The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (9 page)

Coronis, Aigle: daughters of a king of Phocis, living near an open square where the initiates of Dionysus danced, along the road that would take them to the temple of Apollo. There is a twinning between Coronis and Aigle, just as there is a twinning between Coronis-Aigle and Ariadne, and both point us in the direction of a more obscure parallel between these women’s divine lovers: Dionysus and Apollo. Wasn’t Coronis the name of one of the Nymphs who brought up Dionysus in Naxos? And, checking through Dionysus’s other nurses, we come across, yes, another by the name of Aigle. And wasn’t Coronis also the name of one of the girls on the ship Theseus came back from Crete on?
Kor
nē
means “the curved beak of the crow,” but it also means “a garland, a crown.” And wasn’t Ariadne’s story a story of crowns?
Kor
nē
also means “the stern of a ship” and “the high point of a feast.”
Korōnís
means “the wavy flourish that used to mark the end of a book, a seal of completion.” On an Athenian jar we see Theseus carrying off a girl called Corone, while two of his other women, Helen and the Amazon Antiope, try in vain to stop him. Corone is being lifted up in the air, tightly held in the circle of the hero’s arms, yet still three fingers of her left hand find time to toy, delicately, with the curls of Theseus’s little ponytail. Casting a sharp glance behind, Peirithous protects the abductor’s back. “I saw, let’s run,” the anonymous artist’s hand has written beside the scene. The style is unmistakably that of Euthymides.

Ariadne and Coronis each preferred a foreign man to a god. For them the Stranger is “strength,” which is what the name Ischys means. And Theseus is the strong man par excellence. Of all the women to whom the gods made love, Coronis is the most brazenly irreverent. Already pregnant by Apollo’s “pure seed,” elegant in her tunics as Pindar describes her,
she nevertheless felt “that passion for things far away” and went off to bed with the stranger who came from Arcadia. Pindar comments proverbially: “The craziest type of people are those who scorn what they have around them and look elsewhere / vainly searching for what cannot exist.” In Coronis’s case, what she had around her was a god, a god whose child, Asclepius, she was already bearing. It is as if, out of sheer caprice, the fullness of the Greek heaven were fractured here. The stranger from Arcadia was even more of a stranger than the god, and hence more attractive. The bright enamel of divine apparition is scarred by sudden cracks. But this allows it to breathe with the naturalness of literature, which rejects the coercion of the sacred text.

All that was left of Coronis was a heap of ashes. But years later Asclepius too would be reduced to ashes. He had dared to bring a dead man back to life, so Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt. And, just that once, Apollo cried, “wept countless tears as he approached his sacred people, the Hyperboreans.” The tears were drops of amber, and they rolled down into the Eridanus, that river at once earthly and celestial where Phaethon had fallen. All around, the stench of his corpse lingered on. And tall black poplars rustled to mourn his passing. Those poplars were the daughters of the sun.

The destiny of death by burning runs through the stories of Apollo and Dionysus like a scar. Semele is burned to death, and she is Dionysus’s mother; Coronis and Asclepius are reduced to ashes, and they are Apollo’s lover and son. The divine fire devours those venturing outside the human sphere, whether they be betraying a god, bringing a man back to life, or seeing a god bereft of the cloaking veil of epiphany. Beyond the limit laid down for what is acceptable, burns the fire. Apollo and Dionysus are often to be found along the edges of that borderline, on the divine side and the human; they provoke that back-and-forth in men, that desire to go beyond oneself, which we seem to cling to even
more than to our humanity, even more than to life itself. And sometimes this dangerous game rebounds on the two gods who play it. Apollo hid his tears among the Hyperboreans while driving his swan-drawn chariot through the air. Likewise silhouetted against the sky, the enchanter Abaris, emissary of Apollo, would one day arrive in Greece from the North. Riding the immense arrow of ecstasy.

The lives of Theseus and Heracles were intertwined from beginning to end. On seeing Heracles in a lionskin, the infant Theseus had thrown an ax at him. Thinking he was a lion. The gesture suggests a secret hostility later to be submerged in admiration. When he was a youth, Theseus “would dream of Heracles’ deeds by night and burn with ambition to emulate him by day.” He never tired of hearing stories about the hero, “especially from those who had seen him and been present when he had done some deed or made a speech.” Apart from anything else, the two heroes were cousins. When he was old enough, Theseus left his home in Troezen and set off on his travels. From then on, and for years and years, Theseus and Heracles would perform similar exploits, sometimes doing exactly the same thing, as if in a competition. When the two heroes ran into each other, in foreign countries, they were like mercenaries who inevitably meet where blood is flowing. And if one day Heracles went down into the underworld to free Theseus, you would say it was no more than his duty as an old comrade in arms. Yet the distance between the two is immense. Their postures might seem similar, but in reality they were quite opposite, the way some archaic
koûroi
might seem similar to archaic Egyptian statues of the same period, while in fact a crucial divergence in internal time sets them apart: the Egyptian statues looked back to an irrecoverable past, which their rigidity strived hopelessly to regain; the Greek figures expressed tension the very moment before it relaxes, as if wishing to hold at bay for one last time the Alexandrian suppleness that was about to overwhelm them.

