Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The hour of the heroes’ children had come — now they were killing and getting themselves killed just as their fathers had, but quicker, without tears, without divine frenzy, without stirring words: the stories were complete now; all that remained was to put the last seal on them. As Neoptolemus lifted his thin, sinewy arm, the fronds of the palm beside the altar bent in the night wind, thus opening up the space the metal had to pass through to split Priam’s head. And, to hold that head still, like a chunk of wood, Neoptolemus’s left hand gripped the old man’s shoulder through his blood-soaked tunic.

At the very same moment, another hand was reaching out to another body in the smoky darkness of Athena’s temple. The hand of Ajax Oïleus closed on the short hair that barely covered the nape of Cassandra’s neck. Powerful fingers followed the direction of his inflamed and lustful gaze. Like her father, Priam, Cassandra was pressing her body against something sacred: not the stone of Zeus but the Palladium. That small, stiff statue, that Athena with shield and raised spear, was the guardian of Troy. The city could only exist where that statue was, as a language only exists where its poet is. Cassandra forced her soft body against the statue. She was completely naked but for a little cloak knotted beneath her chin and falling down behind her shoulders to form a sort of backdrop to her high breasts, the nipples pointing sideways, as if wanting to flee in opposite directions. Ajax Oïleus tightened his fingers on her hair, while her fingers clutched at the flank of the Palladium. A shock of violence went from the warrior’s fingers, through those of Apollo’s priestess, to the statue. Her father, Priam, had covered his eyes with his arms; round about, some Trojan women crouched down weeping and terrified, their heads in their hands; but Cassandra’s gaze was steady and calm as she watched Ajax Oïleus’s armor bearing down on her: indeed with her free hand she seemed to be egging her assailant on, opening her fingers between the hero’s sword and thighs, drawing him to her, urging him to strike.

All along their roads the Greeks raised stones to the dead. But what did those stelae remind them of? Of Achilles’ horses weeping hot tears on the death of Patroclus. They laid their heads on the ground “like a stele that stays planted in the earth,” says Homer. Around them, the clash of arms. The Greeks and Trojans were fighting over Patroclus’s corpse, tugging at it as though at a bull’s hide. Sweat and fatigue turn flesh to water. But sorrow petrifies it. In the stelae they raised for their dead, the Greeks captured the absorbed, translucent life of those immortal horses, weeping. Looking down from on high, Zeus didn’t feel compassion on seeing the warriors fall in battle, but he did when he saw the tears of the horses as they looked on their fallen driver and master’s friend. Zeus felt closer to those animals than to any man. Like him they were immortal. Yet now they abandoned themselves to something that was forbidden to immortals: tears.

After the death of Patroclus, when Achilles goes back to the battlefield, gritting his teeth, a light as though from a distant beacon flashing from his shield, Zeus once again calls the gods to an assembly. This time the minor Nymphs are there too, and the rivers. They all wait for a sign. But for the moment there is nothing to decide, no divine intrigue to slip in among the warriors. Everybody, gods and men alike, knows what is about to happen. Achilles is going to die. Xanthus, the immortal horse, is already mourning his master. Achilles himself senses his death as something palpable, like a helmet thrust on his head. And then Zeus chooses this of all moments to loose the whole pack of the gods onto the battlefield. “Thus they went to war, god against god.” All of them. Even those who, like Hephaestus and Leto, have so far kept out of the struggle.

Why did Zeus throw them all into the fray? We are closing in on the nerve of Homeric theology here. In the maximum pointlessness lies the maximum splendor. And the real never shines so brightly as when its reality is duplicated, when for every hero’s arm there is a god’s arm coming to meet it, to guide it, when two scenes, one visible, the other invisible, because dazzling, are one inside the other, so that every joint is doubled. Achilles is denied any chance of putting off his end, which must happen, for so it has been decreed, in a certain way, at a certain moment. But destiny does hold out one last honor for Achilles, and Zeus has no desire to deprive him of it, because this honor is his pleasure: it is that the last battle be hard, uncertain, furious.

At the same time Zeus has something else on his mind: he must see that no one on the earth can ever, by mere dint of force, do anything that goes “beyond destiny,” that no one ever manage to postpone his own death. Achilles’ fury might allow him to conquer those walls that are destined to fall at a later date. This would put a crack in the order of things. So now, with the intervention of the Olympians, the tension on the battlefield is raised to something almost unbearable and at the same time placed in a new equilibrium. The clashing swells, indicating that an unprecedented concentration of forces is at work. Indeed the noise even has Hades starting nervously. The only one of the gods not on the battlefield, he senses the excess of tension on the earth and gets up from his throne, fearing that the grassy mantle above him may be about to break up and expose to the light the endless mold of his subterranean world, abhorred by gods and men alike.

In the Iliad , all living things, even the horse Xanthus, even the river Scamander, tell us that they are not the “cause,” not responsible for anything. But they don’t say this in order to lay the blame on someone else. No, that recognition is the supreme act of Homeric devotion, a stepping aside before overwhelming power. Every affirmation of an ego would be crude, here where the distinction between how much each person may do alone and how much a god allows him to do or gives to him is so subtle. The merest breath decides everything, a change in the rhythm of the massacre grants the upper hand to one side or the other.

There is something that distinguishes Homeric characters from everything that was written before or would be written after. They behave like those perfect atheists who have never existed and who are convinced that life is coterminous with breath. After death, for the science-bound atheist, there is but a vague nothingness. For the Homeric character, there is a long torment, a craving without mind or memory. Not another life, and not even a punishment for their lives, but an enervated and delirious physiology, which stops short of life.

Yet for as long as they drew breath, everything was full of gods. Thinking of Achilles, who every day at dawn dragged Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’s pyre, Hecuba says: “But not for this was he [Patroclus] brought back to life.” No artifice, no rite, no merit can alter this fact. The gods “are always,” as the formulaic tags unceasingly tell us; those who recognize the gods live but a brief space. In their modesty, the atheists are full of vainglory. For the brief span of their lives they are convinced they are in control of something, an island of independence later to be dispersed into blind atoms. The Homeric heroes allowed themselves no such consolation: while they lived they were aware of being sustained and imbued by something remote and whole, which then abandoned them at death like so many rags.

The Iliad is the world of brusque, precipitous passages from one state to the other. Its consummate expression is Achilles. Achilles weeps with Priam, his enemy’s father, then looks at him with admiration, then, just a few moments later, has to stop himself from killing him. The intensity is extreme in each phase. And each phase lives by and for itself, nor is it concerned with what came before or will come after. Why should things be consequent upon one another? Is a motionless, bleeding body consequent upon a body tense in the chase? These states follow each other like stretches of a giant wall, reduced to stumps. Marooned in the powerful isolation of each separate block, we must always try to remember that those walls form a single line. When Thetis visits her son, Achilles, wallowing in grief for Patroclus, she doesn’t try to lead him slowly out of his suffering, step by step. Thetis looks at him and reminds him of the existence of bread and bed. Then adds: “It is a good thing to unite with a woman in love.”