Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Before Cadmus embarked on his musical competition with Typhon, Zeus appeared to him in the shape of a bull. He was full of anguish, fearing defeat and ridicule. He was afraid the cosmos might break its sudden silence with a roar of mocking laughter from his old father, Kronos. And he was afraid that “Hellas, mother of myths,” might rearrange all her fables, transferring to Typhon all those gratifying epithets of sovereignty that he himself had enjoyed until now. So it was that the bull, like Typhon, solemnly promised Cadmus a woman, and something else as well: he would sleep with Harmony and be “savior of the cosmic harmony.”

Thus, when Cadmus had tricked Typhon and when Zeus, thanks to the thunderbolts he’d retrieved, had hurled the monster into the depths below Etna, the Phoenician traveler set out once more, except that now he was looking not for one woman but two: Europa and Harmony. Winter was nearing an end, and Orion was rising. Cadmus came down from the Taurus Mountains, following the swift streams of Cilicia, banks bright with saffron. And he took to the sea again. Zeus’s “prophetic breezes” blew him along. He didn’t know where, only that he was going toward Harmony. Cadmus’s sailors lay down to sleep on the beach in Samothrace. The waters were still beneath a windless calm that seemed as though it would last forever.

Toward dawn, Cadmus was awakened by strange sounds. The resonant skins of drums, measured steps, the rustling of oaks, voices behind the leaves. He left the coast behind him, heading inland. Approaching the city, he came across some washerwomen treading their dirty laundry in the water and singing. Cadmus watched, intrigued, amused, as if in no hurry to arrive in the town. But he was already wandering through the narrow streets now, and came out in front of the palace. It looked new, sparkling, smothered with decorations. Doorways featuring historical scenes, pale stuccos, a dome, palms, and hyacinths. In the middle of the garden was a fountain surrounded by gold and silver statues of young men and women. And statues of dogs: except that, as Cadmus approached, these dogs spoke with the voices of automatons and wagged their tails. Struck by his beauty and the expression in his eyes, Haematius, king of the city, welcomed Cadmus as a guest.

At the end of the banquet, Cadmus told, as all visitors must, his story. The opening words were not very different from those Odysseus would one day use in the court of King Alcinous. Then he went back over his intricate genealogy, beginning with Io, the cow who wandered from sea to sea, and ending with the bull that rose from the sea to carry off his sister, Europa. “It is on her account, traveling without cease, that I have arrived thus far.” As he spoke these words, Cadmus knew he was leaving out the most important thing. That while looking for his abducted sister, he had in fact come to Samothrace to win another girl, who was now listening to him in suspicious silence.

At the end of the banquet, the queen mother, Electra, who had been sitting next to the foreign guest, saw a young man with curly hair hanging down over his cheeks coming to speak to her. It was Hermes. The god took the queen to one side and explained that Zeus, her first lover, was ordering her to grant her daughter Harmony to the foreigner. And for once Hermes assumed a solemn tone: “This man defended your lover in his moment of grief, this man ushered in the day of liberation for Olympus.”

Electra reflected: she remembered her childhood with her six sisters, the Pleiades. Zeus had seduced her young. Haematius was born. One day, while she was still nursing him, Aphrodite had appeared, bringing a baby girl in her arms. That was when Electra first saw Harmony, love child of Aphrodite and Ares. The girl’s mother had smuggled her out of Olympus and wanted to entrust her to Electra. Electra pressed Harmony’s mouth to her breast and from that moment on treated her as if she were her own daughter. But just as she had quite suddenly appeared one day, so one day this “maiden descended from heaven” was destined to disappear.

It wasn’t easy to get Harmony to agree. Locked in her girlhood bedroom, she wept tears of rage, touching all the things that were dear to her and that she didn’t want to leave behind. Why had her mother decided to give her to this stranger who told tall tales and had nothing to offer but the tackle of his ship? He was a drifter, a fugitive, a sailor, a man with neither hearth nor home. It wasn’t Electra who finally convinced Harmony but the girl’s friend Peisinoe. She came and shut herself in Harmony’s room with her. She wanted to confess, she had this sensation of emptiness just above her stomach, of burning, and she couldn’t stop thinking of the handsome stranger. With a little girl’s infatuation, she described Cadmus’s body, fantasized his hand boldly touching her round breasts, fantasized herself uncovering the nape of his neck. Harmony listened and realized that something was changing inside her: she was falling in love with her friend’s desire, and at the same time she went on looking around in desperation, because she knew that, if once she left, she would never see this room again.

For the first time she felt pricked by a goad that would not leave her be. In her mind she began to say words of farewell. She said good-bye to the caves of the Cabiri and the shrill voices of the Corybants, she said good-bye to the palace she had grown up in and the rugged coasts of Samothrace. And all at once she understood what myth is, understood that myth is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining. She need not fear the uncertain life opening up before her. Whichever way her wandering husband went, the encircling sash of myth would wrap around the young Harmony. For every step, the footprint was already there. And Harmony was surprised to find herself saying these words: “I’ll follow this boy, invoking the marriages of the gods as I go. If my lover leads me across the sea to the East, I’ll celebrate the desire of Eos for Orion, and I’ll remember the nuptial beds of Cephalus; if I go toward the misty West, my comfort will be Selene, who suffered likewise for Endymion on Latmon.” When she went back to meet the others in the halls of the palace, Harmony had a feverish look in her eye. She ran her fingers along the doorposts, embraced the maids, then went back to her room and stroked the bed, the walls. She picked up a handful of earth and raised it to her lips.

It was time to go. Cadmus and Harmony stood at the prow, like a double figurehead, exposed to the wind that lifted and mingled their hair. Around them were a swarm of passengers they didn’t know, merchants for the most part, paying their way from the coasts of Asia to Greece. All of them looked on the two youngsters, dreamily facing out to sea, as just two more fellow travelers, the sort you meet on a journey and never see again. But such was the halo of beauty around them that the others could not help but see it as a good omen for the crossing.

Many days would pass, and Cadmus and Harmony would have to survive many an adventure before they could celebrate their marriage. At the head of a crowd of wayfarers, carts piled with belongings, they arrived in Delphi. And there Cadmus heard the Pythia pronounce the words that were to decide the course of his life: “In vain, Cadmus, do you plant your wandering footsteps far and wide; you seek a bull never born to any cow; you seek a bull no mortal can find. Forget Assyria; take an earthly heifer as your guide and follow it; do not seek the Olympian bull. No herdsman could lead Europa’s spouse; he treads neither pastureland nor meadow, nor is there any goad that he obeys. That bull has chosen the tender bonds of Aphrodite, not the yoke and the plow. To Eros only does he bow his neck, not to Demeter. Put your longing for Tyre and for your father behind you. Settle in a foreign land and found a city that will bear the name of your homeland, Thebes of Egypt. Found it in the place where the heifer, by divine inspiration, falls to the ground, stretching out her weary hooves.”