Heracles is obliged to follow the zodiac wheel of his labors to the very ends of the earth. As a hero he is too human, blinded like everybody else, albeit stronger and more able than everybody else. Catapulted into the heavens as a result of celestial exigencies, he is never to know what purpose his labors really served, and the pretext the events of his life offer him smacks of mockery. All on account of a spiteful king. Theseus operates between Argos and Epirus, sails to Crete and the Black Sea, but he does have a base: Athens. His deeds are those of an adventurer who responds to a sense of challenge, to whimsy, to curiosity, and to pleasure. And if the step that most determines a life is initiation, it will be Theseus who introduces Heracles to Eleusis, not vice versa, despite the fact that he is the younger and less well known among the the gods. On his own Heracles would never have been admitted, would have remained forever a stranger, a profane outsider. Why? The life of the hero, like the process of initiation, has different levels. On a first level Theseus and Heracles are similar: this is the moment at which someone finally emerges from the blazing circle of force. As Plutarch remarks with the dispatch of the great Greek writers: “It appears that at that time there were men who, for deftness of hand, speed of legs, and strength of muscles, transcended normal human nature and were tireless. They never used their physical capacities to do good or to help others, but reveled in their own brutal arrogance and enjoyed exploiting their strength to commit savage, ferocious deeds, conquering, ill-treating, and murdering whosoever fell into their hands. For them, respect, justice, fairness, and magnanimity were virtues prized only by such as lacked the courage to do harm and were afraid of suffering it themselves; for those who had the strength to impose themselves, such qualities could have no meaning.” It is Theseus and Heracles who first use force to a different end than that of merely crushing their opponents. They become “athletes on behalf of men.” And, rather than strength itself, what they care about is the art of applying it: “Theseus invented the art of wrestling, and later teaching of the sport took the
basic moves from him. Before Theseus, it was merely a question of height and brute force.”

This is only the first level of a hero’s life. It is the level at which he competes with other men. But there is a higher level, a much greater dimension to conquer, where even the combination of force and intelligence is not enough: this is the dimension where men meet and clash with gods. Once again we are in a kingdom where force is supreme, but this time it is divine force. If the hero is alone and can count on nothing but his own strength, he will never be able to enter this kingdom. He needs a woman’s help. And this is where the paths of Theseus and Heracles divide, forever. Women, for Heracles, are part of the fate he must suffer. He may rape them, as he does with Auge; he may impregnate fifty in a single night, as he does with Thespius’s daughters; he may become their slave, as with Omphale. But he is never able to appropriate their wisdom. He doesn’t even realize that it is they who possess the wisdom he lacks. Deep down, he harbors a grim suspicion of them, as if foreseeing how it will be a woman’s gift that will bring him to his death, and an excruciating death at that. Heracles is “the irreconcilable enemy of female sovereignty,” because he senses that he will never be able to grasp it for himself. When the Argonauts land on the island of Lemnos and, without realizing it, find themselves caught up with the women who have murdered their husbands, Heracles is the only one who stays on board ship.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of Theseus, who sets sail all on his own to go and find the Amazons. And immediately Theseus tricks their queen, Antiope. He invites her onto his ship, abducts her, has her fall in love with him, makes her his wife and the mother of his son, Hippolytus. What’s more, and this is what really marks Theseus out, in the end Antiope would “die a heroine’s death,” fighting beside Theseus to save Athens. And she was fighting against her own comrades, who had pitched camp beneath the Acropolis and were attacking Athens precisely to avenge her abduction. Theseus knows that woman is the repository of
the secret he lacks; hence he uses her to the utmost, until she has betrayed everything: her country, her people, her sex, her secret. Thus, when Heracles arrived in Eleusis, an unclean stranger, he was accepted only because Theseus “had vouched for him.” The saying “Nothing without Theseus,” which the Athenians were to repeat for centuries, alludes to this: apart from being a hero, Theseus also initiates heroes; without him the rough-and-ready hero could never achieve that initiatory completeness which is
teleíōsis, telet
.

Heracles is contaminated by the sacred, it persecutes him his whole life. It drives him mad, and in the end it destroys him. Theseus, in contrast, seems to wash the blood from his hands after every adventure, to shrug off the violence and the many deaths. Heracles becomes a pretext for the gods to play out a long game. Theseus dares to use the gods to play his own game. But it would be churlish to see him as someone who knows how to turn everything to his advantage. The hero who founded Athens was also to have the privilege of being the first to be expelled from it. “After Theseus had given the Athenians democracy, a certain Lycus denounced him and managed to have the hero ostracized.” In the end, even Theseus will be killed. He dies in exile, dashed to pieces at the foot of a cliff. Somebody pushed him from behind. “At the time, nobody paid any attention to the fact that Theseus was dead.” But his game is still played in the city Theseus himself named: Athens, the most sacred, the most blasphemous of cities.