The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

XI

(photo credit 11.1)

THE LONG CHAIN OF THOSE STORIES THAT predate history, and of which the Iliad and the Odyssey form a number of links, opened with the copulation of Uranus and Ge and closed with the death of Odysseus. The circle opened with the mingling of earth and sky and closed with a paltry brawl, a fatal accident, as, in a foreign land, the young Telegonus unknowingly kills his father, the old Odysseus, with the sting of a devilfish. After Odysseus, our life without heroes begins; stories are no longer exemplary but are repeated and recounted. What happens is mere history.

Partly because he is so near the boundary, so near the point where the circle closes, Odysseus is the hero who most often tells stories. The circle began with the majestic and suffocating obscurity of the world’s origins, commanding silence; it ends with this warrior disguised as a Phoenician merchant, who some suspected of being a Phoenician merchant disguised as a warrior. Odysseus invited irreverence, insinuation. Certainly he inspired less respect than any other hero. There were even rumors that he had been Homer’s lover. That was why, detractors said, the poet treated him so well, concealing many of his worst traits and even removing the figure of Palamedes from the Iliad, so as to leave no clue that might point us to his treacherous murder, set up by Odysseus. That was why he said that Odysseus had defeated the Sirens, whereas in fact — some sneeringly maintained — it was the Sirens who disdained this sailor, with his “squashed nose,” as being “past it, erotically speaking.” When, at the end of the Odyssey, Zeus has a temporary harmony descend upon Ithaca to wind up the poem, it does seem that the curtain is being hurriedly lowered before too many questions can be asked. But in the centuries after Homer, people would go on wondering about Odysseus, and question and answer would pass from mouth to mouth, as if in a long stubble fire.

It is part of the essence of Odysseus that he be the last of the heroes, the one who closes the cycle. Being the last, Odysseus is the closest to the life that will follow, a life never more to close in any cycle. His foot treads the boundary line. Thus it was not the Iliad, that erratic rock abandoned on the plain, that bequeathed us the multiform novel but the sinuous Odyssey: “a private not a public affair,” as Telemachus says of his search for his father. And yet, last among the heroes to return, Odysseus is also the one who right up to the end maintains his contact — and what an intimate contact it was — with the primordial powers who appeared in the first phases of the cycle. His wanderings were partly a compendium, a roll call, of all those beings and places that were already growing confused in many a memory, already being removed to the realm of the fabulous. With Odysseus they are present, powerful and whole for one last time, and in Odysseus they salute the last traveler able to see them with his own eyes and bear witness.

While Odysseus was still sailing laboriously back to his island, in the halls of the palace of Ithaca the bard Phemius was already celebrating the deeds of the warriors he had fought with beneath the walls of Troy. Almost everything was already words. Only one blank remained to be filled: the deeds of Odysseus himself, the buckle that would close the cycle. Odysseus, master of the word, was the last to have us believe that not all was words, for as long, that is, as his own sparkling haul of stories was still missing. After his return to Ithaca, after the Odyssey, man’s approach to primordial beings and places could only take place through literature.

Alone among the Achaean leaders, Odysseus keeps his eyes down. But not out of fear. While his gaze is lowered, Odysseus concentrates his mind, isolates it from all around in a way his companions are not used to doing, weaves a plot, gives shape to a mēchan. He is the opposite of the man who is continually caught between the forces, machines, and mēchanaí of nature and of the gods. To their invisible tangle, Odysseus adds new mēchanaí, ones that he has elaborated himself. Now he has the secret, he need not merely submit to it. Thus he adds to the confusion of elements at play, then takes advantage of that confusion to elude the various traps. The frontal approach of the hero holds no attraction for him. Odysseus takes one step back toward the tortuous mind of Kronos, to get the run-up he needs to leap beyond the heroes. When the heroes are dead, or obsolete, Odysseus will still be looking out to the sea he expects will be the death of him, still dreaming of setting sail again, perhaps toward that land where men know nothing of the sea.

Odysseus and Oedipus, the most intelligent of the heroes, killed and were killed by mistake. Odysseus was killed by his son Telegonus, who didn’t recognize him; Oedipus killed his father, Laius, without recognizing him. In both cases the deaths were the result of a pointless brawl: over who should go first at a crossroads, over a squabble between the Ithacan palace guards and a stranger. The lucidity of Odysseus and Oedipus releases a murky, murderous smoke round about them.

Socrates was not the first just man among the Greeks to be killed because he was just. During the Trojan War the same fate befell Palamedes, although he was not yet a just man but a wise one. Those ten years beneath the walls of Troy were only occasionally taken up in skirmishes and the dust and clash of conflict. More than fear, the warriors’ most constant companion was boredom. Having set up their huts on a dull Asiatic plain, they watched the horizon. There were no women, and even passions between men could grow wearisome. As year followed year, they had just one precious resort: a man like themselves, a warrior, Palamedes, had taught them how to play with dice, checkers, astragals. Staring at those small rolling objects, at their checkered boards, they managed to forget time. It was said that Palamedes invented other things too: some of the letters of the alphabet, the length of the months, beacons. But for the common soldier he was the inventor of the game, of a motionless, endless spell. Apart from which, Palamedes was a prince like any other. His only distinguishing feature was that he didn’t have a beard. And yet there was someone powerful who hated him: Odysseus.

