Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

She stopped in front of the horse. Complete silence now. She went around it, slowly. Then, with her hand, she began to touch that belly packed with warriors. And all of a sudden, as Helen’s hand slid over the wooden planks, knocking softly as though at a lover’s door, they heard her voice. She was calling names. She called Menelaus, Diomedes, Odysseus, Anticlus. For each name she found a different voice. In the darkness, careful not to bang their shin guards together, some of the heroes began to get excited. There was a chorus of suffocated groans. It was the least appropriate time and place for nostalgia and desire. Yet Menelaus and Diomedes were on the point of getting to their feet. Anticlus couldn’t help himself and opened his mouth to answer Helen’s voice. But Odysseus stopped his mouth and tightened strong hands around his neck. Helen’s voice went on calling names as Anticlus slowly expired, strangled. There was a last convulsion; then, moving carefully, the other heroes laid him down on the wood and stretched a blanket over him.

Menelaus fell silent, still absorbed in the pleasure of telling the story. Telemachus looked at him and said a few sober words. Yes, it was true, his father, Odysseus, had “a heart of iron.” Yet he too had come to a wretched end, heaven knew where. It was time to go to bed, he said. They deserved “to enjoy their sweet sleep.” Helen had already told the servants to prepare beds for the guests in the porch. Then she went off in her long tunic toward the rooms deep inside the house where Menelaus would lie down beside her.

Menelaus didn’t tell Telemachus how that night in Troy had ended. When Helen had gone, the Acropolis was shrouded in a silence unbroken even by a dog’s bark. The heroes got ready to swarm to the ground, “like bees from the trunk of an oak.” Then the voiceless slaughter began in the Trojan bedrooms. Menelaus and Odysseus didn’t even watch their backs. They rushed into Deiphobus’s house. They found him on his bed, still warm from Helen’s embrace. Menelaus was determined to perform a systematic mutilation on the man. He hacked off his hands and ears, split his temples, and cut his head in two along the line of the nose. Then he went deeper into the huge house. And at the back of the last room he found Helen. He advanced without a word, his sword, bespattered with blood and gore, pointing at her belly. Helen looked at him and bared her breast. Menelaus let his sword drop.

According to Stesichorus and Euripides, Helen was a phantom. According to Homer, Helen was the phantom, eídōlon . The Homeric vision is by far the more thorny and frightening. Dealing with a phantom while knowing that there is a reality to counter it doesn’t involve the same kind of tension as dealing with a phantom and knowing that it is also a reality. Helen is as gold to other merchandise: gold too is merchandise, but of such a kind that it can represent all the others. The phantom, or image, is precisely that act of representation. While Troy burned, Menelaus found himself confronted by Helen’s bared breast. He could have smothered it in blood, repeated what he had just done to Deiphobus. But how can one kill gold? Helen would have gone on breathing in some niche of her murderer’s mind, and likewise in the minds of all the other warriors who had wanted to respond to the lure of her voice when they were shut up in the horse’s belly. Helen was a reflection on water. How can you kill a reflection without killing the water? And how can you kill water? Menelaus didn’t actually think any of this as he let his sword drop, but it was this that made him drop it.

Meanwhile, he was thinking of something completely different. He was thinking of Agamemnon. He was afraid his brother would take him for a coward or a weakling once again. So he decided to get smart, the way the others had. He gripped Helen’s wrist and dragged her along as though to the slaughter. And at last Agamemnon turned up. Menelaus had to pretend to have his brother convince him not to kill Helen. Agamemnon unwittingly played the part he was supposed to. Words that had once been Priam’s sprang to his lips: “Helen isn’t the cause of this.” Menelaus wasted no time agreeing. Now there was one last problem: the army of warriors. Once again, Menelaus decided he would have to present himself in the role of the avenging husband. He approached the Achaean camp holding Helen tightly by the wrist, his face grim. The crowd parted before them. They all had stones in their hands. They had chosen them carefully to stone Helen. Menelaus pressed on, dragging his faithless wife, and, as the warriors formed a semicircle around them, he heard the dull thud of stones falling thick and fast to the ground, already forgotten.

In the deep calm of the opium, Menelaus managed to recall, without so much as a quiver of resentment, how Helen had tried to the very last to bring ruin upon the Greeks. It was thanks to her that Anticlus had been strangled. But if Odysseus hadn’t strangled him, if one of the heroes had answered her alluring voice, they might all have been burned alive in the belly of the horse. Or the Trojans would have thought up some other horrible death for them. Yet Menelaus recounted the episode, in front of Helen and their guests, as though it were an image of glory, to be savored with pleasure.

Twenty years later, Menelaus had understood a thing or two about the woman beside him. He no longer thought of punishing her, as he had for so many years and so obsessively fantasized. He was happy to have understood of her what amounted to no more than the hem of her tunic. And this, among other things, was what he had understood: that for Greeks and Trojans alike Helen had posed the danger of the phantom, the image. Living with the phantom is ruinous, but neither of the two sides had wanted to live without. It was over the phantom they had fought. And now the phantom went on threatening and enchanting life in Greece.

The night Troy was put to the torch, Helen had pushed the danger for both Greeks and Trojans to the limit, for this was of her essence. She insinuated her voice into the seething dark of the horse, shaking the soul of the Achaean warriors. Then, just a few moments later, while dancing on the Acropolis with the other Trojan women, she waved the torch that was to signal to the other Achaeans waiting on their ships that it was time to attack. Two incompatible actions, one right after the other. Helen performed them both with the same serenity. Those two actions were Helen. Never as on that night did Helen reveal herself so completely, a great, intoxicating moon radiating its light impartially on all.

What is the evil of exile? “One and terrible,” claims Polynices: “not having freedom of speech [ parrēsía ].” And his mother, Iocasta, adds: “Not to say what one thinks is the way of the servant.” Frankness, that first feature of the aristocratic ethic, becomes secularized with democracy into freedom of speech. Odysseus steered clear of both. He renounced the frankness of the warrior when he pretended to be crazy so as not to sail for Troy; he renounced freedom of speech when he played the part of the wandering beggar who could be told to shut up and sent packing by the merest servant.

Odysseus was the first to have mediation triumph over the immediate, postponement over presence, the twisted mind over straightforwardness. All the character traits that would be assigned over the centuries to the merchant, the foreigner, the Jew, the traveling player were coined by Odysseus in himself. He looked ahead to a human condition in which neither aristocratic frankness nor democratic freedom of speech would be enough. Many centuries later, that condition seems normal, but in Odysseus’s time it was a foresight granted only to one who had traveled a great deal between earth and heaven. So, whereas Achilles and Agamemnon stand out in our memories as leftovers of another creation, consumed by catastrophe, Odysseus is still familiar to us, a sort of invisible companion. The presence he renounced in its immediacy is redeemed in the stream of memory and history. Achilles has to be evoked; Odysseus is already at our side, wherever we are, whatever the circumstances.