The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

XII

(photo credit 12.1)

ZEUS IS NEVER RIDICULOUS, BECAUSE HIS dignity is of no concern to him. “Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur / Maiestas et amor,” says Ovid, master of matters erotic. To seduce a woman with a bundle of lightning bolts in one’s hand would be injudicious, and not even very exciting. But a white bull, an eagle, a swan, a false satyr, a stallion, a stream of gold, a blaze of fire: these are divine. Only when he assumes these forms does Zeus manage to “leave aside his very being Zeus.” Thus when the god came down from Olympus to seduce some mortal woman, the lightning was left behind, forgotten. Zeus preferred to be unarmed when he exposed himself to the amorous gadfly that tormented and aroused him just as it did the lowliest of his subjects. Eros is the helplessness of that which is sovereign: it is strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.

Zeus was seducing the Nymph Pluto when Ge, avenger of all the victims of the Olympian age, nodded to her son Typhon, as one assassin giving the go-ahead to another. A huge body stretched across heaven and earth: an arm, one of the two hundred attached to that body, reached out to Olympus, the fingers searching behind a rock from which rose rags of smoke. Typhon’s hand closed around Zeus’s bundle of thunderbolts. The sovereign god had lost his weapon. Olympus was terror-struck. The gods fled like a stampeding herd. They shed the human forms that made them too recognizable and unique. Trembling, they camouflaged themselves beneath animal skins: ibis, jackals, dogs. And they flew toward Egypt, where they would be able to blend in among the hundreds and thousands of other ibis, jackals, and dogs, the motionless, painted guardians of tombs and temples.

Europa’s fine hair was still shrinking to a speck that would lose itself in the wide expanse of sea when King Agenor called together his sons Cilix, Phoenix, Cepheus, Thasus, and Cadmus. He commanded them to go and find their sister. They were to never show their faces in Sidon again unless they had Europa with them. The sons had already traveled for years with their father through Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia. Now they had to set out again, and this time alone. Thus began the long wanderings of Cadmus. His brothers set out too but were soon distracted from the quest that had driven them from their home. Cadmus thought of the bull, the bull “that no mortal can find.”

Still wandering about in search of his sister, he reached the Cilician mountains. He was walking through dense woodland when a flock of birds flew over his head with a convulsed whirring of wings, heading south. Cadmus sensed a sudden emptiness above and beneath him. He didn’t know that that flock of birds were the Olympians, fleeing to Egypt. Olympus was uninhabited now, a museum in the night. And in a cave a few yards from Cadmus, although he hadn’t found the place yet, lay Zeus, helpless. Wrapping himself around the god’s body, Typhon had managed to wrench his adamantine sickle from him and had cut through the sinews of his hands and feet. Now, drawn out from his body, Zeus’s sinews formed a bundle of dark, shiny stalks, not unlike the bundle of lightning bolts that lay beside them, although these were bright and smoking. Zeus’s body could just be glimpsed through the shadows, an abandoned sack. Wrapped in a bearskin, his sinews were being guarded by Delphine, half girl, half snake. And out from the cave drifted the breath of Typhon’s many mouths, Typhon with his hundred animal heads and the thousands of snakes that framed them. The Olympians were routed. Already nature was slowly degenerating. And the only witness to the scene was that traveler lost in the woods dressed as a shepherd.

Cadmus felt a loneliness no one had ever felt before. Nature’s soul was fading, order gasped its death rattle, destiny shrank to a single point, in that wood, before the mouth of that cave, where a Phoenician prince was about to take on a primordial and evil creature, Typhon. Cadmus had no weapons, bar the invisible resources of his mind. He remembered how in his childhood, when he used to follow his father on his travels, the priests of the Egyptian temples had squeezed into his mouth “the ineffable milk of books.” And he remembered the most intense joy he had ever known: one day Apollo had revealed to him, and him alone, “the just music.” What was the just music? No one else would ever know, but Cadmus decided to play it to the monster now, a last voice from the deserted world of the gods. Hiding in a thicket of trees, he played his pipes. The notes penetrated Typhon’s cave, rousing him from his happy torpor. Then Cadmus saw some of Typhon’s arms slithering toward him. Head after head rose before him, until the only human one among them spoke to him in a friendly voice. Typhon invited Cadmus to compete with him: pipes versus thunder. He spoke like a bandit in need of company who grabs at the first chance to show off his power. With the bluster of the braggart, he promised him marvelous things, although in this particular moment that braggart really was the sole master of the cosmos. And, as he spoke, he was struggling to imitate Zeus, whom he had long observed with resentment. He told Cadmus he would take him up to Olympus. He would grant him Athena’s body, untouched. And if he didn’t like Athena he could have Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Hebe. Only Hera was out of bounds, because she belonged to him, the new sovereign. Never had anyone been at once so ridiculous and so powerful.

