Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

The heifer’s fetlocks buckled under her in the valley of Tanagra. Immediately Cadmus began looking for a spring to purify himself before sacrificing the heifer. He found one. But, coiled around the crystalline water, the huge snake of Ares was waiting for him. Many of Cadmus’s companions would have their bones crushed in the snake’s coils before the hero was able to attack it. He could already feel his legs being trapped in the monster’s grip when Athena came to spur him on with some rousing words. Then the goddess disappeared, leaving the print of her heel in the air. Cadmus felt a new strength fill his breast: he lifted a rock and smashed it down on the snake’s head. Then he pulled out the sacrificial knife that hung at his thigh and buried it in the beast. His companions watched as he turned the knife around the snake’s head with the deftness of a practiced butcher. Finally he managed to cut the head off and raise it in the air, while the snake’s coils went on writhing in the dust.

Now Cadmus must found his city. In the center he would put Harmony’s bed. And around it, everything would be modeled on the geometry of the heavens. Iron bit into soil, the reference points were calculated. Stones of different colors, like the signatures of the planets, were taken from the mountains of Cithaeron, Helicon, and Teumesus, and arranged in piles. The seven gates of the city were laid out to correspond to the seven heavens, and each one was dedicated to a god. Cadmus looked on his finished city as though it were a new toy and decided that their wedding could now go ahead.

The many halls of the palace of Thebes were filled with an incessant chatter, a rustle of light feet, melodious meetings and greetings. All the gods had come down from Olympus for the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. They wandered through the rooms, busy and talkative. Aphrodite took care of the decorations for the marriage bed. Inane and jolly, Ares unbuckled his weapons and tried out a dance step or two. The Muses offered the full range of song. Amusing herself playing maid, Nike’s wings brushed against those of the darting Eros.

Finally the bridal pair arrived, standing straight as statues on a chariot drawn by a lion and a boar. Apollo played the cithara beside the chariot. No one was surprised to see those unusual animals: wasn’t that what Harmony meant, yoking together the opposite and the wild? As dusk fell, thousands of torches flared. Zeus walked the streets of Thebes. He liked the town. It reminded him of the heavens. It was like a dance floor. They all got together for the banquet, on seats of gold. Zeus and Cadmus laid their hands on the same table, sat next to each other, poured out wine for each other. Zeus looked at Cadmus with the eyes of a friend who has kept a secret promise. When the Dragon flickered in the sky, the moment had come to accompany the bride to her bed. And now the Olympians stood in line to offer their gifts. The most mysterious, and the grandest, was Zeus’s. He gave Cadmus “all perfection.” What did that mean? Cadmus bowed his head in gratitude.

Aphrodite came up to her daughter Harmony and fastened a fated necklace around her neck. Was it the wonderful necklace Hephaestus had wrought to celebrate the birth of Eros, the archer? Or was it the necklace Zeus had given to Europa, when he laid her down beneath a plane tree in Crete? Harmony blushed, right down to her neck, while her skin thrilled under the cold weight of the necklace. It was a snake shot through with stars, a snake with two heads, one at each end, and the heads had their throats wide open, facing each other. Yet the two mouths could never bite each other, for between them, and caught between their teeth, rose two golden eagles with their wings outspread. Slipped into the double throat of the snake, they functioned as a clasp. The stones radiated desire. They were snake, eagle, and star, but they were the sea too, and the light of the stones trembled in the air, as though upon waves. In that necklace cosmos and ornament for once came together.

Among the guests was Iasion, Harmony’s brother, who had hurried over from Samothrace. Demeter glimpsed him through the crowd during the preparations for the feast and immediately desired him with that vehement passion of hers the Olympians knew so well. Everybody was milling toward the marriage chamber now. Looking around, Zeus realized that Demeter and Iasion had disappeared. He went out into the night. The din of the party faded in the distance. He crossed the threshold of one of the city’s seven gates. Now the empty fields were all around, dark against the glow of the torches and the palace behind. In a deep furrow in the black soil, he saw two bodies tight together, furiously clasping each other and mixing with the earth. He recognized Iasion and Demeter’s cry.

After that remote time when gods and men had been on familiar terms, to invite the gods to one’s house became the most dangerous thing one could do, a source of wrongs and curses, a sign of the now irretrievable malaise in relations between heaven and earth. At the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Aphrodite gives the bride a necklace which, passing from hand to hand, will generate one disaster after another right up the massacre of the Epigoni beneath the walls of Thebes, and beyond. At the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, failure to invite Eris leads to the Judgment of Paris in favor of Aphrodite and against Hera and Athena, and thus creates the premise for the Trojan War. Lycaon’s banquet, where human and animal flesh are served together, brings about the Flood. Tantalus’s banquet, where little Pelops is boiled in the pot, marks the beginning of a chain of crimes that will go on tangling together ever more perversely right up to the day when Athena casts the vote that acquits the fugitive Orestes.

What conclusions can we draw? To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories. And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations were in fact contrived by the gods themselves, because the gods get bored with men who have no stories.

The gods didn’t realize, nor did men, that that wedding feast in Thebes was the closest they would ever get to each other. The next morning, the Olympians had left the palace. Cadmus and Harmony woke up in the bed Aphrodite had made for them. Now they were just a king and queen.

They had four daughters: Autonoë, Ino, Agave, and Semele. Cadmus’s hair had turned white and woolly on his bony head when one day, years later, he stopped in front of his daughter Semele’s tomb immediately outside the palace. It was an area of rubble with thin plumes of smoke rising from the place where Semele’s bed had been when Zeus came to make love to her. Vine shoots twisted around the crumbling stones. In that scene of devastation and luxuriance, Cadmus saw the image of his life. The plume of smoke was the sign Zeus’s thunderbolt had left, the thunderbolt Zeus had recovered from Typhon’s cave thanks exclusively to Cadmus. But Cadmus couldn’t tell anyone about that. That story of long ago was sealed up inside him. It would hardly have seemed proper that Zeus had once been saved from defeat by the merest Phoenician traveler. And it would have been even less proper to have spoken of the sinews stolen from Zeus’s body. No one would ever know anything about it. Cadmus went on looking at Semele’s tomb. The broken columns were covered by a thin layer of ash. Who could guess what part of Semele’s tender body had been transformed into that gray dust — Semele, the youngest, the most beautiful of his daughters, envied from birth by the others, although they too were very beautiful. Just as Europa had disappeared across the water, so Semele had vanished in the flames. Zeus, always Zeus, the encircling one. But that was another story that couldn’t be told. Cadmus’s other daughters, who hated their sister passionately, said she had coupled shamelessly with a stranger and then begun to tell lies about Zeus having come to her bed. Semele’s sisters were happy she had been reduced to a handful of ashes. And Cadmus couldn’t even mourn her, or adore her as mother of a new and ancient god, the god who announced his presence in the vine shoots twisting among the broken stones and who was, in the end, his grandson: Dionysus.