One day, in Ithaca, when he was pretending to be crazy so as not to go to Troy, Odysseus saw Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Palamedes heading toward him across the fields. He went on plowing. He tossed handfuls of salt in the furrows, and he had yoked together an ox and an ass. He tossed the sea, which knows no harvest, into the hollow of the fertile earth; he who one day, after seeing the whole world, would take his salty skin to a place where people knew nothing of the sea. But it was too early for Odysseus to appreciate that he was representing his own life in this gesture. On his head, to add insolence to pretense, he wore a pointed hat, the kind Cabirian initiates wore. Only another initiate would be able to understand his game. Palamedes watched him. Then, quite suddenly, he snatched the baby Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and threw him down on the ground in front of the plow. At which Odysseus stopped. He was beaten. Palamedes had forced him up against the limits of simulation. There was nothing Odysseus loathed more, even if he knew that this wasn’t quite how it was, for simulation must know no limits for him. That was his secret, that was what separated him from the vigorous simplemindedness of all the Ajaxes. Simulation meant gliding down from high above, commanding everything with one’s eye, without ever being commanded by another eye even higher up. Palamedes was that other eye.

Odysseus said nothing and followed him. Locked away in his heart, he nursed a hatred no enemy would ever rouse. They were to fight side by side for years. Compared with Odysseus, Palamedes was “mentally quicker, but not so good at helping himself.” His inventions enchanted the soldiers but didn’t achieve anything. They obeyed the power of abstraction and at the same time mimicked the course of nature. Palamedes knew that. He dedicated the dice he had invented to Tyche, in her sanctuary in Argos. Tyche was not a popular divinity at the time. But one day everybody would recognize her as the image that most closely resembles nature. When life strips off all her finery, what remains is fortune. Everything that happens is a constant collision of tossed dice. One day this image became fixed in people’s minds, never to be replaced. But Palamedes was the only one of those beneath the walls of Troy who saw this truth in all its starkness. That was why Odysseus hated him, that was why he felt that this man was too close to himself for comfort. His own intelligence needed solitude and distance from others. He could not accept a complicity he hadn’t sought.

When the Achaeans needed to find Achilles to take him to Troy, Odysseus immediately thought of the trick Palamedes had used to unmask him. He went to Scyros disguised as a merchant and got himself taken to the women’s quarters. He had brought a crate of precious goods, and now he laid them out on the floor. Immediately, girlish hands were fingering the fabrics, searching among the jewelry. But there was a shield and spear in the heap too. And a redhead grabbed them at once, as if she’d spent her whole life slinging such things over her shoulder. It was Achilles. Odysseus knew then that he had won the war, using Palamedes’ trick. With Achilles on their side, Troy had already fallen. Now all he had to do was take his revenge on Palamedes.

He mulled over it for years. And in the end he chose the trick that was at once the most cowardly, the most sure to work, and the most philosophical. In unmasking Odysseus’s fake madness, Palamedes had demonstrated the existence of a truth behind the simulation. A truth of gesture. Odysseus responded by demonstrating the opposite: that the truest of gestures could be judged a perfect pretense. He took a Trojan prisoner and gave him a forged letter, ostensibly from Priam, to take to Palamedes. The letter spoke of gold in return for an understanding between them. Then he killed the Trojan prisoner and contrived to have the letter discovered as if by chance. In the meantime he had hidden some gold under Palamedes’ bed. When the letter was discovered and Palamedes declared himself innocent, Odysseus suggested people look under his bed. Upon which Palamedes was unanimously condemned by his companions, and they stoned him. Every one of the dice players threw a stone at him, and likewise the Achaean leaders, and Odysseus, and Agamemnon. The only thing Palamedes said before dying was that he mourned the passing of the truth, which had died before him. Those words were his answer to Odysseus. Palamedes’ enemy had shown that a total agreement between the world and the mind could be falseness itself. All had been sincerely indignant in their condemnation of Palamedes. All had seen the gold under his bed. The lie was more consistent than the truth. Odysseus could feel alone again at last, in the rapturous gliding of his intelligence.

The ranks of the dead appeared to Odysseus in Hades as a throng of women. Their queen, Persephone, spurred them on. But how did she spur them on? What goad did she use to rouse them from their cold thickets, to assemble them before the black blood and before that man with the sword hanging from his powerful thigh? Those women had been the daughters and bedmates of the heroes. Some of them, of gods. They all wanted to drink the blood and talk at the same time. That throng of women is memory in its natural state: all alike, all particles of the same cloud. The mind is terrified by this cloud, which is always with it. And the strength of the mind lies in the cleverness with which it manages to separate those particles from one another and then question them one by one.

Odysseus drew his sword and threatened them. The women got into line. One by one they drank the blood and spoke. Odysseus wanted to hear them all. He was hearing knowledge in its primordial form: genealogy. One spoke of the “amorous works” of Poseidon: she had been bathing in the river when a wave rose above her high as a mountain. Another spoke of a hanging. Another of precious gifts accepted in return for betrayal. Another of a hunt for some elusive cows. And, as Odysseus listened, the intricate cobweb of descendances settled over his mind: the Deucalionides, the Inachides, the Asopides, the Atlantides, the Pelasgides. Not all the threads came together again in that web. Some became superimposed over each other, knotted together; others made fragile shapes that turned in on themselves, others trailed in the darkness, abandoned.

The age of Odysseus, the hybrid age of the heroes, was all there in the intersecting of those names, those births, those deeds. If he could have listened for time without end to all those women’s voices, one after another, he would have known what no man knew: the course of history, the history of an age that would die out with his death. But soon, or perhaps after a very long time, Persephone dispersed her throng of women in a squeaking of bats.

