by Joshua Cohen
C. EGYPT, CADMUS/KADMOS, MEMORY, ORPHEUS TURNING
IN THE GREEK-EGYPTIAN PORT CITY of Naucratis dwelled an ancient god called Theuth, creator of mathematics, astrology/astronomy, gambling, and the alphabet, all of which he shipped down the Nile, following the current, to Thebes, capital of Egypt, to its King Thamus who, in godly form, was worshipped as Ammon.
At Thebes—imagine a palace—they discussed these creations, some receiving Thamus’s approval, some his disapproval, but none was resisted more than the alphabet. Though its letters resembled papyrus reeds broken by a storm, none symbolized “papyrus,” or “reeds,” or “brokenness,” or “storms”—unlike glyphs, Theuth’s inventions did not individually depict or represent but rather aggregated, piling on their singular sounds in a process not unlike the building of pyramids, into words that served as conceptual tombs.
The language in which Theuth defended his art is not recorded, nor has it ever been explained why a deity would require a language.
He said (in my translation of a dozen translations): I do not understand your resistance, your divine majesty—these characters of mine will make the people more wise and improve their memories, broaden their culture, widen their trade, and enrich your treasury.
Thamus replied (smiling): With all respect due to my fellow immortal—inventors are never the best judges of their own inventions. Your characters will not inculcate memory, rather forgetfulness. The people will come to entrust their minds to writing, their thoughts and knowledge will become enslaved to the tablet and scroll, remembrance will be drained to depthless recall, truth will be usurped by forgeries, things heard and said will engender no change, the truest experience of the soul will be draped, as in a funeral rite, with a false appearance of omniscience, and all the world will become a kingdom of pure surface.
I have never been able to read this myth without recalling its genesis—in a speech by Socrates, who never wrote, transcribed by Plato, who did.
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THE ALPHABET WAS INTRODUCED to humanity by Theuth, or by hermeneutical Hermes (according to Diodorus), by Palamedes (according to Euripides), by Prometheus (according to Aeschylus), by Cadmus/Kadmos (according to Herodotus). Cadmus was a Phoenician prince from Tyre, his father, King Agenor, one of twins born to an Egyptian princess named Libya and the sea-god Poseidon. Agenor ruled Phoenicia; his brother Belus ruled Egypt. Cadmus’s mother, Telephassa, was the daughter of the Nile and a cloud.
When Zeus changes into a bull and abducts Cadmus’s sister, Europa, her brother sets out to rescue her. (Bullish Zeus, it might be mentioned, was Cadmus and Europa’s great-grandfather.)
It was on the Greek island of Samothrace that Cadmus reenacts the privilege of Zeus, by abducting a woman of his own—Harmonia, daughter of Ares, god of war, and of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Cadmus takes her to Delphi, where the oracle counsels him to forsake his quest and follow a certain ox with a crescent moon on its flank. Wherever that ox lies down, Cadmus is to found the citadel of Cadmeia, the palace of Thebes you’d imagined, future seat of the kingdom of Thamus. Many adventures, many misadventures, follow, incidents whose color might have required the Phoenician alphabet their hero accidentally packed along to Greece—the slaying of a water dragon, the sowing of the dragon’s teeth to grow soldiers, accursed jewelry—though for a full accounting I’d direct you to the Delphi of online and recommend a search by author, with the keywords “Hyginus” and “Pseudo-Apollodorus.”*1
Cadmus’s marriage to Harmonia has been taken as an allegorical wedding of Eastern, or Phoenician, wisdom, to the Western, or Greek, cult of beauty. If the wisdom that Cadmus brought to the Greeks has been recorded, in writing, as writing itself—Phoenician, the world’s first nonglyphic alphabet—then perhaps Harmonia’s beauty can be read as being of a proportion between the capacities of language and its use. This distinction is evinced immediately after what the archaeological record proposes as the date of the introduction of the Phoenician characters to Greek—between the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.E., a century or so before “Homer.”
