The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

by Roberto Calasso

  The most interesting thing about Aristotle’s account is his own comment on Pisistratus’s return, that it was “worthy of ancient times and extremely simple.” A century before him, Herodotus was still having to make an effort to exercise that marvelous new Greek quality, that shrewdness “alien to childish naïveté.” Hence he was obliged to present Pisistratus’s return as an almost unbelievable event.

  The more sober Aristotle, by contrast, already had an entirely modern vision of events. Which is precisely why he was not in the least surprised by what happened, recognizing in this return led by the flower girl—goddess a last apparition of a lost world in which the line separating gods and men was constantly shifting, and thus hazardous. Pisistratus’s return could thus truly be considered “worthy of ancient times,” of the times when the power of metamorphosis was still such that a flower seller could be mistaken for a goddess in the streets of Athens.

  Right from the beginning, Greek elegance is opposed to Asiatic sumptuousness with its prodigal mix of solemnity and abundance. As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity. Glaphyrós, “concave,” the word Homer used to describe ships and caves, gradually came to refer to that polish and brightness typical of a carved and honed surface. The spare incision of a sign, or the compact, vibrant surface: these were the desirable goals, and each must be achieved by planing away and streamlining one’s material.

  The epidermis of the Greek statue is so sharply separated from all that surrounds it because it is carved out of the air, whereas Mesopotamian or Egyptian statues seem to have grown up from the ground. The intensity that resides in a line of Homer is such above all because the word stands out against the emptiness of all the many details the poet denies us, the splinters hacked away from the word. Later, turning aside from the realm of palpable surfaces, the glaphyría opens up a passage toward the interior, toward the sharpness of the mind. Until finally it installs itself in a surface bereft of any foothold when Iamblicus uses the word glaphyría to define the elegance of mathematical demonstrations.

  On the one hand, long, pleated skirts with long, thin feet poking out beneath, corsets squeezing the ample breasts of Minoan women; on the other, seamless tunics held by a buckle at the shoulder to create an alternation of soft, ruffled drapery, through which the body could be sensed, and smooth, bright surfaces which prevented it from actually being seen, so that “what must be kept hidden is kept hidden, while much blows in the wind.” There could be no greater incompatibility than that revealed by this change in the way women dressed. Between the one style and the other lies the forever obscure process that was the evolution of Greek uniqueness. What happened in that interval? The Dorians, always a riddle for archaeologists, left nothing that could be attributed to them with any certainty, except perhaps a simple form of clothing, a rectangular drape pinned at the shoulder.

  The first enemy of the aesthetic was meaning. The symbol appears as an image that is also something else. The aesthetic appears in a figure that is like many others. The god is a boy; he appears on the scene like any Athenian boy, naked as they are, face creased in a light smile. Often he has no attributes that might allow us to recognize him. He relies entirely on presence. Scholars are still puzzled by the kórai: are they dead girls? or the goddess’s maids? or the goddess herself? or the figurative representation of thoughts on the tomb of a boy or man, with whom these women had nothing at all to do? Here meaning seems to melt away, doesn’t impose itself. What does impose itself is a presence, as if of someone we don’t know. And one doesn’t think immediately of any meaning, but of what appears to the eye.

  In contrast, the smallest Mesopotamian seal challenges us to decipher it: it is a memory condensed into a few stiff notches. It presupposes a scene, an order of events and figures. The statue defies such interpretation. At most it will hold a piece of fruit in one hand. But we sense that, before conveying any meaning, it wishes only to attract our eye—and install itself there.

  The Greek god imposes no commandments. How could he forbid anything, when he has already done it all himself, good deeds and bad? The Greeks did have maxims that aspired to the same universality as commandments. But they were not rules descended from heaven. If we look closely at these maxims, at their insistence on sōphroneîn, on control, on the dangers of any kind of excess, we discover that they are of an entirely different nature: they are maxims elaborated by man to defend himself from the gods. The Greeks had no inclination for temperance. They knew that excess is divine, and that the divine overwhelms life. But the more they found themselves immersed in the divine, the more they wished to keep it at arm’s length, like slaves running their fingers over their scars. Western sobriety, which two thousand years later would become everyman’s common sense, was at first no more than a mirage glimpsed through the tempest of the elements.

  So what did these Greek gods want of men? What they certainly did not require was that we behave one way rather than another. They were as ready to defend the unjust actions of a favorite as to condemn the just actions of someone they disliked. So what did they want? To be recognized. Every recognition is an awareness of form. Hence in our enfeebled modern vocabulary we might say that the way they imposed themselves was first and foremost aesthetic. But in a sense of the word which, with time, has been lost: the aesthetic of a mesh of powers concentrated in a figure, a body, a voice.

