Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The ranks of the dead appeared to Odysseus in Hades as a throng of women. Their queen, Persephone, spurred them on. But how did she spur them on? What goad did she use to rouse them from their cold thickets, to assemble them before the black blood and before that man with the sword hanging from his powerful thigh? Those women had been the daughters and bedmates of the heroes. Some of them, of gods. They all wanted to drink the blood and talk at the same time. That throng of women is memory in its natural state: all alike, all particles of the same cloud. The mind is terrified by this cloud, which is always with it. And the strength of the mind lies in the cleverness with which it manages to separate those particles from one another and then question them one by one.

Odysseus drew his sword and threatened them. The women got into line. One by one they drank the blood and spoke. Odysseus wanted to hear them all. He was hearing knowledge in its primordial form: genealogy. One spoke of the “amorous works” of Poseidon: she had been bathing in the river when a wave rose above her high as a mountain. Another spoke of a hanging. Another of precious gifts accepted in return for betrayal. Another of a hunt for some elusive cows. And, as Odysseus listened, the intricate cobweb of descendances settled over his mind: the Deucalionides, the Inachides, the Asopides, the Atlantides, the Pelasgides. Not all the threads came together again in that web. Some became superimposed over each other, knotted together; others made fragile shapes that turned in on themselves, others trailed in the darkness, abandoned.

The age of Odysseus, the hybrid age of the heroes, was all there in the intersecting of those names, those births, those deeds. If he could have listened for time without end to all those women’s voices, one after another, he would have known what no man knew: the course of history, the history of an age that would die out with his death. But soon, or perhaps after a very long time, Persephone dispersed her throng of women in a squeaking of bats.

After the age of the heroes, the Greeks measured time by the succession of priestesses in the sanctuary of Hera in Argos. During the age of the heroes the passing of time took its rhythm from the succession of divine rapes. The anonymous author of the Catalogue of Women lists sixteen for the house of the Deucalionides alone, and eight for the Inachides. Whereas among the Pelasgides they were rare. In those races where divine rape was frequent, so was contact, exchange, and interbreeding with remote and fabulous lands. It was among these peoples that sea routes were opened, kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties migrated. In those races where divine rape was rare, events remained circumscribed and trapped, as the Pelasgides were trapped in the mountains of Arcadia.

hoíē: “Or like she who …”: such was the recurrent formula in the Catalogue of Women , for centuries attributed to Hesiod, and then lost. Thus, time after time, the story of another woman in the catalogue would begin. Thus was each new link in the chain of generations opened, as though, for the Greeks, the only form in which the heroic past, from beginning to end, might be recorded was not that of a genealogy of kings but this linking together of scores of girls and their stories in monotonous and stupefying succession. In the end, the Iliad and the Odyssey recounted only a few days and a few years of the story, the last throes of the heroic age. While the age as a whole could only be told as a sequence of women’s tales, as though turning page after page of a family album. For those learned genealogists whose supreme ambition it was to map out the tree of time through all its branches, the only frame that could contain the age of the heroes was there in those two words: hoíē …, “Or like she who …”

Unlike the peoples of the ages that preceded them — the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age — the heroes had no metal upon which to model themselves and their world. Their physiological composition was hybrid but impalpable, because half of their being was made up of the substance of the gods. And their appearance marks a break in the order of descendances, which until now had merely degenerated from one metal to the next.

Quite suddenly, when the people of the bronze age, a race of muscled armed warriors, went under the earth again, leaving only silence behind, having killed one another off without the name or glory of even one of them surviving — quite suddenly, Zeus had the fanciful idea of breaking the chain of peoples for a while and so allowed the gods to follow what was first and foremost his own example and couple with the daughters of men. It was a brief and dangerous attraction, out of which history was born. It was the age of the heroes. Only then did Names emerge that would outlive the race that bore them. Until one day, when Helen had just given birth to Hermione in Sparta, and with the other gods quarreling furiously round about him, Zeus began to think. And what he thought was that this breed must die out like the others. The time had come. The heroes, this parenthesis in the affairs of the world and the succession of metals, must be wiped out. The age of black iron was approaching, age of a people who would live in the memory of the heroes. Zeus thought, and round about him none of the rest of the Twelve realized what was happening. They had become so used to the heroes, so involved with them, they thought they would go on forever, as if it were quite normal for the Olympians to have these charming mobile toys down on earth, toys they quarreled over every day now.

The climate began to change. Camped in Aulis, the Greeks were astonished by unseasonal storms, endless, unremitting gales that prevented them from sailing. Like the gods, they didn’t realize that these unusual storms marked the beginning of the end for their age. There were only a few years left now, just long enough to kill off all those who were setting out to fight on the plains of Troy. The events of those years would be told in detail as none had ever been told before, as if a huge lens had come down from the sky to magnify every tiny gesture. If time speeded up toward the end, the focus certainly broadened: in that last generation of the heroes, even the names of those who lived in the shadow of glory, the names of the cupbearers, the helmsmen, the serving maids, would be etched in the air for the first time.

Why did Zeus decide to wipe out the heroes? A thousand tribes trod the soil and, “seeing this, Zeus felt pity in the depths of his thoughts.” So says the poet of the Kypria . But why did Zeus, who wasn’t easily stirred to pity, feel concerned for the vast body of the earth, on which, when seen from on high, the race of heroes, however numerous, couldn’t have looked very different from all the other clinging parasites?

The crime of the heroes, perhaps, lay not so much in their treading the earth but in their detaching themselves from it. The heroes were the first to look at the earth before them as an object. And seeing it as an object, they struck out at it. Their model was Apollo, who loosed his arrows at Python’s scales, mottled as the slopes of Delphi were mottled with shrubs. He who strikes the snake strikes the earth on which it slithers and the water that springs from the earth. Now the heroes were imitating Apollo, and Apollo had imitated Zeus. Imitation is the most dangerous of activities for world order, because it tends to break down boundaries. Just as Plato wanted to banish the poets, whom he loved, from the city, Zeus wanted to see the heroes, whom he loved, wiped off the face of the earth. They had to go, before they began to tread that earth with the same heedlessness with which the Olympians had trodden it before them.