It’s through the codification of the Homeric canon that the culture of the oral/aural became the culture of the visual/manual, fixing the odysseys of the roving bards as hexametric. Interpretation went from being a matter of individually altering a primal myth in performance to collectively establishing a textbound version as primary. Letters lined consecutively into words, lined consecutively onto a scrap of reed or parchment, became sentences: punctuated—ca. fifth century B.C.E. This textuality engendered a quest for accuracy among the stanzas—or so goes the origin myth of literary criticism. Inconsistencies were pointed out and disseminated by scholiasts such as Zoilus of Amphipolis as early as the fourth century B.C.E.: In Book V of The Iliad, Menelaus and Antilochus slay Pylaemenes, king of the Paphlagonians. In Book XIII, however, he’s still alive to witness his son, Harpalion, be pierced by Meriones’s arrow.
An ultimate sharpness: A Greek stilus marked and was a mark, which word became Latin’s stimulus, a “prick” or “goad.” What Greek understood as an instrument for marking, or the mark itself, Latin understood as meriting attention.
(for a further consideration of writing technologies, skip directly to chapters e and 10)
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AMONG THE MYRIAD COMPLEXITIES, OR COMPLICATIONS, of the concepts being written about came the need for more words, and even the need for more letters—conceptual revelations that signaled a notable reversal in the history of language development, in which new vocabulary had always been syllabically exhumed from the old. Simonides of Ceos (ca. 556– 468 B.C.E.) is credited with the invention of η, ξ, ψ, ω, though he is better remembered as the father of memory—or, in the terms of his own progonoplexic age, a son of Mnemosyne, and so a brother to the Muses.
Simonides was one of Greece’s finest poets—it’s unfortunate that only scattered verses of his have survived. He might also have been the first poet to write for pay. Cicero relates that a wealthy Thessalonian noble named Scopas held a banquet and commissioned an ode in his own honor. But when Simonides delivered his text, which insulted Scopas by including, instead of praise, a stretch of remplissage referring to Castor and Pollux, the patron responded by withholding half of Simonides’s fee. The wining and dining continued, until a message arrived that Simonides had two young male visitors waiting at the door. The moment Simonides left, the banquet hall collapsed; the roof fell in and crushed Scopas, his family and guests so completely that when their surviving friends went to bury them—friends probably previously resentful that they hadn’t been invited to the feast, probably pleased now that they hadn’t been—they weren’t able to recognize the corpses.
Cicero, who has no time for superstition, glosses over the purpose of the young men’s visit (anyway, it would’ve been clear to Cicero’s contemporaries that the visitors were supposed to be Castor and Pollux themselves, reincarnated from their constellation in gratitude for Simonides’s interest). Instead, the great Latin poet prefers to describe the great Greek poet’s descriptive postmortem:
It is told that Simonides was able by his recollection of the place in which each had been sitting to identify them for individual interment, and that this experience suggested to him that the best aid to a clarity of memory consisted in orderly arrangement.
He inferred that persons hoping to train this faculty must select localities, form mental images of the facts they wish to remember, and store those images in those localities, with the result that the arrangement of localities will preserve the order of facts, and the images of facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images as if wax tablets and the letters written on them, respectively.
It’s ironic that Simonides, a man who worked in language and its sounding (the oral/aural), found his truest talent and posterity in pictures (the visual/manual): seating arrangements becomin
g mental arrangements, pillowy loci, reclines of the mind. His associative method itself was just a pictorial translation of literary technique. Lessons crucial for survival—this banquet is reminiscent of that banquet, the relation of this roof to a chance of collapse recalls the relation of that roof to its certain collapse—relied on the mimeses of poetry, in which a toppled glass might be a wasted opportunity; a fork missing a tine, a piteous loss; a knife missing a handle, a raging danger; a full amphora, a glutton. In Simonides’s system, analogies, metaphors, similes, and puns were returned from the domain of literature, to life—to their source as granaries or storehouses of memory.