Cadmus contrived to look serious and respectful, but not frightened. He said it was pointless him trying to compete with his pipes. But with a lyre, maybe. He made up a story of his once having competed with Apollo. And said that, to save his son the embarrassment of being beaten, Zeus had burned his strings to ashes. If only he had some good, tough sinews to make himself a new instrument! With the music of his lyre, Cadmus said, he would be able to stop the planets in their courses and enchant the wild beasts. These words convinced the ingenuous monster, who enjoyed conversation only when it centered on power, immense power, the one thing he was interested in. He agreed. His many heads went back into the cave and then emerged again. In one hand he was holding the shining bundle of Zeus’s sinews. He handed them to Cadmus. He said they were a gift for his guest. He thought this was how sovereigns behaved. Cadmus began to finger the divine sinews like a craftsman examining his materials before getting down to work. Then he went off to build his instrument. He hid Zeus’s sinews beneath a rock. Then he pressed on into the thicket and, skillfully sweetening the tone of his pipes, began to play a tune.

Typhon strained hundreds of ears to listen. He heard the tune and didn’t understand it. But harmony was working on him. Cadmus told him he had invented the composition to celebrate the flight of the gods from Olympus. Typhon wallowed in self-gratification. The music pricked him with its sweet goad. He ventured outside the cave to hear it better. For the first time he felt he understood how Zeus must feel when his eye settled on the breast and hips of a woman about to yield to him. That sensation had always been obscure and impenetrable to Typhon. But now he must learn all about it, if he was to take Zeus’s place. Typhon was immersed in the music, every one of his hundred heads distracted. Zeus took advantage of the situation to sneak out of the cave. Dragging himself across the ground with great effort, he found his sinews behind the rock. A few moments later the bundle of lightning bolts was back in his hand. He had seen the smoke rising from them in the darkness. When Typhon roused himself and went back to the cave, he found it empty.

Before Cadmus embarked on his musical competition with Typhon, Zeus appeared to him in the shape of a bull. He was full of anguish, fearing defeat and ridicule. He was afraid the cosmos might break its sudden silence with a roar of mocking laughter from his old father, Kronos. And he was afraid that “Hellas, mother of myths,” might rearrange all her fables, transferring to Typhon all those gratifying epithets of sovereignty that he himself had enjoyed until now. So it was that the bull, like Typhon, solemnly promised Cadmus a woman, and something else as well: he would sleep with Harmony and be “savior of the cosmic harmony.”

Thus, when Cadmus had tricked Typhon and when Zeus, thanks to the thunderbolts he’d retrieved, had hurled the monster into the depths below Etna, the Phoenician traveler set out once more, except that now he was looking not for one woman but two: Europa and Harmony. Winter was nearing an end, and Orion was rising. Cadmus came down from the Taurus Mountains, following the swift streams of Cilicia, banks bright with saffron. And he took to the sea again. Zeus’s “prophetic breezes” blew him along. He didn’t know where, only that he was going toward Harmony. Cadmus’s sailors lay down to sleep on the beach in Samothrace. The waters were still beneath a windless calm that seemed as though it would last forever.