After the age of the heroes, the Greeks measured time by the succession of priestesses in the sanctuary of Hera in Argos. During the age of the heroes the passing of time took its rhythm from the succession of divine rapes. The anonymous author of the Catalogue of Women lists sixteen for the house of the Deucalionides alone, and eight for the Inachides. Whereas among the Pelasgides they were rare. In those races where divine rape was frequent, so was contact, exchange, and interbreeding with remote and fabulous lands. It was among these peoples that sea routes were opened, kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties migrated. In those races where divine rape was rare, events remained circumscribed and trapped, as the Pelasgides were trapped in the mountains of Arcadia.

hoíē: “Or like she who …”: such was the recurrent formula in the Catalogue of Women, for centuries attributed to Hesiod, and then lost. Thus, time after time, the story of another woman in the catalogue would begin. Thus was each new link in the chain of generations opened, as though, for the Greeks, the only form in which the heroic past, from beginning to end, might be recorded was not that of a genealogy of kings but this linking together of scores of girls and their stories in monotonous and stupefying succession. In the end, the Iliad and the Odyssey recounted only a few days and a few years of the story, the last throes of the heroic age. While the age as a whole could only be told as a sequence of women’s tales, as though turning page after page of a family album. For those learned genealogists whose supreme ambition it was to map out the tree of time through all its branches, the only frame that could contain the age of the heroes was there in those two words: hoíē …, “Or like she who …”

Unlike the peoples of the ages that preceded them — the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age — the heroes had no metal upon which to model themselves and their world. Their physiological composition was hybrid but impalpable, because half of their being was made up of the substance of the gods. And their appearance marks a break in the order of descendances, which until now had merely degenerated from one metal to the next.

Quite suddenly, when the people of the bronze age, a race of muscled armed warriors, went under the earth again, leaving only silence behind, having killed one another off without the name or glory of even one of them surviving — quite suddenly, Zeus had the fanciful idea of breaking the chain of peoples for a while and so allowed the gods to follow what was first and foremost his own example and couple with the daughters of men. It was a brief and dangerous attraction, out of which history was born. It was the age of the heroes. Only then did Names emerge that would outlive the race that bore them. Until one day, when Helen had just given birth to Hermione in Sparta, and with the other gods quarreling furiously round about him, Zeus began to think. And what he thought was that this breed must die out like the others. The time had come. The heroes, this parenthesis in the affairs of the world and the succession of metals, must be wiped out. The age of black iron was approaching, age of a people who would live in the memory of the heroes. Zeus thought, and round about him none of the rest of the Twelve realized what was happening. They had become so used to the heroes, so involved with them, they thought they would go on forever, as if it were quite normal for the Olympians to have these charming mobile toys down on earth, toys they quarreled over every day now.

The climate began to change. Camped in Aulis, the Greeks were astonished by unseasonal storms, endless, unremitting gales that prevented them from sailing. Like the gods, they didn’t realize that these unusual storms marked the beginning of the end for their age. There were only a few years left now, just long enough to kill off all those who were setting out to fight on the plains of Troy. The events of those years would be told in detail as none had ever been told before, as if a huge lens had come down from the sky to magnify every tiny gesture. If time speeded up toward the end, the focus certainly broadened: in that last generation of the heroes, even the names of those who lived in the shadow of glory, the names of the cupbearers, the helmsmen, the serving maids, would be etched in the air for the first time.

Why did Zeus decide to wipe out the heroes? A thousand tribes trod the soil and, “seeing this, Zeus felt pity in the depths of his thoughts.” So says the poet of the Kypria. But why did Zeus, who wasn’t easily stirred to pity, feel concerned for the vast body of the earth, on which, when seen from on high, the race of heroes, however numerous, couldn’t have looked very different from all the other clinging parasites?

The crime of the heroes, perhaps, lay not so much in their treading the earth but in their detaching themselves from it. The heroes were the first to look at the earth before them as an object. And seeing it as an object, they struck out at it. Their model was Apollo, who loosed his arrows at Python’s scales, mottled as the slopes of Delphi were mottled with shrubs. He who strikes the snake strikes the earth on which it slithers and the water that springs from the earth. Now the heroes were imitating Apollo, and Apollo had imitated Zeus. Imitation is the most dangerous of activities for world order, because it tends to break down boundaries. Just as Plato wanted to banish the poets, whom he loved, from the city, Zeus wanted to see the heroes, whom he loved, wiped off the face of the earth. They had to go, before they began to tread that earth with the same heedlessness with which the Olympians had trodden it before them.

But Zeus didn’t just want the heroes dead: “he forced the land of the Greeks and the hapless Phrygians to go to war so that Mother Earth might be lightened of the mass of mortals and so that the strongest of the Greeks might be made famous.” Here Zeus’s plan seems appalling. The extermination of a whole race turns out to be a necessary step in exalting the glory of a single person, Achilles — and this in a world that had still to discover what glory was, in the sense of a power that goes beyond the race. To bestow glory on a hero means to bestow it on all the heroes. It means to evoke glory itself, something unknown to the peoples of the golden, silver, and bronze ages. Glory is a pact with time. Thanks to the death of the heroes, men would win themselves a bond with time. The most arduous of bonds and metaphysically superior to all others. Zeus wanted the death of the heroes to be a new death. What had death meant until now? Being covered once again by the earth. But, with the heroes, death coincided with the evocation of glory. Glory was something you could breathe now. The men of the iron age would not be composed in body and mind as the heroes had been, but they moved in an air that was drenched with glory, as their predecessors had lived among the “mist-clad” daímones, the thirty thousand invisible “guardians of men” into whom the beings of the golden age had been transformed.