But the decisive triumph of the look/see over the hear/listen occurred in the first century B.C.E., not in written language but, again ironically, in oratory—the spoken. Cicero developed Simonides’s loci into a host of mnemonic or rebus techniques to aid in remembering his vast speeches to the senate. Each of his addresses was quite literally an address—a labeled chamber—and each object in that chamber visually or ideationally rhymed with a rhetorical portion: Say, a vacant comfy chair was the Exordium (whose purpose, according to Quintilian, was “to prepare the audience to lend a ready ear to the rest”); drying togas were the stiff data of the Narratio; a broken jug of wine was the disputation of the Partitio; and so on, through the Confirmatio, the Reprehensio, and the conclusive—door shutting—Peroratio.
Memory, having been externalized to books, had to be reinternalized—not again by the communal sharing of legend and lore, but by the lonely scholar, zealously guarding his precious manuscripts and tablets. If the present was still a repository of the past, it wasn’t from any civilized consensus, but from elective affinity. The gods had ceased to be anything but representations of human foibles; the convocation prayer of Classical religion was art; the temples, already museums.
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BUT BEFORE THE TURN from Antiquity, which turned from the throat, there is one final—one original—figure to meet: Orpheus, whose voice could charm the birds and beasts and fish, compel even the trees and boulders to dance, and divert the courses of rivers—at least according to Simonides, whose own powers of transformation were perhaps getting ahead of him. Whereas Cicero claimed philosophy as the sole arbiter of his expression, Orpheus took his marching orders only from music, the strophes. Orpheus, whose name is related to orbus, meaning “self-contained,” “solitary,” was another “Homer,” but while Homeric editing aspired to the authority of history, the Orphic hierophants made art whose authority not even a god could aspire to.
The myth of Orpheus is one of an artist falling in love with a woman, a dryad or arboreal nymph, Agriope in some accounts, Eurydice in others, who dies accidentally and young and so is ferried across the river Styx that flows into the domain of Hades. It is there that Orpheus ventures, intent on winning her back, to life and to himself. Katabasis is to go down, anabasis to come back up, and that’s what all the Greek versions have Orpheus doing—prevailing—returning from darkness into light with his love on one arm, his lyre in the other.
Cicero was a student of Plato—not yet a reader of Plato, but an inheritor of his tradition through the academies—and so might have been familiar with the philosopher’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth as a dramatization of the soul’s conflict between appearances and the actual. According to Plato, Eurydice is merely a shade, an apparition, the clouded reflection of Orpheus’s mortal—insufficient—love. Because Orpheus is unwilling to commit suicide for this love, preferring instead to resurrect it, or her, to his own estate, he can be no hero. Such is his ignominy that Aristotle said—in words preserved in Cicero’s quotation—“Orpheus never existed” (his only real existence is in quotation).
But let’s give audience to a retelling by a later Roman, a later master of Latin, Virgil—from the fourth book of his Georgics.
The background is this: Pluto, or Hades, god of the underworld, was lonely and so did as they do in the overworld, on Olympus, and abducted a wife—Proserpine, or Persephone, confining her to hell. In Virgil’s version, Eurydice’s wandering through the woods one noon when she’s ambushed and pursued by a satyr (lust). Trying to escape, she’s bitten by a snake and dies, descends. Orpheus follows, as in the earlier Greek versions, but here Virgil has him transact with the queen of death Proserpine, who might be resentful—the poet seems to imply—that nobody has come to save her.
Because Orpheus’s voice has so dazzled the dead she wants him out and doesn’t want anyone to follow, so she orders him to silence, and to return to life. Only Eurydice will follow, but so as not to attract others, Orpheus must not turn around:
And now Orpheus reversed his steps, avoided missteps,
as Eurydice, reclaimed, regained the upper air,
following behind him (as Proserpine decreed),
when a sudden frenzy seized his caution
(a pardonable offense, if hell is capable of pardon):
he stopped, and, forgetful at the lip of light,
was ruined, by looking back at his Eurydice.
His efforts were shattered like water, his pact
with the mean queen, broken, as three storm peals
were heard by the Avernus pools. “Orpheus,” Eurydice cried,
“what craze has destroyed my wretchedness? And yours?
See, the base Fates recall me, sleep lids my swimming eyes,
goodbye: I am taken, enwrapped by night,
stretching out to you hands no longer yours.”