Toward dawn, Cadmus was awakened by strange sounds. The resonant skins of drums, measured steps, the rustling of oaks, voices behind the leaves. He left the coast behind him, heading inland. Approaching the city, he came across some washerwomen treading their dirty laundry in the water and singing. Cadmus watched, intrigued, amused, as if in no hurry to arrive in the town. But he was already wandering through the narrow streets now, and came out in front of the palace. It looked new, sparkling, smothered with decorations. Doorways featuring historical scenes, pale stuccos, a dome, palms, and hyacinths. In the middle of the garden was a fountain surrounded by gold and silver statues of young men and women. And statues of dogs: except that, as Cadmus approached, these dogs spoke with the voices of automatons and wagged their tails. Struck by his beauty and the expression in his eyes, Haematius, king of the city, welcomed Cadmus as a guest.

At the end of the banquet, Cadmus told, as all visitors must, his story. The opening words were not very different from those Odysseus would one day use in the court of King Alcinous. Then he went back over his intricate genealogy, beginning with Io, the cow who wandered from sea to sea, and ending with the bull that rose from the sea to carry off his sister, Europa. “It is on her account, traveling without cease, that I have arrived thus far.” As he spoke these words, Cadmus knew he was leaving out the most important thing. That while looking for his abducted sister, he had in fact come to Samothrace to win another girl, who was now listening to him in suspicious silence.

At the end of the banquet, the queen mother, Electra, who had been sitting next to the foreign guest, saw a young man with curly hair hanging down over his cheeks coming to speak to her. It was Hermes. The god took the queen to one side and explained that Zeus, her first lover, was ordering her to grant her daughter Harmony to the foreigner. And for once Hermes assumed a solemn tone: “This man defended your lover in his moment of grief, this man ushered in the day of liberation for Olympus.”

Electra reflected: she remembered her childhood with her six sisters, the Pleiades. Zeus had seduced her young. Haematius was born. One day, while she was still nursing him, Aphrodite had appeared, bringing a baby girl in her arms. That was when Electra first saw Harmony, love child of Aphrodite and Ares. The girl’s mother had smuggled her out of Olympus and wanted to entrust her to Electra. Electra pressed Harmony’s mouth to her breast and from that moment on treated her as if she were her own daughter. But just as she had quite suddenly appeared one day, so one day this “maiden descended from heaven” was destined to disappear.

It wasn’t easy to get Harmony to agree. Locked in her girlhood bedroom, she wept tears of rage, touching all the things that were dear to her and that she didn’t want to leave behind. Why had her mother decided to give her to this stranger who told tall tales and had nothing to offer but the tackle of his ship? He was a drifter, a fugitive, a sailor, a man with neither hearth nor home. It wasn’t Electra who finally convinced Harmony but the girl’s friend Peisinoe. She came and shut herself in Harmony’s room with her. She wanted to confess, she had this sensation of emptiness just above her stomach, of burning, and she couldn’t stop thinking of the handsome stranger. With a little girl’s infatuation, she described Cadmus’s body, fantasized his hand boldly touching her round breasts, fantasized herself uncovering the nape of his neck. Harmony listened and realized that something was changing inside her: she was falling in love with her friend’s desire, and at the same time she went on looking around in desperation, because she knew that, if once she left, she would never see this room again.

For the first time she felt pricked by a goad that would not leave her be. In her mind she began to say words of farewell. She said good-bye to the caves of the Cabiri and the shrill voices of the Corybants, she said good-bye to the palace she had grown up in and the rugged coasts of Samothrace. And all at once she understood what myth is, understood that myth is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining. She need not fear the uncertain life opening up before her. Whichever way her wandering husband went, the encircling sash of myth would wrap around the young Harmony. For every step, the footprint was already there. And Harmony was surprised to find herself saying these words: “I’ll follow this boy, invoking the marriages of the gods as I go. If my lover leads me across the sea to the East, I’ll celebrate the desire of Eos for Orion, and I’ll remember the nuptial beds of Cephalus; if I go toward the misty West, my comfort will be Selene, who suffered likewise for Endymion on Latmon.” When she went back to meet the others in the halls of the palace, Harmony had a feverish look in her eye. She ran her fingers along the doorposts, embraced the maids, then went back to her room and stroked the bed, the walls. She picked up a handful of earth and raised it to her lips.

