Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Right from the start, beautiful as she was, Jason felt a strange repulsion for Medea. She was a woman who knew only two states: either hopeless unhappiness, desertion, lonely misery, helpless rejection; or dazzling, lightning-swift power. It was conceivable that one might go through all kinds of adventures with such a woman (and she could be pretty useful too, more so than many a hero); but could you live with her day in day out? Jason was old now, shunned by everybody. People told his adventures to their children, with the result that he couldn’t find anyone to tell them to himself. He went back to Corinth, where he had witnessed horror upon horror, where he had even reigned as king. There, pulled up onto dry land, lay his ship, the Argo. It was his first, his last, his only true companion. And he couldn’t say it had been a silent companion either, because its main beam had a voice, a sound unlike any other and one Jason would always remember. Once it had frightened him; now it pricked him with nostalgia, like the voice of an old nurse. He looked at this ship, which he had loved more than any woman, and certainly more than Medea, that fake savage, who always seemed to be on the brink of disaster but at the end of the day did nothing but slip from one palace to the next, one kingdom to the next, sowing calamity everywhere she went and always saving herself, along with her chariot and her snakes. The charms of the Argo were rarer and nobler. Jason thought the Argo might grant him a last favor: he would hang himself from the wooden bowsprit. Then he lapsed back into his thoughtful brooding, his back resting against the keel. A rotten timber fell from the deck, struck him on the head, and killed him.

The appearance of the heroes covers a very brief period in Greek history. They all knew one another, or had heard stories about the others from people who had known them. Like links in a bracelet, the Cretan cycle, the Argonauts’ cycle, the Theban cycle, and the Trojan cycle are all connected. And the whole phenomenon burned itself out in just a few years. Between the killing of the Minotaur and the killing of Agamemnon, there were only two generations. Theseus buried his sword in the Minotaur, and his son Acamas was one of the Achaeans who lay in ambush in the Trojan horse. The fall of Crete, the fall of Mycenae, the fall of Troy, the rise of Athens: the heroes put their seal on the key events, then disappeared. Swiftness was of their essence. It is as if the Greeks had wanted to concentrate all the stories whose consequences they would live among into the shortest possible time. The age of the heroes was brief, overcrowded, cruel. And the earth groaned: “oppressed by the weight of humankind, while there was no devotion left among them.”

If, in Greek eyes, the origin of all historic crimes could be traced back to the Trojan War, the origin of the war itself was far from clear. Helen, who was the only witness to the whole thing and the pivot of the scales, attributed the cause to a double-edged plan of Zeus: to unburden the earth and give glory to Achilles. These goals are seemingly unconnected: on the one hand, we have the slaughter of hundreds of heroes, as if they were a mere nameless number, an excess ballast of feet trampling the belly of the earth; on the other, the exaltation of a single person, likewise a hero, and not so much his strength, which was brief and thrust upon him, but his name pure and simple, the sound of his glory. And all this was to be achieved via a single artifice: Helen, and not even Helen herself but her “breathing phantom,” her “name.” By examining the nature of this fatal artifice, we begin to see the unity of Zeus’s design, how it converges on a single goal: to scoop out a vacuum in the material world, to lighten its density, to fashion a sounding box between skin and shade. The fullness of the Homeric word, effortlessly bringing into existence whatever it names, is the last heritage of an earth filled and oppressed by the heroes, by their amorous and cruel trampling. What follows is a new story, in which something has been taken away from the density of the body to house the vacuum of the word.

Zeus decided to do this because he knew that the appearance of Achilles hailed nothing less than a new era: the posthumous era of Zeus, an era in which Achilles came to substitute, albeit only for a short time (but as a sign it was valid forever), for the son of Thetis who was to have overthrown Zeus. Even if Zeus’s sovereignty remained intact, and that son was never born, the change had somehow come about: a god can only shift the meaning of what is predestined, not cancel it out. Thus, as it first appears, the symbol is a tool the gods use to defend themselves from destiny. By forcing the earth to swallow up the innumerable bodies of the heroes, Zeus accepted that his own body be lessened too. He thus opened the space for the word, a hollowness in the body of the god himself, a memory of that other Zeus, who had existed before Achilles and whom now the poets celebrated in their songs, insofar as he allowed them to celebrate Achilles.

What we call Homeric theology was a reckless interval in the lives of the gods. For a brief period the world accepted the supremacy of the visible. Not so that the power of the invisible might somehow be diminished. Nobody imagined power could reside anywhere else. It was just that for the first time the invisible agreed to fashion itself in every tiny detail according to the rules of the visible, as though deeply attracted to that precarious way of being.

Considered from the heights of the divine home, life on earth opened out in a vast and trembling fan: its value was intrinsic to itself and lasted only as long as it did, standing out sharply against the light. After that life came neither punishment nor reward but the same suffering for all: the protraction, beneath the earth, of an enervated existence, in which mental powers were reduced to a subdued muttering, the body to an impalpable shade, the voice to the squeak of a bat. Only in Homer’s Greece does the cry of the warrior who begs Zeus that he may be killed in the light make any sense: “Destroy us in the light, since such is your pleasure.” The light will serve not to escape death but to usher it in. A death in the gloom of the fog would already be a fragment of the sorrowful afterlife, all weakness and vacillation, whereas a death in the light is a last instant of clarity. The light the hero invokes has nothing to do with Mazdean photism, forerunner of every internal and transfiguring light. It is an external light, almost solid, the light in which things, all things, stand out in radiant profile. Such a vision of life, and of the afterlife that mockingly follows it, amounts to an unparalleled cruelty. All the more irresistible then must one’s brief spell in the light have appeared. But it was not a tension man could bear for long.

The heroes wiped one another out beneath the walls of Troy, not just because Zeus wanted to lighten the earth but because they themselves could no longer bear this form of life and thus, with silent assent, chose to seek their deaths together. The battles beneath Troy were, among other things, a bloody banquet of farewell.

Neoptolemus was a young man when he raised his sword above old Priam’s head, a boy even, you might have said, were it not for the weapons weighing him down. He planted his feet firmly on the ground, tensing the big adult calves that bulged in their shin guards, before bringing down his heavy blade on the bald, already blood-bespattered head leaning toward him and partly covered with desperate hands. Between the fingers of those hands, a few wisps of hair peeped out, like white grass. Priam was sitting on the hollowed stone of the altar of Zeus Herkeios, where for years blood had flowed in streams, forming long streaks and dark stains. On his knees he cradled a body not unlike Neoptolemus’s, but naked and with deep wounds to chest, stomach, and one thigh: it was Astyanax, Hector’s son. Thus on Priam’s body the old blood of the sacrifices, the still gushing blood of Astyanax, and that of his own head and shoulder wounds were all mingled together.