How did the heroes explain this plan of Zeus that condemned them to extinction? They didn’t explain it, they submitted to it. But there were two people living among them who dared to posit the motives behind that plan: Helen and Alcinous. Just a few words, almost the same in each case. Speaking to Hector and having twice referred to herself as a “slut,” Helen concludes: “Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us so that in the future we might be sung of by the bards.” Alcinous, king of an intermediate realm, of a race of ferrymen who go back and forth more through time than on the water, catches Odysseus trying to hide his tears on hearing the story of the sack of Troy and says: “This is the work of the gods: they brought about the ruin of men so that others might have song in the future.” Alcinous, like his people, loves parties, seafaring, and song. He loves “frequent changes of clothes, warm baths and beds.” Nothing else. And his near-perfect, marginal world is at a good safe distance from all the others. Helen is the opposite: the center of the exterminating storm that swirls around her body. But does her body exist in the same way other bodies do? And what is going on in Helen’s mind, that mind that nobody pays any attention to?

The immense scandal of Homer lies first and foremost in his allowing Helen to survive the fall of Troy. Telemachus reached Sparta to find Helen sitting beside Menelaus on an inlaid seat, her feet resting on a stool. She had a golden spindle in her hand and looked like Artemis. Many years before, another guest — Paris — had found her in the same pose. The only difference seemed to be this: that now there were stories to tell, stories that demanded to be told. Even before Helen came into the room, Menelaus had begun to talk to the two strangers about the long and tortuous return from Troy.

Helen had barely sat down, and already she was looking straight at Telemachus. She recognized him immediately: he must be Odysseus’s son. A few moments later they were all crying, Helen included. They had been seized, all at the same time, by “the desire to sob.” Each of them had his or her dead to mourn. And all those dead belonged to the same story, which had begun in that very room, when another stranger and guest had been shown hospitality and Paris had looked at Helen. The first to dry his tears was the young Peisistratus, offspring of the happy stock of Nestor, who was traveling with Telemachus. He hadn’t been at Troy, but he had lost a beloved brother there. With the mollifying good nature typical of his family, he suggested that they postpone their tears till the following morning. Menelaus approved. And they went back to enjoying their party.

But let us leave the men for a moment and look into the mind of Helen, the most inscrutable of them all. A thought crossed that mind. She picked up a bowl for mixing wine and poured in a drug. It was opium, dried lymph of poppies grown from an earth rich with enchantments. Queen Polydamna had given it to her when she was in Egypt. Helen knew that the drug would prevent a person from crying for a whole day, even if “he were to see a brother or beloved son put to the sword before his very eyes.” She waited for the men to drink the drugged wine. Then she invited them to abandon themselves to “the pleasure of talk” (mýthois térpesthe). And she decided to start the ball rolling herself. With something “suitable,” she added. Odysseus, said Helen, loved to dress up as a beggar. And on one occasion he tried the trick on the streets of Troy. No one recognized him, except Helen. They had an argument because Odysseus didn’t trust her. Then he decided to follow her. Helen washed Odysseus, dressed him again, and assured him he could count on her loyalty as a traitor. Upon which, Odysseus drew out a long blade and set about massacring Trojans. Later, when she heard the women mourning over the bleeding bodies, Helen exulted. Aphrodite’s átē, that infatuation which had dominated her life, seemed to have subsided. “Her heart turned and longed for home.”

That night, Odysseus managed to get hold of the Palladium in the temple of Athena. Helen knew, being herself a phantom, an idol, that the life of a city resides in an image and that, when the image deserts it, the city is lost. Helen had told the story to celebrate one of the many deeds of their young guest’s father. Menelaus gave her a happy, misty look. He approved of the story, he told her, and called her “dear,” as if they were having an evening together after a day’s hunting and everybody were waiting his or her turn to recount some highlight of the day’s doings.

But if it was stories about Odysseus they wanted, there were plenty of others. For example, Menelaus said, what the hero did the night Troy was sacked. When the Phaeacian court bard, Demodocus, evoked that night in verse, Odysseus hadn’t been able to hold back his tears. And for Demodocus it was mere literature and recent history. But now Menelaus wanted to tell the story of that night, a story both he and Helen had been personally involved in. He told it so as to recall, before the hero’s son, the great deeds of a lost friend.

The heroes were all crouched down in the smooth belly of the horse. Throughout the day, in the stale dark, with only a breath of air filtering down from an opening in the beast’s mouth, they had heard a constant din of voices. The horse had been drawn right up to the walls of Troy, like a big toy on wheels. Then, heaving away, they had pulled it as far as the Acropolis. And meanwhile the argument went on and on. Some were for disemboweling it, some for burning it, some for guarding it as a sacred statue. Seen from the outside, the horse inspired feelings of “terror and beauty.” Its mane was golden, its eyes flamed with beryl and amethyst. The Trojans wreathed the animal’s neck with garlands of fresh flowers. On the ground before it they had laid a carpet of roses. Children screamed and shouted round about.

All of a sudden Cassandra’s shrill voice rose above the others. She spoke of Athena, scourge of cities, and said the goddess had prepared this trick. She saw blood. She told the truth. But then they heard old Priam’s voice, and he spoke of dances, of honey, of freedom. And he told his daughter to go away. Night fell, and hidden in the horse the warriors no longer heard the sound of voices arguing. Instead there was the hubbub of a party. Then the hubbub faded. The party was coming to an end. Shuffling footsteps, voices growing fainter. It was then that Helen arrived, escorted by Deiphobus, her new husband.

