The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  Again the weather was fiercely hot, and Aura was looking for a stream. Dionysus decided that only one of his weapons could work: wine. When Aura brought her lips down to the stream, she found a strange-tasting liquid. She had never experienced anything like it. Numbed and stupefied, she lay down in the shadow of a huge tree. And slept. Barefoot, making no noise, Dionysus approached. Moving quickly, he slipped off her bow and quiver and hid them behind a rock. He couldn’t get over his nervousness. For days now he just couldn’t stop thinking of another huntress he had known, Nikaia, a girl so beautiful it was as if her body had plundered all the beauties of Olympus. She too had steered clear of men, and when Hymnos, a herdsman, came to tell her of his passion and devotion, Nikaia had cut him short with an arrow through the throat. At which the woods had echoed with a chant that recalled a nursery rhyme: “The handsome herdsman is gone, the beautiful maiden has won.” The lines echoed again now in Dionysus’s mind as his wary hands tied a rope around Aura’s feet. Then he looped another rope around her wrists. Aura was still asleep, in a state of cloying intoxication, and Dionysus took her like that, bound hand and foot. Her body was completely relaxed, dozing on the bare earth, but the ground itself rose and fell to celebrate their union, and the hamadryad shook the branches of the pine tree. While Dionysus was taking immense pleasure in her body, a pleasure intensified by the baseness of it all, the huntress had a heady, disturbing dream, which followed on from her other dream. Gently linked to those of Aphrodite and Adonis, her arms had become entwined to form a single knot with that alien flesh, and her wrists were writhing in the terrifying spasm of a pleasure that was not hers, but theirs, and yet was being passed on to her through the joined veins in their wrists. At the same time Aura saw her head bowed like that of the captured lioness. She was consenting to her own ruin. Dionysus withdrew. Still making no noise, walking on tiptoe, he recovered Aura’s bow and quiver and laid them next to her naked body. He freed her hands and feet. Then he went back to the forest.

  When she woke up, Aura saw her naked thighs, saw that the girdle covering her breasts had been untied. She felt she would go mad. She went down into the valley, yelling. Just as she had once shot lions and boars, she now loosed her arrows at herdsmen and shepherds. Everywhere she went, she left streams of blood. Any hunters she saw, she shot. Walking into a vineyard, she killed the farmers working there, because she knew they were followers of Dionysus, an enemy god, even though she thought she had never met him. When she found a temple to Aphrodite, she took a whip to the goddess’s statue. Then she lifted it from its pedestal and hurled it into the waters of the river Sangarius, the whip still wrapped around its marble flanks. Then she hid in her forest again. She tried to think which of the gods might have raped her, and she cursed them one by one. She would shoot her arrows into their shrines. She would kill the gods themselves. The first to go would be Aphrodite and Dionysus. As for Artemis, she deserved nothing but scorn: the virgin goddess hadn’t been able to protect her, just as she hadn’t known how to answer those few teasing and rather funny comments about her heavy, swollen breasts. Aura wanted to cut open her womb and scrape out the stranger’s semen. She stood defenseless in front of a lioness, but the lioness didn’t consider her a worthy victim. She wanted to find out who her lover had been, so she could make him eat their child.

  Then Artemis appeared with a sneer. She mocked Aura for walking slowly and heavily, the way pregnant women do. Where was that swift, light step she’d had? And where would Aura be without her speed? She asked her what gifts her lover, Dionysus, had left her. Had he given her some rattles by any chance, for their children to play with? Then she disappeared. Aura continued to wander about. Soon she felt the first birth pains. They went on and on. While Aura was suffering, Artemis appeared again to mock her. She gave birth to twins. Dionysus was proud but afraid that Aura might kill them. He called the huntress Nikaia. He had played the wine trick on her too, raped her in her sleep and deserted her just as he had Aura. And she too had borne him a child, a daughter, Teleté, which means “initiation,” “ultimate achievement.”