It was time to go. Cadmus and Harmony stood at the prow, like a double figurehead, exposed to the wind that lifted and mingled their hair. Around them were a swarm of passengers they didn’t know, merchants for the most part, paying their way from the coasts of Asia to Greece. All of them looked on the two youngsters, dreamily facing out to sea, as just two more fellow travelers, the sort you meet on a journey and never see again. But such was the halo of beauty around them that the others could not help but see it as a good omen for the crossing.

Many days would pass, and Cadmus and Harmony would have to survive many an adventure before they could celebrate their marriage. At the head of a crowd of wayfarers, carts piled with belongings, they arrived in Delphi. And there Cadmus heard the Pythia pronounce the words that were to decide the course of his life: “In vain, Cadmus, do you plant your wandering footsteps far and wide; you seek a bull never born to any cow; you seek a bull no mortal can find. Forget Assyria; take an earthly heifer as your guide and follow it; do not seek the Olympian bull. No herdsman could lead Europa’s spouse; he treads neither pastureland nor meadow, nor is there any goad that he obeys. That bull has chosen the tender bonds of Aphrodite, not the yoke and the plow. To Eros only does he bow his neck, not to Demeter. Put your longing for Tyre and for your father behind you. Settle in a foreign land and found a city that will bear the name of your homeland, Thebes of Egypt. Found it in the place where the heifer, by divine inspiration, falls to the ground, stretching out her weary hooves.”

The heifer’s fetlocks buckled under her in the valley of Tanagra. Immediately Cadmus began looking for a spring to purify himself before sacrificing the heifer. He found one. But, coiled around the crystalline water, the huge snake of Ares was waiting for him. Many of Cadmus’s companions would have their bones crushed in the snake’s coils before the hero was able to attack it. He could already feel his legs being trapped in the monster’s grip when Athena came to spur him on with some rousing words. Then the goddess disappeared, leaving the print of her heel in the air. Cadmus felt a new strength fill his breast: he lifted a rock and smashed it down on the snake’s head. Then he pulled out the sacrificial knife that hung at his thigh and buried it in the beast. His companions watched as he turned the knife around the snake’s head with the deftness of a practiced butcher. Finally he managed to cut the head off and raise it in the air, while the snake’s coils went on writhing in the dust.

Now Cadmus must found his city. In the center he would put Harmony’s bed. And around it, everything would be modeled on the geometry of the heavens. Iron bit into soil, the reference points were calculated. Stones of different colors, like the signatures of the planets, were taken from the mountains of Cithaeron, Helicon, and Teumesus, and arranged in piles. The seven gates of the city were laid out to correspond to the seven heavens, and each one was dedicated to a god. Cadmus looked on his finished city as though it were a new toy and decided that their wedding could now go ahead.

The many halls of the palace of Thebes were filled with an incessant chatter, a rustle of light feet, melodious meetings and greetings. All the gods had come down from Olympus for the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. They wandered through the rooms, busy and talkative. Aphrodite took care of the decorations for the marriage bed. Inane and jolly, Ares unbuckled his weapons and tried out a dance step or two. The Muses offered the full range of song. Amusing herself playing maid, Nike’s wings brushed against those of the darting Eros.

Finally the bridal pair arrived, standing straight as statues on a chariot drawn by a lion and a boar. Apollo played the cithara beside the chariot. No one was surprised to see those unusual animals: wasn’t that what Harmony meant, yoking together the opposite and the wild? As dusk fell, thousands of torches flared. Zeus walked the streets of Thebes. He liked the town. It reminded him of the heavens. It was like a dance floor. They all got together for the banquet, on seats of gold. Zeus and Cadmus laid their hands on the same table, sat next to each other, poured out wine for each other. Zeus looked at Cadmus with the eyes of a friend who has kept a secret promise. When the Dragon flickered in the sky, the moment had come to accompany the bride to her bed. And now the Olympians stood in line to offer their gifts. The most mysterious, and the grandest, was Zeus’s. He gave Cadmus “all perfection.” What did that mean? Cadmus bowed his head in gratitude.