Virgil’s rewrite of the Greek is both a sober, literarily sophisticated commentary on how humanity can never quite countenance the monitions—the advice and signs—all around (none apply, individually), and also a sardonic fable or parable of the cult that Orpheus’s fate gave rise to, debauched Orphism. Regardless of its interpretation, Virgil’s version is an indictment of an entire society that imitated every aspect of Orpheus but his talent—a Rome too emotionally weak and carousing, too orgiastic and invested in mysticism. His implication seems to be that raving devotion devolves, with the intercession of business or commerce (the deal with Proserpine), into frenzy, craziness, dementia, and furor—a descent, or dissent, from the verities, the virtues. The whole Roman Empire follows Orpheus in doubting Eurydice’s love, which is nature’s love, and, at the moment of turning, surrenders its honor. The mythic martyrs, the grand sacrificial sufferers, were all cold in the ground, shadows underground, by Virgil’s time, and new heroes hadn’t stepped forward yet to claim the laurels. Not for nothing is Eurydice described as an oak nymph.*2
She spoke and then she fled, abruptly, from his vision,
like smoke emptying in air, never to be seen,
though he grasped vainly at shadows and craved
further speech. Nor did the ferryman of Orcus
allow him to cross the marsh again.
The Latin for “grasped vainly at shadows” is prensantem nequiquam umbras, and discernible in that verb (prenso, prehenso) is the tenebrously mental nature of the action: “prehension,” “apprehension.” That prefix, pre, is especially disturbing, to the contemporary mind indicating that even a variety of “presentiment,” in the sense of “premonition,” might attend this grasping. It’s as if Orpheus has already foretold his failures, but vainly. He reaches out hoping for Eurydice, aware that his hope has the consistency of fume.
It’s here that Orpheus sheds everything Grecian and becomes completely Roman: lost, confused, howling cacophonously and without meter but with grief. In some traditions, Orpheus even loses the ability to sing. In others, he doesn’t lose the ability but spurns it. He tours the oracles. He can’t find himself, so he casts around, this once-great model, for models. Artists consult oracles only when they cease to be oracles themselves. A question is asked, the oracle answers, the Greek ones with orders, the Roman ones with riddles,
or metaphysical jokes. The riddle itself, its winding way, becomes the life that must be led in search of a solution; though Orpheus, of all mortals, must’ve been aware, having been there, that the only true solution is damned.
He worships Apollo, trying to get a grip on his sanity, but while on a visit to a shrine to Apollo’s adversary, the insane Bacchus (or Dionysus), at Thrace, he’s torn apart by Maenads, who are enraged that he has already propitiated a deity more calm or resigned, and too that out of his uncontrollable passion for Eurydice—or, per Ovid, boys—he’s spurned their desperate advances. The Maenads scatter his limbs; his lyre ascends to heaven, becoming catasterized by the Muses who’d tutored him in its art into a congeries of stars most evident in summer, between spring’s birth and the death of fall. Orpheus’s head floats down the Hebrus to the Aegean, where it washes up like an unpronounceable rock on the shore of Lesbos, island of Sappho, who counsels: “We must accept that in a world like ours /our chief desires will be denied us.”
The head is buried in Lesbos, where it becomes an oracle again, consulting on the Greek invasion of Troy, involving Orpheus’s tongue with the fate of another female ideal—Helen.
No record exists of his reunion with Eurydice amid the sulfur.
*1 The Cadmeian messenger/linguist figure might not be the only composite at work: The ox Cadmus is instructed to follow was likely related to his great-grandmother, a nymph named Io, called Isis by the Egyptians, whose mythology regards her as another candidate for alphabetical innovator. In the myth’s most basic telling, insatiable Zeus has a dalliance with Io and, so as not to be caught by his wife, Hera, turns Io into a cow. Hera, though, uncovers the indiscretion and condemns Io to a life of grazing under the watch of the many-eyed, insomniac Argus Panoptes. Zeus, in turn, sends Hermes to distract the giant, to slay him, and set Io free. Io wanders across the Bosporus (lit. ox passage), to Egypt, where she births Libya, Cadmus’s grandmother.