  Repetition, for a god, is a sign of majesty, necessity’s seal. Nikaia, the magnificent girl who had once had blood gushing from the throat of a harmless herdsman merely because he’d dared speak a few words of love to her, was now working at a loom like any poor woman. (Should Dionysus have given her Ariadne’s spindle perhaps?) But now Nikaia would be able to see that another huntress had come to the same sorry end. Now she could take comfort, Dionysus said, in the thought that she formed part of a divine order. But her role did not end there: she must become the god’s accomplice, help him save at least one of those twins Aura was about to kill. The world, the whole world, the world far away from the woods, the world of temples, ships, and markets, was awaiting the arrival of two new creatures: one was Nikaia’s own daughter, Teleté; the other was one of those twins now in the hands of a pain-crazed Aura.

  Aura lifted the two newborn babies to the sky, to the wind that had carried her through life when she ran, and dedicated them to the breeze. She wanted them dashed to pieces. She offered them to a lioness, to have them gobbled up. But a panther came into the lair: tenderly, the animal licked the two infant bodies and fed them, while two snakes protected the entrance to the cave. Then Aura took one of the twins in her hands, threw him in the air, and, when he fell in the dust, leaped on him to tear him to pieces. Terrified, Artemis intervened: she took the other child and, holding a baby in her arms for the first time in her life, fled into the forest.

  Aura was alone again. She went down to the banks of the Sangarius, threw her bow and quiver into the river, then dived in herself. The waves covered her body. Water squirted from her breasts. Artemis gave the surviving child to Dionysus. The father took the two babies born from the two girls he had raped in their sleep and brought them to the place where the rites of the mysteries were celebrated. Even Athena clutched the little boy to her virgin breast. Then she handed the child to the Bacchants of Eleusis. In Attica they lit torches in his honor. He was called Iacchus, “the new being who appeared in Eleusis.” Those who had the fortune to see him became happy. Those who didn’t, didn’t even know what happiness means.

  But Dionysus’s wanderings and conquests were over now. It was time for him to climb up to Olympus. He would still find himself thinking of Ariadne sometimes. He took a garland of flowers up the mountain in remembrance. Then he sat down at the table of the Twelve. His seat was next to Apollo’s.

  Dionysus’s first love was a boy. His name was Ampelos. He played with the young god and the satyrs on the banks of the Pactolus in Lydia. Dionysus noticed the way his long hair fell on his neck, the light that glowed from his body as he climbed out of the water. When he saw him wrestling with a satyr and their feet became knotted together, he was jealous. He wanted to be the only one to fight with Ampelos. They were “erotic athletes.” They threw each other to the ground, and Dionysus loved it when Ampelos got him down and sat on his naked belly. Then they would wash the dust and sweat from their skins, swimming in the river. They invented new games. Ampelos always won. He plaited a crown of snakes and put it on his head the way he’d seen his friend do. He also imitated Dionysus by wearing a mottled tunic. He learned to talk to bears, lions, and tigers. Dionysus encouraged him, but there came the day when he warned him too: you needn’t fear any wild beast, he said, but watch out for the horns of the cruel bull.

  Dionysus was alone one day when he witnessed a scene he felt must be an omen. A horned dragon appeared among the rocks. On his back he was carrying a deer. He tipped the creature off onto a stone altar and plunged a horn into its defenseless body. A pool of blood formed on the stone. Dionysus watched and felt grieved, but along with his grieving came an overwhelming desire to laugh, as if his heart were being split in two. Then he found Ampelos again, and they went on wandering about and hunting together as usual. Ampelos used to like playing his reed pipes, and he played badly. But Dionysus never tired of praising him, becaus
e while he praised he would watch him. Sometimes Ampelos would remember Dionysus’s warning about the bull, but it made less and less sense. By now he knew all the wild animals, and they were all his friends: why on earth shouldn’t the bull be a friend too? And one day, when he was out on his own, he met a bull among the rocks. The animal was thirsty, its tongue hanging out. The bull drank, then stared at the boy, then belched, and a stream of saliva dribbled from his mouth. Ampelos tried to stroke his horns. He made himself a rush whip and a sort of bridle. He arranged a mottled pelt over the bull’s back and mounted it. For a few moments he experienced a sense of elation no other animal had ever given him. But Selene was jealous. She saw him from on high and sent a gadfly. Irritated, the bull began to gallop, trying to escape that awful sting. Ampelos could no longer control the beast. A last jolt threw him to the ground. There was a dry, cracking sound as his neck snapped. The bull dragged him on, its horn sinking deeper and deeper into the boy’s flesh.