She stopped in front of the horse. Complete silence now. She went around it, slowly. Then, with her hand, she began to touch that belly packed with warriors. And all of a sudden, as Helen’s hand slid over the wooden planks, knocking softly as though at a lover’s door, they heard her voice. She was calling names. She called Menelaus, Diomedes, Odysseus, Anticlus. For each name she found a different voice. In the darkness, careful not to bang their shin guards together, some of the heroes began to get excited. There was a chorus of suffocated groans. It was the least appropriate time and place for nostalgia and desire. Yet Menelaus and Diomedes were on the point of getting to their feet. Anticlus couldn’t help himself and opened his mouth to answer Helen’s voice. But Odysseus stopped his mouth and tightened strong hands around his neck. Helen’s voice went on calling names as Anticlus slowly expired, strangled. There was a last convulsion; then, moving carefully, the other heroes laid him down on the wood and stretched a blanket over him.

Menelaus fell silent, still absorbed in the pleasure of telling the story. Telemachus looked at him and said a few sober words. Yes, it was true, his father, Odysseus, had “a heart of iron.” Yet he too had come to a wretched end, heaven knew where. It was time to go to bed, he said. They deserved “to enjoy their sweet sleep.” Helen had already told the servants to prepare beds for the guests in the porch. Then she went off in her long tunic toward the rooms deep inside the house where Menelaus would lie down beside her.

Menelaus didn’t tell Telemachus how that night in Troy had ended. When Helen had gone, the Acropolis was shrouded in a silence unbroken even by a dog’s bark. The heroes got ready to swarm to the ground, “like bees from the trunk of an oak.” Then the voiceless slaughter began in the Trojan bedrooms. Menelaus and Odysseus didn’t even watch their backs. They rushed into Deiphobus’s house. They found him on his bed, still warm from Helen’s embrace. Menelaus was determined to perform a systematic mutilation on the man. He hacked off his hands and ears, split his temples, and cut his head in two along the line of the nose. Then he went deeper into the huge house. And at the back of the last room he found Helen. He advanced without a word, his sword, bespattered with blood and gore, pointing at her belly. Helen looked at him and bared her breast. Menelaus let his sword drop.

According to Stesichorus and Euripides, Helen was a phantom. According to Homer, Helen was the phantom, eídōlon. The Homeric vision is by far the more thorny and frightening. Dealing with a phantom while knowing that there is a reality to counter it doesn’t involve the same kind of tension as dealing with a phantom and knowing that it is also a reality. Helen is as gold to other merchandise: gold too is merchandise, but of such a kind that it can represent all the others. The phantom, or image, is precisely that act of representation. While Troy burned, Menelaus found himself confronted by Helen’s bared breast. He could have smothered it in blood, repeated what he had just done to Deiphobus. But how can one kill gold? Helen would have gone on breathing in some niche of her murderer’s mind, and likewise in the minds of all the other warriors who had wanted to respond to the lure of her voice when they were shut up in the horse’s belly. Helen was a reflection on water. How can you kill a reflection without killing the water? And how can you kill water? Menelaus didn’t actually think any of this as he let his sword drop, but it was this that made him drop it.

Meanwhile, he was thinking of something completely different. He was thinking of Agamemnon. He was afraid his brother would take him for a coward or a weakling once again. So he decided to get smart, the way the others had. He gripped Helen’s wrist and dragged her along as though to the slaughter. And at last Agamemnon turned up. Menelaus had to pretend to have his brother convince him not to kill Helen. Agamemnon unwittingly played the part he was supposed to. Words that had once been Priam’s sprang to his lips: “Helen isn’t the cause of this.” Menelaus wasted no time agreeing. Now there was one last problem: the army of warriors. Once again, Menelaus decided he would have to present himself in the role of the avenging husband. He approached the Achaean camp holding Helen tightly by the wrist, his face grim. The crowd parted before them. They all had stones in their hands. They had chosen them carefully to stone Helen. Menelaus pressed on, dragging his faithless wife, and, as the warriors formed a semicircle around them, he heard the dull thud of stones falling thick and fast to the ground, already forgotten.

In the deep calm of the opium, Menelaus managed to recall, without so much as a quiver of resentment, how Helen had tried to the very last to bring ruin upon the Greeks. It was thanks to her that Anticlus had been strangled. But if Odysseus hadn’t strangled him, if one of the heroes had answered her alluring voice, they might all have been burned alive in the belly of the horse. Or the Trojans would have thought up some other horrible death for them. Yet Menelaus recounted the episode, in front of Helen and their guests, as though it were an image of glory, to be savored with pleasure.

Twenty years later, Menelaus had understood a thing or two about the woman beside him. He no longer thought of punishing her, as he had for so many years and so obsessively fantasized. He was happy to have understood of her what amounted to no more than the hem of her tunic. And this, among other things, was what he had understood: that for Greeks and Trojans alike Helen had posed the danger of the phantom, the image. Living with the phantom is ruinous, but neither of the two sides had wanted to live without. It was over the phantom they had fought. And now the phantom went on threatening and enchanting life in Greece.