  If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from the ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. Life as mere vegetative protraction, glazed eyes looking out on the world, the certainty of being oneself, without knowing what one is: such a life has no need of a god. It is the realm of the spontaneous atheism of the homme naturel.

  But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed.

  Looking at Athena, her breast fringed with snakes, her clear-cut monochrome face, we get a sense of what the classical is: a hybrid between the barbaric and the neoclassical.

  At a certain point in their history, when the palaces had been burned down, writing lost, gold become unobtainable—at a certain point in their history, about which we know very little, since it left us neither words nor monuments, the Greeks chose perfection as opposed to power. Power dreams of indefinite expansion, perfection cannot. The perfect is only one of the innumerable points in the process that is ceaselessly transforming existence. But this point has a hidden flaw, which terrifies the Greeks: the point of perfection is the moment that closes the circle, that brings death. Only in the experience of Eleusis did this huge obstacle appear to melt away. That was why the Greeks respected Eleusis more than anything else.

  What was celebrated at Eleusis was not just one of the everyday and extremely tedious agrarian rituals. It was the simultaneous presence of perfection and death. Eleusis was not for peasants worried about their crops. Eleusis was for those languishing for perfection, and it was meant to heal their sickness. There, and only there, could one find a perfection that did not die. People coming back from Eleusis would laugh and cry like everybody else. But only they could claim to be really laughing and crying. Because their laughter and tears came after perfection, and not as its feeble precursors.

  “Pure light of midsummer.” Such, according to Pindar, is Dionysus. He is the opra: the fi
fty days that follow the rising of Sirius, after the first half of July. When the opra was over, the Eleusinian procession set off from Athens. The festival began with an extremely high-pitched cry and ended with the appearance of a “sacred youth.” For the Athenians he was a “beautiful god,” the god of that moment. The cry and the youth had the same name: Iacchus. The cry was the youth.

  At the beginning of the procession, when on a September afternoon, the day of the battle of Salamis, the people left the Dipylon and headed off down the Sacred Way, the presence of Iacchus, in the role of “traveling companion,” roused the young dancers for a dance that was to last twelve and a half miles and would take them as far as Eleusis. The crowd of boys, women, and old men would let themselves be ruled by this “tireless god.” Iacchus was a sound and a torch, one amid the many flickering on the flowery plain, even though it was September and the fields scorched by the summer heat.

  What are the mysteries? “The saying of many ridiculous things and many serious things” is the definition Aristophanes offers, and no one has ever bettered it. In the midst of “the laughter and the jokes,” as the procession proceeds, the sidelong glance of a dancer comes to rest “on a very attractive young girl, an old playmate, one small breast poking through a tear in her tunic.” The air is full of the smell of resin and roast pig. The dust is strewn with sandals and torn clothes, which would be even more torn before the dance was through, because “he who celebrated the mysteries would not take off the tunic he wore at the festival until it was reduced to rags.”

  They were a group of small states, enemies for the most part, or halfhearted friends. But they felt they had something in common to defend: tò Hellēnikón, the “Greek thing.” They didn’t bother to define it, because they knew perfectly well what it was. Not high-ceilinged palaces, or guards lined up in ranks, or deferent ministers, or gold. But a certain spareness of expression, as though among athletes who compete in physical speed and beauty, and in nothing else. Perhaps this partly explains why, unlike the barbarians, even the imperial barbarians, the Greeks would go around naked. And there was something else the Greeks, and only the Greeks, were interested in: an empty space, sun-drenched and dusty, where they could exchange goods and words. A market, a square.

  When Cyrus the Great, first ideological opponent of the Greeks, received a threatening Spartan herald, he sat up on his throne for a moment to ask what on earth this unknown city called Sparta might be, and how many men they could muster. One of his Greek advisers explained. At which Cyrus answered with an expression that would clear up once and for all the question of why Asian power could not tolerate the “Greek thing”: “I’ve never been afraid of men who have a special place to meet in the middle of their city, where they swear to this and that and cheat one another.”

  Among the most significant of epithets applied to Zeus is Phanaîos, “he who appears.” The same name is also used for Apollo, “because through him the things that are [tà ónta] are made manifest, and the cosmos is illuminated.” The supremacy of appearance begins with Zeus, and from it derive the tensions that galvanize Greek culture. The fact that Plato launched a devastating attack on appearance shows that appearance was still dominant and oppressive to him. The messenger of the realm of appearance is the statue. No other ancient language had such a rich vocabulary for referring to different kinds of images as Greek. And this markedly visual vocabulary contrasted sharply with that of the Greeks’ enemies par excellence: the Persians. Behind the long historic rivalry, one glimpses an insuperable metaphysical divide, which Herodotus describes thus: “[The Persians] do not raise statues, or build temples and altars. On the contrary, they reproach those who do so for their folly, I think because they don’t believe as the Greeks do that the gods have a human form. Their practice is to make sacrifices to Zeus from the top of the highest mountains, and they think of Zeus as the whole blue sky.”