  Dionysus found Ampelos in the dust, covered in blood, but still beautiful. Gathered in a circle, the satyrs began to mourn over him. But Dionysus couldn’t join in with them. It wasn’t in his nature to weep. And he realized that he wouldn’t be able to follow Ampelos into Hades, because he was immortal. Over and over he promised himself he’d kill the whole bull species with his thyrsus. Eros, who had disguised himself as a shaggy satyr, came over to console him. He told him a love sting could only be cured by the sting of another love. So he should look elsewhere. When a flower has been cut, the gardener plants another one. But now Dionysus was crying for Ampelos. It was a sign that something had happened that would change his nature, and the nature of the world.

  At that moment the Hours were hurrying toward the house of Helios, the sun. There was a sense that something new was about to take place on the celestial wheel. It was time to consult the tablets of Harmony, where Phanes’ primordial hand had inscribed the events of this world in their order. Helios pointed to them where they hung on a wall of his house. The Hours looked at the fourth tablet: it showed the Lion and the Virgin, and Ganymede holding a cup. They interpreted the image: Ampelos would become the vine. He who had brought tears to the god who never wept would also bring delight to the world. Upon hearing which, Dionysus recovered. When the grapes born from Ampelos’s body were mature, he picked the first bunches and, with a gesture he seemed to know of old, squeezed them gently in his hands. He watched as a red stain spread across his fingers. Then he licked them. He thought, Ampelos your end demonstrates the splendor of your body. Even in death you haven’t lost your rosy color.

  No other god, let alone Athena with her sober olive, or Demeter with her nourishing bread, had ever had anything that could vie with that liquor. It was exactly what had been missing from life, what life had been waiting for: intoxication.

  Bursting with youth, his Bacchants buzzing all around him, Dionysus stormed over to Naxos to appear before the abandoned Ariadne. Eros was darting about him like a sweet hornet. The women following the god were holding leafy thyrsi, bloody shreds of young bull’s flesh, baskets of sacred objects. Dionysus had come from Attica, where he had done something no one would ever forget: he had revealed the secret of wine to man. Behind him he was leaving an extraordinary new drink and the body of another abandoned girl. On his departure, Erigone had hung herself from a tree. But there was no royal frame to put her story in, and it was not to be handed down from one rhyme to the next by a chain of poets. Erigone wouldn’t find her poets until much later, two scholars of the latter days of the ancient world, who, oppressed like others by the times in which they lived, felt almost obliged to write about secrets hitherto left untold. They were Eratosthenes and Nonnus, two Egyptians.

  The secret of bread had been revealed by Demeter in Attica, and a holy place, Eleusis, had been established to celebrate the event. The secret of wine had been revealed in Attica by Dionysus, to common people, but that day was to be commemorated only by a ceremony with masks, dolls, and swings. There was something very obscure about the whole business, and the ritual commemoration suggested an aura of playfulness at once childish and sinister.

  Dionysus had turned up in the role of Unknown Guest in the house of an old Attican gardener, Icarius, who lived with his daughter Erigone and loved to plant new types of trees. His house was a poor one. All the same, he welcomed the Stranger with the same gesture with which Abraham welcomed the angel, by keeping a place in his mind empty and ready for his guest. It was from that gesture that every other gift would derive. Erigone immediately went off to milk their goat for the guest. Sweetly, Dionysus stopped her from making what a philologist would one day describe as “an adorable faux pas.” He was about to reveal to her father, “as a reward for his fair-mindedness and devotion,” something that no one had ever known before: wine. And now Erigone was pouring cup after cup of the new drink for her father. Icarius felt good. Then Dionysus explained that this new drink was perhaps even more powerful than the bread Demeter had revealed to other farmers, because it could both wake a man up and put him to sleep, dissolve the pains that afflicted the heart and make them liquid and fleeting. Now it was Icarius’s job to pass this revelation on to others, as Triptolemus had passed on the revelation of grain.