The night Troy was put to the torch, Helen had pushed the danger for both Greeks and Trojans to the limit, for this was of her essence. She insinuated her voice into the seething dark of the horse, shaking the soul of the Achaean warriors. Then, just a few moments later, while dancing on the Acropolis with the other Trojan women, she waved the torch that was to signal to the other Achaeans waiting on their ships that it was time to attack. Two incompatible actions, one right after the other. Helen performed them both with the same serenity. Those two actions were Helen. Never as on that night did Helen reveal herself so completely, a great, intoxicating moon radiating its light impartially on all.

What is the evil of exile? “One and terrible,” claims Polynices: “not having freedom of speech [parrēsía].” And his mother, Iocasta, adds: “Not to say what one thinks is the way of the servant.” Frankness, that first feature of the aristocratic ethic, becomes secularized with democracy into freedom of speech. Odysseus steered clear of both. He renounced the frankness of the warrior when he pretended to be crazy so as not to sail for Troy; he renounced freedom of speech when he played the part of the wandering beggar who could be told to shut up and sent packing by the merest servant.

Odysseus was the first to have mediation triumph over the immediate, postponement over presence, the twisted mind over straightforwardness. All the character traits that would be assigned over the centuries to the merchant, the foreigner, the Jew, the traveling player were coined by Odysseus in himself. He looked ahead to a human condition in which neither aristocratic frankness nor democratic freedom of speech would be enough. Many centuries later, that condition seems normal, but in Odysseus’s time it was a foresight granted only to one who had traveled a great deal between earth and heaven. So, whereas Achilles and Agamemnon stand out in our memories as leftovers of another creation, consumed by catastrophe, Odysseus is still familiar to us, a sort of invisible companion. The presence he renounced in its immediacy is redeemed in the stream of memory and history. Achilles has to be evoked; Odysseus is already at our side, wherever we are, whatever the circumstances.

Throughout Odysseus’s life, and above all during the long years of the voyage back from Troy, there was a constant whispered exchange between himself and Athena. Nothing happened to the hero without that whisper being part of it. Only once did it peter out altogether. Then Odysseus had to find his way back to another female voice, even more remote, a voice beyond which all voices fall silent. He was clutching the raft he’d built with his own hands on Calypso’s island. Huge waves battered the mast. Naked, clinging to a few planks of wood, he might have been the first or last man on the waters of the flood. He couldn’t hear Athena’s voice. Then, looking up amid the whirling foam, he saw a white sea gull on the top of the mast, and in its beak it held a purple ribbon.

That ribbon, incongruous in the storm, reminded him of something. It was absurd trying to remember what, when at any moment a wave might submerge his raft forever. But Odysseus was determined he would remember. One day, in Samothrace, when he had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, some nameless person had come up to him and tied a purple sash around his waist, the krdemnon. And that sash now seemed to be fluttering in the sea gull’s beak. Odysseus realized that only a veil lay between him and death, and that veil was initiation. When everything is reduced to its most basic and is about to be swallowed up, there is still a ribbon fluttering in the dark.

Instead of protecting himself from the waves, Odysseus exposed himself by reaching out an arm to take the purple ribbon from the sea gull’s beak. Then he tied it around his waist. He repeated the ritual of Samothrace, but this time the nameless person’s hands were his own. For years that purple ribbon that saved Odysseus from shipwreck had been tied around the hair of Leucothea, the White Goddess. And before becoming the goddess who rises from the watery depths to rescue sailors, Leucothea had been a poor mad woman who drowned herself, throwing herself into the sea from a cliff, her infant child in her arms. At the time her name was Ino; she was one of the four daughters of Cadmus and wife of King Athamas. During her mother Harmony’s lifetime, and perhaps partly because Harmony “knew of many crimes committed in the past by barbarians and Greeks,” the most heterogeneous and remote elements had agreed to submit to the same yoke. Afterward, during the lifetime of her daughters, every unity was torn apart and dismembered, as if the gods had wanted to have everybody appreciate, and fast, that the harmonious yoke that binds disparate elements is the most precarious form of all.

Ino was the last of Cadmus’s daughters to go crazy and kill. She had seen her mother reduced to ashes, had seen Agave cut her son Pentheus to pieces, had seen Autonoë pick up the remains of the stag that had been her son Actaeon, torn apart by Artemis’s dogs. All these horrors had been reflected in Ino’s eyes before being repeated one last time with herself when she plunged the little Melicertes into a caldron of boiling water, while her other son, Learchus, was run through by his father, Athamas. Yet this princess who committed suicide was saved, and became herself a savior. Why? She had shown kindness to the orphaned Dionysus; she had disguised him as a little girl in her palace; she had given him her white breast just as she did to her own son Melicertes; she had hidden him in a dark room wrapped in a purple veil while Mystis the serving maid gave him his first taste of the sound of the cymbals and tambourines and offered him his mystical objects as toys. But it wasn’t only Dionysus who remembered Ino. Aphrodite remembered her too. “Spuma fui,” “I was foam myself,” the goddess said to Poseidon, encouraging him to accept Ino among the divinities of the sea. That foam was the ribbon in Leucothea’s hair; it was the veil around the hips of the initiates in Samothrace; it was the slow upward spreading of the light as the hidden is made plain in the dawn; it was the whiteness of appearance itself and the sovereign purple of blood; it was the only veil that is laid over the shipwreck.

The veil, or something that encloses, that wraps around, or belts on, a ribbon, a sash, a band, is the last object we meet in Greece. Beyond the veil, there is no other thing. The veil is the other. It tells us that the existing world, alone, cannot hold, that at the very least it needs to be continually covered and discovered, to appear and to disappear. That which is accomplished, be it initiation, or marriage, or sacrifice, requires a veil, precisely because that which is accomplished is perfect, and the perfect stands for everything, and everything includes the veil, that surplus which is the fragrance of things.

