Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Cadmus went on staring at Semele’s tomb. The tempest of calamities wasn’t over yet. When he had married the young Harmony, the opposite extremes of the world had come together in visible accord for one last time. Immediately afterward they had separated, torn apart. Semele was reduced to ashes; all her sisters, at some point of their lives, were either cut to pieces or cut someone else to pieces. Nobody ever inflicted or endured laceration as much as Harmony’s daughters. Actaeon, Autonoë’s son, was torn to pieces by Artemis’s dogs. Learchus, lno’s son, was run through by the spit of her father, Athamas. And time held still other lacerations in store. Cadmus was no longer king of Thebes. He had given up his throne to his grandson Pentheus, Agave’s child. And this grandson of his, who looked on him as a more or less good-for-nothing old man, had chosen to quarrel with Dionysus, the new god, of whom he knew nothing and understood less. Cadmus was obliged to play the part of the rather undignified old man who lifts his thin legs in a dance with the thyrsus. Pentheus watched him with scorn. Pentheus thought he was the city. He refused to remember how Thebes had been nothing more than a hillside of wild grass before Cadmus sunk his plow into the earth. One old man leaning on another, Cadmus and Tiresias set off for the mountains where the delirious Maenads lived. Lost among them, unrecognizable amid those sleeping or ecstatic bodies, were the three princesses: Autonoë, Ino, Agave. Step by wary step, Cadmus and Tiresias climbed on into the woods. They knew that one does not quarrel with a god.

Cadmus was back in Thebes in time to pick up the shreds of Pentheus’s body, torn to pieces on the mountains by his mother’s own hands. He called his old wife, Harmony, and told her to get ready to leave, one last time. He had been a wanderer when she met him, and as wanderers they would end their days. Shortly afterward, Dionysus appeared in Thebes. He took possession of the city and expelled Agave, Cadmus, and Harmony. After Pentheus’s atrocious death, they were all contaminated. Helped by his servants, Cadmus loaded a few sacks on a big cart. Harmony already had the reins in her hands. Dionysus pointed the way. They must head for the western boundaries of the earth, the mists of Illyria.

On their wedding day, young and radiant, Cadmus and Harmony had arrived standing on a chariot drawn by a lion and a boar. Now, thrown out of their own home, these two old exiles climbed on a cart pulled by a pair of simple oxen and loaded with memories. When the cart rolled off, Cadmus and Harmony sat down side by side, and the Thebans saw the couple’s backs knot together in the scales of a single snake. Cadmus and Harmony rode away, twined snakes below, heads held high. Thus we may still see them today on the stone that marks their tomb, “by the edge of the black gorges of the Illyrian river.”

As he drove his cart westward, knotted to his spouse, like some stubborn emigrant still seeking a new city long after it is too late, Cadmus thought about the past. What was left of it? A few bundles of things on a cart, and behind them a city Dionysus had shaken with an earthquake. Cadmus had saved Zeus, but this hadn’t saved him from life’s precariousness. He had set out to find his sister Europa and had won the young Harmony. A traveler had told him that Europa had become queen of Crete. Harmony was at his side, an old snake. He felt as he had when he climbed off his ship in Samothrace: a man without gifts, because everything he had was on the cart. But Cadmus’s gift was impalpable.

Another king from Egypt, Danaus with his fifty bloodthirsty daughters, had brought Greece the gift of water. Cadmus had brought Greece “gifts of the mind”: vowels and consonants yoked together in tiny signs, “etched model of a silence that speaks”—the alphabet. With the alphabet, the Greeks would teach themselves to experience the gods in the silence of the mind, and no longer in the full and normal presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage. He thought of his routed kingdom: of daughters and grandchildren torn to pieces, tearing others to pieces, ulcerated in boiling water, run through with spits, drowned in the sea. And Thebes was a heap of rubble. But no one could erase those small letters, those fly’s feet that Cadmus the Phoenician had scattered across Greece, where the winds had brought him in his quest for Europa carried off by a bull that rose from the sea.

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Homeric Hymn to Demeter

, 5

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Ibid., 10–11.

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Lycophron,

Alexandra

, 1293.

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Ibid., 1297.

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Herodotus,

Historiae

, I, 4, 2.

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Ibid., I, 4, 3.

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G. Moreau,

Pasiphaé

, in

L’assembleur de rêves

, Fontfroide: Fata Morgana, 1984, p. 69.

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Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica

, V, 77, 3.

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Plutarch,

Life of Theseus

, 19, 6.

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Virgil,

Aeneid

, VI, 397.

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Ovid,

Fasti

, III, 498.

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Chaeremon,

The Centaur

, 71 F 11, in

Tragicorum

Graecorum Fragmenta (

TrGF

), vol. 1, ed. B. Snell.

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Plutarch,

Life of Theseus

, 20, 8–9.

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Euripides,

Hippolytus

, 339.

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Iliad

, XIV, 296.

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Callimachus,

Aetia

, II, fr. 48 (Pfeiffer).

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Iliad

, XIV, 349.

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Nonnus,

Dionysiaca

, XLVIII, 372.

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Ibid., XV, 409.

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Ibid., X, 339.

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F. Solmsen,

Eratosthenes

’

Erigone: A Reconstruction

, in “Transactions of the American Philological Association,” 78, 1947, p. 262.

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Hyginus,

Astronomica

, II, 4, 2.

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Ovid,

Metamorphoses

, VI, 125.

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Eratosthenes,

Erigone

, fr. 22, in I. U. Powell,

Collectanea Alexandrina

.

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R. Merkelbach,

Die Erigone

des Eratosthenes

, in “Miscellanea di studi Alessandrini in memoria di A. Rostagni,” Turin, 1963, p. 472.

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Rig Veda

, VII, 87, 5.

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Nonnus,

Dionysiaca

, XLVII, 135.

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Ibid., XLVII, 190, 249.

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Diodorus Siculus,

Bibliotheca historica

, II, 65, 2.

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Plutarch,

Isis and Osiris

, 364 d.

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Nonnus,

Dionysiaca

, XVI, 229, 252.

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Ibid., XVII, 184; XXXVI, 469.

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Clement of Alexandria,

Hortatory Address to the

Greeks

, II, 39, 3.

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Ibid.

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Nicola Damasceno, H 90 F 38, in F. Jacoby,

Die

Fragmente der griechischen

Historiker

(

FGrH

), II, A, p. 345.

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