  Was it then that Dionysus seduced Erigone? We don’t know. Like a piece of flotsam from a shipwreck, the only mention that has survived of the affair is a single line in Ovid. Arachne had the effrontery to challenge Athena to a tapestry competition. The cloth she wove showed Europa being carried off by the bull: you could see the girl’s feet drawing back fearfully from the water. It showed Leda beneath the wings of the swan. It showed Danaë under a shower of gold. It showed Asteria in the clutches of an eagle. And it also showed Erigone, who Dionysus tricked with his grapes (falsa deceperit uva). Not a word more does Ovid give us. But out of a sense of defiance, Arachne’s cloth included only stories that would bring shame to the gods. Erigone, then, was deceived and seduced by that powerful fruit. Other authors tell us that Dionysus and Erigone had a child: his name was Staphylus, “bunch of grapes,” but this was also the name of the child other writers attribute to Dionysus and Ariadne.

  Icarius obeyed Dionysus’s orders. He got onto his cart and set off around Attica to show people this plant with the wondrous juice. One evening he was drinking with a few shepherds. Some of them fell into a deep sleep. It seemed they would never wake up. The shepherds began to suspect Icarius was up to something. Maybe he’d come to poison them and steal their sheep? They felt the impulse to kill. They surrounded Icarius. One picked up a sickle, another a spade, a third an ax, a fourth a big stone. They all hit out at the old man. Then, to finish the job, they ran him through with their cooking spit.

  As he lay dying, Icarius remembered something that had happened not long before. Dionysus had taught him how to plant the vines and look after them. Icarius watched over their growth with the same love he had for his trees, waiting for the moment when he would be able to squeeze the grapes with his own hands. One day he caught a goat eating some vine leaves. He was overcome by anger and killed the animal on the spot. Now he realized the goat had been himself.

  But something else had happened that had to do with that goat. Icarius had skinned it, put on its pelt, and, with some other peasants, improvised a dance around the beast’s mangled corpse. Icarius didn’t appreciate, as he lay dying, that the gesture had been the origin of tragedy, but he did sense that the death of the goat was connected with what was happening to him, the shepherds circling him, each one hitting him with a different weapon, until he saw the spit that would pierce his heart.

  As to the origin of tragedy, all reconstructions ultimately come up against this contradiction. On the one hand there is Eratosthenes’ remark: “It was then that the inhabitants of Icarius danced around a goat for the first time.” Here tragedy seems to involve singing and dancing around the goat. But then Aristotle says that early tragedy was the singing and dancing of the goats. An ancient and pointless dispute was to go o
n for generations around this contradiction, which isn’t actually a contradiction at all. “If one wishes to dress up as a satyr [a goat], one first has to kill a goat and skin it.” Eratosthenes and Aristotle were saying the same thing, except that Aristotle omits the first and decisive part of the process: the slaying of the goat. Thus it is to Eratosthenes that, along with the first extremely accurate estimate of the circumference of the earth, we owe an extremely concise definition of the process from which tragedy developed. There are three phases: Icarius kills the goat; Icarius skins the goat and stretches part of the pelt into a wineskin; Icarius and his friends dance around the goat and stamp on the wineskin while wearing strips of the pelt. Thus the dance around the goat is also the dance of the goats. It is as if a long, tortuous, and obscure process were suddenly reduced before our very eyes to a few shabby elements which are nevertheless capable of releasing an enormous power.

  Of all the women who ascended to the heavens, Erigone was the poorest, the one we know least about. They called her Atletis: the wanderer, the roving spirit, the beggar. And yet this woman’s dog, Maera, was to assume an important position in the night sky, a place central to every calamity, every blessing: he was to become Sirius. One day Erigone was woken up by Maera’s whimpering. Her father had disappeared some months ago. His daughter had searched for him far and wide, wandering about speechless. She felt Maera tugging at her tunic. The dog wanted to take her somewhere. He led her to a well beneath a big tree where they had thrown Icarius’s body. Erigone buried him. Then she climbed high into the tree and hanged herself. Maera stayed there to watch over the two bodies and starved himself to death.