Aphrodite came up to her daughter Harmony and fastened a fated necklace around her neck. Was it the wonderful necklace Hephaestus had wrought to celebrate the birth of Eros, the archer? Or was it the necklace Zeus had given to Europa, when he laid her down beneath a plane tree in Crete? Harmony blushed, right down to her neck, while her skin thrilled under the cold weight of the necklace. It was a snake shot through with stars, a snake with two heads, one at each end, and the heads had their throats wide open, facing each other. Yet the two mouths could never bite each other, for between them, and caught between their teeth, rose two golden eagles with their wings outspread. Slipped into the double throat of the snake, they functioned as a clasp. The stones radiated desire. They were snake, eagle, and star, but they were the sea too, and the light of the stones trembled in the air, as though upon waves. In that necklace cosmos and ornament for once came together.

Among the guests was Iasion, Harmony’s brother, who had hurried over from Samothrace. Demeter glimpsed him through the crowd during the preparations for the feast and immediately desired him with that vehement passion of hers the Olympians knew so well. Everybody was milling toward the marriage chamber now. Looking around, Zeus realized that Demeter and Iasion had disappeared. He went out into the night. The din of the party faded in the distance. He crossed the threshold of one of the city’s seven gates. Now the empty fields were all around, dark against the glow of the torches and the palace behind. In a deep furrow in the black soil, he saw two bodies tight together, furiously clasping each other and mixing with the earth. He recognized Iasion and Demeter’s cry.

After that remote time when gods and men had been on familiar terms, to invite the gods to one’s house became the most dangerous thing one could do, a source of wrongs and curses, a sign of the now irretrievable malaise in relations between heaven and earth. At the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Aphrodite gives the bride a necklace which, passing from hand to hand, will generate one disaster after another right up the massacre of the Epigoni beneath the walls of Thebes, and beyond. At the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, failure to invite Eris leads to the Judgment of Paris in favor of Aphrodite and against Hera and Athena, and thus creates the premise for the Trojan War. Lycaon’s banquet, where human and animal flesh are served together, brings about the Flood. Tantalus’s banquet, where little Pelops is boiled in the pot, marks the beginning of a chain of crimes that will go on tangling together ever more perversely right up to the day when Athena casts the vote that acquits the fugitive Orestes.

What conclusions can we draw? To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories. And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations were in fact contrived by the gods themselves, because the gods get bored with men who have no stories.

The gods didn’t realize, nor did men, that that wedding feast in Thebes was the closest they would ever get to each other. The next morning, the Olympians had left the palace. Cadmus and Harmony woke up in the bed Aphrodite had made for them. Now they were just a king and queen.

They had four daughters: Autonoë, Ino, Agave, and Semele. Cadmus’s hair had turned white and woolly on his bony head when one day, years later, he stopped in front of his daughter Semele’s tomb immediately outside the palace. It was an area of rubble with thin plumes of smoke rising from the place where Semele’s bed had been when Zeus came to make love to her. Vine shoots twisted around the crumbling stones. In that scene of devastation and luxuriance, Cadmus saw the image of his life. The plume of smoke was the sign Zeus’s thunderbolt had left, the thunderbolt Zeus had recovered from Typhon’s cave thanks exclusively to Cadmus. But Cadmus couldn’t tell anyone about that. That story of long ago was sealed up inside him. It would hardly have seemed proper that Zeus had once been saved from defeat by the merest Phoenician traveler. And it would have been even less proper to have spoken of the sinews stolen from Zeus’s body. No one would ever know anything about it. Cadmus went on looking at Semele’s tomb. The broken columns were covered by a thin layer of ash. Who could guess what part of Semele’s tender body had been transformed into that gray dust — Semele, the youngest, the most beautiful of his daughters, envied from birth by the others, although they too were very beautiful. Just as Europa had disappeared across the water, so Semele had vanished in the flames. Zeus, always Zeus, the encircling one. But that was another story that couldn’t be told. Cadmus’s other daughters, who hated their sister passionately, said she had coupled shamelessly with a stranger and then begun to tell lies about Zeus having come to her bed. Semele’s sisters were happy she had been reduced to a handful of ashes. And Cadmus couldn’t even mourn her, or adore her as mother of a new and ancient god, the god who announced his presence in the vine shoots twisting among the broken stones and who was, in the end, his grandson: Dionysus.