No one was ever lonelier than Calypso. From the mouth of her cave she watched the violet waves, knowing that none of the other gods was interested in her. Behind her she heard the whirlpool bubbling deep underground, throwing water up to the surface in four directions. Divine hostess, time denied her any guests. But why was the sea around her so empty, why didn’t the smoke of sacrifices rise to her from the lands of the earth? Calypso’s distance from the world wasn’t only to be measured across the huge expanse of the waters but first and foremost across time. Like her father, Atlas, “who knows all the depths of the sea” and watches over the great columns that separate earth and sky, Calypso lived at a point of cosmic intersection: Ogygia was a primordial island, not to be confused with any other, just as the water of the Styx, which dissolved any and every material and frightened even the Olympians, was not to be confused with any other water. But no one paid any attention to these places. They were orphans of a lost era, of the usurped realm of Kronos. These days the gods sat on a mountain and sparkled in the light.

Calypso means “She Who Conceals Things.” Concealment was her passion, cloaking something in a veil, like the veils she sometimes wore around her head. But she was given nothing to conceal, apart from the constant mingling of the heavenly and earthly waters beneath her cave, a dull roar she could perfectly well distinguish from that of the sea before her. As a little girl she had played on flowery meadows with Persephone and other Nymphs. Now the only beings she ever saw were the two maids who served her and the birds perched on the dark trees around her cave. Toward Calypso, Odysseus felt the same attraction Gilgamesh had felt for the barmaid Siduri, for the woman who pours drinks behind a counter and talks, listens. What did that attraction conceal? Odysseus knew what would later be forgotten: it concealed the woman who welcomes us at the entrance to the kingdom of the dead.

In that world between worlds, suspended, the only place one might delude oneself, one was beyond life and beyond death, one drinks and plays dice. The conversation with the woman who pours the drinks goes on and on through an endless night, unthreatened by any dawn on the window-panes. After Odysseus, men would forget: but they still felt an obscure attraction to hostesses, barmaids, as if every counter where drinks are poured were the threshold to another world.

Odysseus spent seven years with Calypso, long enough for many of his subjects to decide to consider him lost. They were years when time sucked him backward into a fabulous prison that was also a floating sepulcher. If he looked at the ground he saw violets and lovage, plants usually strewn about the dead. If he raised his eyes he saw alders, cypresses, black poplars, willows: the trees of the dead. And everything had a primordial beauty that left even the gods amazed. Talking to Achilles in Hades, Odysseus had come up against the horror of death. Now, all around him, he found another death, one that presented itself in the uncertain guise of a better life but was in fact a static wallowing in time. For Odysseus knew that there was no better life. Like the Elysian Fields and the garden of the Hesperides, Ogygia was a place to acquire knowledge but not a place where you could live. Day after day, crouching on the beach, Odysseus told Calypso about the Trojan War. With a stick, he drew the positions of the camps and the armies in the sand. Every time he spoke, he changed the story or the way he told it. Calypso sat next to him, silent, concentrating. Then a wave bigger than the others would erase the lines in the sand. Once Calypso said to him: “You see, that’s what the sea does. And you want to trust your life to the sea?” After that Odysseus didn’t go to the beach with her anymore. Now he sat alone, on a rock, the most exposed rock of all, and wept. At sundown he returned to the cave as if after a day’s work. And every evening it was the same. Sitting on his golden stool, Odysseus would reach across the table for his human food. It had been placed next to the ambrosia and red nectar Calypso ate as she sat opposite, watching him. Every evening for seven years Calypso hoped Odysseus would try her food. Then he would become immortal, ageless, a semigod lost at the boundaries of the world. But Odysseus never touched it. Later they would twine their bodies together in the bed at the back of the cave, and on those nights Calypso would feel she was truly alive, because she was concealing Odysseus between her big body and the bedclothes. The rest of the time she was oppressed by melancholy and doubt, as if her life were no more real than the names of the warriors Odysseus spoke of, names that had now become familiar, impalpable presences for her.

When Calypso told him she was going to let him leave, Odysseus suspected her words might conceal some other trick to trap him there, “some other evil.” They were enemies fighting it out to the last with their respective weapons, in silence and without witnesses. Feeling a stab of tenderness, Calypso called Odysseus alitrós, “rascal,” and “she caressed him with her hand.” Odysseus would never hear another woman use a word at once so intimate and so accurate.

A cousin of Helen, Penelope was given as a bride to the swift, sturdy suitor who had raced faster than all the others, Odysseus. Her father, Icarius, wasn’t happy with the marriage. He followed the couple and stopped them when they were already some distance from Sparta. But Penelope stood her ground. She was a stubborn duck.

Years later, when Odysseus was still fighting beneath the walls of Troy, somebody arrived claiming he was dead. Penelope in desperation threw herself into the sea, but a flock of ducks followed her beneath the water and pulled her up, gripping her sodden clothes in their beaks.

Pan, the wildest and most bestial of the gods, Pan the masturbator, the terrorizer, chose as his mother the woman who for centuries people would point to as an example of chastity and faithfulness: Penelope. There are two versions of the story of Pan’s birth. Some claimed that when Odysseus got back to Ithaca he found “his house infested from top to bottom by lecherous thieves of women.” In the middle of them was Penelope, “the Bassarid, the whorish fox, who majestically keeps her brothel and empties all the rooms of their riches, pouring away the wretched man’s wealth in her banquets.” The wretched man was her husband, Odysseus. So the hero threw her out. She’d have to go back to the father she had once been happy to leave, clinging to her spouse. Thus it was that Penelope saw the Spartan plain again and the mountains that encircled it. On the highlands of Mantinea she made love with Hermes. And, after giving birth to Pan, she died. Pan has run about playing his pipes on the crags of Arcadia ever since.