  Unlike the Greeks, who adored stones and pieces of wood, and the Egyptians too, who prostrated themselves before ibis and ichneumons, the first Persians would bow down only before “fire and water, like philosophers.” Breaking away in very early times from those philosopher-priests, the Magi, the Greeks generated a new race of philosophers, who were not priests and did not always dispense with images to then climb up on the highest mountains and worship the sky. Some would dispense with images and find nothing at all to worship. But, before that could happen, appearance had to impose itself as a hitherto unknown force, a challenge.

  Nowhere so much as in Athens was sovereignty in both its guises, regal and priestly, so scornfully written off. Basileús, “king,” became the name of a kind of priest who was entrusted with limited duties only at certain of the annual festivals, such as the Anthesteria. For the rest of the year the basileús was an Athenian like any other. And priests in general were respectable, physically whole members of the community, but they were not granted any power beyond the roles they played in their cults. They were priests without books, without an all-embracing secret doctrine.

  There could be nothing more Greek than Herodotus’s amazement on discovering that in Persia no one could make a sacrifice unless a Magus was there to oversee the ceremony. In Greece, anyone could offer a sacrifice. And no one checked up on him. But the image of the Magus, of that cold eye watching, checking, keeping guard, would make itself felt through occult paths, building up the image of an unassailable power that exercised total control over reality. The Guardians were the peculiar image of such a power that was to develop in Greece. In two forms: practical and authoritarian in Sparta’s ephors; theoretical, always ruthless, but linked to the heaven of ideas, in Plato.

  Greece cherished two secrets: that of Eleusis and that of Sparta. Jacob Burckhardt came close to the secret of Sparta. With typical sobriety he comments: “Power can have a great mission on earth; for perhaps it is only on power, on a world protected by power, that superior civilizations can develop. But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”

  As an end unto itself: how often we hear that expression, and always with a shiver, as when drawn to something dangerous: hoarding of money, dandyism, experimental research. But the first end unto itself was laconic, Spartan: the grim reticence of a power that devoured all, that saw nothing else, needed nothing else. The first self-sufficiency, first indifference toward everything that was not part of its own mechanism, the divine machine designed by a craftsman who has a name but no face: Lycurgus. The Spartan state subjected every form to itself, subordinated every usage to its own existence. This was the ancient and thoroughly modern philosophy that the Spartans tried so determinedly to hide by passing themselves off as ignorant warmongers. Otherwise their enemies might also have been seduced by this power-enhancing mechanism, which the Equals felt was invincible. And a sad contradiction that would be … The philosophy turned out to be the most effective weapon of war and self-preservation. And it was not discovered by the Athenians, as always too garrulous, vain, and distracted for that kind of thing. No, this philosophy was the Spartan discovery, one that rendered any other discovery, and above all any other philosophy, superfluous.

  This explains the yawning depths of Socrates’ irony as he puts together an argument to counter Protagoras: “The greatest and most ancient of Greek philosophies is that of Crete and Sparta, and it is there that most of the earth’s sophists reside: but they deny it and pretend to be ignorant, so as not to stand out among the Greeks for their wisdom, but to appear to excel only in battle and courage, fearing that the others, were they to know what they are really good at, might set themselves the same goal: knowledge. Their sham takes in the admirers of Sparta in other cities, who thus butcher their ears to imitate them, put leather bands around their legs, go to gymnasiums and wear short tunics, imagining that these are the keys to Sparta’s supremacy among the Greeks. For the
ir part, the Spartans, when they want to talk freely with their sophists and are tired of concealing their true selves, expel all the Spartophiles and other foreigners in the land, so as to be able to spend time with their sophists without any foreigners knowing; what’s more, they, like the Cretans, don’t let any of their young men travel to other cities, so that the teaching they have received cannot be spoiled.”

  The old Plato of the Laws was still thinking of Sparta with obscure regret: “When I saw the organization we were discussing, I found it most beautiful. If the Greeks had had it, it would, as I said, have been a marvelous possession, if someone had been able to use it in an attractive way.” What comes through these words is the dawning fallacy of the technical, the illusion that one might set up a perfect mechanism and deploy it for the Good. The point is that the Spartan mechanism was based on the exclusion of every Good that was not part of its own operations.