Cadmus went on staring at Semele’s tomb. The tempest of calamities wasn’t over yet. When he had married the young Harmony, the opposite extremes of the world had come together in visible accord for one last time. Immediately afterward they had separated, torn apart. Semele was reduced to ashes; all her sisters, at some point of their lives, were either cut to pieces or cut someone else to pieces. Nobody ever inflicted or endured laceration as much as Harmony’s daughters. Actaeon, Autonoë’s son, was torn to pieces by Artemis’s dogs. Learchus, lno’s son, was run through by the spit of her father, Athamas. And time held still other lacerations in store. Cadmus was no longer king of Thebes. He had given up his throne to his grandson Pentheus, Agave’s child. And this grandson of his, who looked on him as a more or less good-for-nothing old man, had chosen to quarrel with Dionysus, the new god, of whom he knew nothing and understood less. Cadmus was obliged to play the part of the rather undignified old man who lifts his thin legs in a dance with the thyrsus. Pentheus watched him with scorn. Pentheus thought he was the city. He refused to remember how Thebes had been nothing more than a hillside of wild grass before Cadmus sunk his plow into the earth. One old man leaning on another, Cadmus and Tiresias set off for the mountains where the delirious Maenads lived. Lost among them, unrecognizable amid those sleeping or ecstatic bodies, were the three princesses: Autonoë, Ino, Agave. Step by wary step, Cadmus and Tiresias climbed on into the woods. They knew that one does not quarrel with a god.

Cadmus was back in Thebes in time to pick up the shreds of Pentheus’s body, torn to pieces on the mountains by his mother’s own hands. He called his old wife, Harmony, and told her to get ready to leave, one last time. He had been a wanderer when she met him, and as wanderers they would end their days. Shortly afterward, Dionysus appeared in Thebes. He took possession of the city and expelled Agave, Cadmus, and Harmony. After Pentheus’s atrocious death, they were all contaminated. Helped by his servants, Cadmus loaded a few sacks on a big cart. Harmony already had the reins in her hands. Dionysus pointed the way. They must head for the western boundaries of the earth, the mists of Illyria.

On their wedding day, young and radiant, Cadmus and Harmony had arrived standing on a chariot drawn by a lion and a boar. Now, thrown out of their own home, these two old exiles climbed on a cart pulled by a pair of simple oxen and loaded with memories. When the cart rolled off, Cadmus and Harmony sat down side by side, and the Thebans saw the couple’s backs knot together in the scales of a single snake. Cadmus and Harmony rode away, twined snakes below, heads held high. Thus we may still see them today on the stone that marks their tomb, “by the edge of the black gorges of the Illyrian river.”

As he drove his cart westward, knotted to his spouse, like some stubborn emigrant still seeking a new city long after it is too late, Cadmus thought about the past. What was left of it? A few bundles of things on a cart, and behind them a city Dionysus had shaken with an earthquake. Cadmus had saved Zeus, but this hadn’t saved him from life’s precariousness. He had set out to find his sister Europa and had won the young Harmony. A traveler had told him that Europa had become queen of Crete. Harmony was at his side, an old snake. He felt as he had when he climbed off his ship in Samothrace: a man without gifts, because everything he had was on the cart. But Cadmus’s gift was impalpable.

Another king from Egypt, Danaus with his fifty bloodthirsty daughters, had brought Greece the gift of water. Cadmus had brought Greece “gifts of the mind”: vowels and consonants yoked together in tiny signs, “etched model of a silence that speaks”—the alphabet. With the alphabet, the Greeks would teach themselves to experience the gods in the silence of the mind, and no longer in the full and normal presence, as Cadmus himself had the day of his marriage. He thought of his routed kingdom: of daughters and grandchildren torn to pieces, tearing others to pieces, ulcerated in boiling water, run through with spits, drowned in the sea. And Thebes was a heap of rubble. But no one could erase those small letters, those fly’s feet that Cadmus the Phoenician had scattered across Greece, where the winds had brought him in his quest for Europa carried off by a bull that rose from the sea.

(photo credit 12.2)

(photo credit bm1)