Others said that, when Odysseus got back to Ithaca, Penelope had already let all one hundred and eight suitors have their way with her. And they were the fathers of Pan. Odysseus’s footsteps echoed in the desolate corridors of the palace, as the suitors lay drenched in blood and Penelope slept on. He opened the door to a room he didn’t remember being there. It was completely empty. In the darkness a child with a sly look on his face was watching him. Two delicate horns sprouted from his curls, and his feet were like a goat’s. Two shiny hooves poked out from the hare’s pelt the baby Pan was wrapped in. Odysseus immediately closed the door. Without saying a word, he went down to the harbor and once again set sail from Ithaca. He didn’t know where to, and this time he was alone.

The suitors’ bodies made a carpet of flesh, blood, gore, and dust. Outside the palace hall, in the courtyard, the twelve unfaithful serving maids swung in the wind, hanged. Everything else was still, save for the jaws of the dogs fighting over Melanthius’s testicles and penis.

Penelope slept on. Her sleep this morning was the sweetest she’d had in twenty years. She sank into irresponsible pleasure, let a weight force itself down on her eyelids, while from behind the door and through the thick walls came the thud of falling bodies and the high-pitched twang of the bow. When Eurycleia woke her, saying that Odysseus had come back and killed the suitors, Penelope was scornful of the old woman’s excitement and dishevelment. For Penelope immediacy was an evil. All her life had been a shrewd avoidance of immediacy. And just as her husband, Odysseus, used to lower his eyes so he could think, his face hidden from all around him, so Penelope, on coming down the big stairway, would lift her tunic up over her cheeks so as to give nothing away in her expression. But now she must go down there again, to greet — they said — the newly returned Odysseus.

The hall was empty and smelled of sulfur. The men had been using sulfur and fire to try to hide the stench of slaughtered flesh. Penelope and Odysseus found themselves sitting down face to face in the glow of the fire. Once again Odysseus lowered his eyes. Penelope’s gaze ran over him feature by feature. In that moment of mute tension they were at once close and hostile as never before. They were two “hearts of iron,” two beings walled up behind the defenses of the mind, occasionally using the weapons of strength and beauty but then immediately withdrawing to their invisible fortresses. Long used to the solitary life, they were reluctant to recognize someone with whom to share their own monologues. Penelope is described as períphrōn, echéphrōn; Odysseus as polýmētis—all words that suggest the supremacy of mind: as artificer of a shrewd control, in Penelope’s case, of constant and complex invention in Odysseus’s. More than the complicity of the flesh, they shared the complicity of intelligence. But intelligence is isolated and distrustful; thus, before recognizing each other, they clashed.

Their son Telemachus couldn’t understand this. He was angry with his mother for being so cold. Penelope answered that she would only feel able to recognize Odysseus if he gave her one of the “signs that only they knew about.” Upon which, a small smile crossed Odysseus’s face. Yes, Penelope too wanted to “put him to the test.” That, in the end, was the one constant in his life. Even Athena, the goddess who protected him, had allowed the suitors to insult him so that “sorrow might bite even deeper into the heart of Odysseus, son of Laertes.” And right to the end, when the battle with the suitors had already begun and in the form of a swallow the goddess was perched on a beam to watch the massacre, even then she had chosen to “put his strength and courage to the test.” One after another, favors and desertions formed an unending series of ups and downs in his life, the only link between the two being Odysseus’s capacity to endure both good fortune and bad. Every good and bad fortune is a test: the sovereignty of the mind lies in recognizing them, in dealing with them as such, in getting through them with the secretly indifferent curiosity of the traveler.

Odysseus rose from his seat and began to give out orders. It was as though the clock had been turned back twenty years. Still Penelope said nothing. Odysseus had his servants wash him and rub him with oil. Athena appeared to him again, “pouring down grace on his head and chest.” And now Penelope recognized him. But, before letting her knees go weak, she wanted to wring at least one of their secret signs out of him. With an authoritative tone to her voice, she ordered Eurycleia to move Odysseus’s bed. And just this once Odysseus rose to the bait. No one could move his bed, he said, unless they chopped it in two first. He had made it with his own hands from a huge olive trunk. The bedroom had been built around the trunk.

It was the sign Penelope was waiting for. And now she let her knees give and, embracing Odysseus, wept. Odysseus wept too, for a long time. When he started talking again, he said nothing of the house and the woman he had come back to. He spoke of tests again, of one last test that loomed in the future. “Woman, we haven’t reached the end of our trials; a great, hazardous, and extraordinary task still awaits me, and I will have to see it through.” Odysseus’s first words to Penelope after she recognized him thus looked forward to a new test and a new desertion. But tests were also their secret language. What separated them in life brought them together in the mind. Penelope was already prepared to look to the future again. She asked for details about this trial. Odysseus spoke of new wanderings, of having to travel from city to city until he reached, alone as ever, the people “who know nothing of the sea.” Penelope merely said in her sober way: “If the gods plan to grant you a better old age, then you may hope that there will be a way out of your troubles.” Eurynome came forward with a torch and led them off to their bed with its mighty roots.