The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

II

(photo credit 2.1)

THERE IS A GIVE-AND-TAKE AMONG THE gods, a strict accountancy that takes on new ramifications with every passing age. Artemis came in useful as a murderer when Dionysus wanted to kill Ariadne. But the day would come when Artemis too, proud virgin that she was, would find to her amazement that she needed the help of that impure and promiscuous god. She too would need to ask someone to kill for her, leaving him the choice of weapon. And she asked Dionysus.

A mortal had made a fool of her. Aura, a tall mountain girl with clean limbs and feet that could run like the wind. She would take on boars and lions single-handed, disdaining weaker prey. And she likewise disdained Aphrodite and all her doings. All she wanted was virginity and strength, nothing else. One hot, sultry day, while sleeping on some laurel twigs, Aura had a disturbing dream: a barbaric, whirling Eros was offering Aphrodite and Adonis a lioness he had caught with an enchanted girdle (Aphrodite’s perhaps? Had this erotic ornament become a weapon for capturing wild beasts?). In the dream, Aura saw herself standing next to Aphrodite and Adonis, her arms around their shoulders. It was a sinuous, flourishing group they made! Eros approached with his lioness and presented the animal with these words: “Goddess of garlands, I bring you Aura, the girl whose only love is her virginity. See, the enchanted girdle has bent the stubborn will of the invincible lioness.” Aura woke up with a sense of anxiety. For the first time she had seen herself split in two: she was the prey, and she was also the huntress watching her prey. She was furious with the laurel leaves she’d slept on, and hence with Daphne: why had a virgin sent her a dream worthy of a slut? Then she forgot all about it.

On another hot, sultry day, Aura was leading Artemis’s chariot toward the Sangarius waterfalls, where the goddess planned to bathe. Running beside the chariot, the goddess’s maids had taken their bands from their foreheads and were lifting up the hems of their tunics, showing their knees. They were the Hyperborean virgins. Opis lifted Artemis’s bow from her shoulders, and Hekaerge took her quiver. Loxo untied her boots. Artemis stepped carefully into the water. She kept her legs tight together, lifting her tunic off only as the water began to lap at it. Aura watched her with a cruel, inquisitive eye. She studied her mistress’s body. Then she swam around her, stretching right out in the water. She stopped next to the goddess, shook a few drops from her breasts, and said: “Artemis, why are your breasts soft and swollen, why have your cheeks got that rosy bloom? You’re not like Athena: her chest is tight as a boy’s. Or look at my body with its sweet smell of strength. My breasts are round as shields. My skin is taut as a bowstring. Perhaps you’d be better suited to shooting and suffering Eros’s arrows. No one looking at you would ever think of inviolable virginity.” Artemis listened in silence. “Her eyes flashed murderous glints.” She leapt out of the water, put on her tunic and girdle, and disappeared without saying another word.

She went straight to Nemesis, high up in the Taurus Mountains, to ask her advice. She found her, as ever, sitting in front of her wheel. A griffin was squatting on her throne. Nemesis could remember Artemis coming in for all kinds of insults. But always from men, or at most from a mother with children, Niobe, for example, now transformed to a damp rock in the mountains here. Or was it the old matrimonial comedy business? Had Zeus gone and teased her again about it being time to get married? No, said Artemis, this time it was a virgin, Lelanto’s daughter. She couldn’t even bring herself to repeat the insulting things Aura had dared to say about her body and breasts. Nemesis decided she wouldn’t turn Aura to stone, as she had Niobe. Apart from anything else, they were related; the girl belonged to the ancient family of the Titans, as did Nemesis herself. But she would rob her of her virginity, a punishment no less cruel perhaps. And this time it would be Dionysus who would take care of the matter. Artemis agreed. As if to give her a foretaste of her destiny, Nemesis got on her griffin-drawn chariot and went off to see Aura. To make the stubborn girl bow her head, she cracked her whip of snakes on her neck. And Aura’s body went under the wheel of necessity.

Now Dionysus could get moving. In his last adventure he had come across another girl warrior: Pallene. Something he’d never experienced before in all his amorous adventures had happened with her. He’d had to agree to a wrestling match with the girl. The match took place in front of a crowd of spectators, and, most important, in front of the girl’s incestuous father. Pallene appeared in the sand-covered ring with her long tresses around her neck and a red sash around her breasts. A piece of white cloth barely covered her crotch. Her skin was shiny with oil. The match was a long one. Sometimes Dionysus would find himself squeezing the palm of a deliciously white hand. And, rather than overcome that body, he wanted to touch it. He wanted to put off his voluptuous victory, but meanwhile he realized that he was breathing hard like a mere mortal. A moment’s distraction, no more, and Pallene was struggling to lift Dionysus and throw him. That was too much. Dionysus slipped out of her grasp and managed to lift her instead. But then he ended up laying her down quite softly, his furtive eyes straying over her body, her thick hair in the dust. And already Pallene was back on her feet again. So Dionysus decided to throw her properly. He gripped her by the neck and tried to make her knee give. But he judged the move badly and lost his balance. Down he went on his back in the dust, Pallene astride his stomach. A second later, Pallene slipped away, leaving Dionysus on the ground. But just another moment and Dionysus had managed to throw her. The score was even, and Pallene wanted to go on. But her father, Sithon, intervened, giving Dionysus the victory. Drenched in sweat, the god looked up at the king coming over to give him his prize and speared him with his thyrsus. The man was a murderer and destined to die in any event. As a love gift Dionysus gave Pallene the thyrsus dripping with her father’s blood. The next thing was the wedding.

Amid the hubbub of the celebrations, Pallene wept for Sithon. He may have been cruel, but he was still her father. Gently, Dionysus pointed to the rat-gnawed heads of her twenty previous suitors on display in front of the palace doors like the first fruits of the harvest. And to soothe her he said she couldn’t possibly be the daughter of such a terrible man. Maybe her real father was a god, Hermes, for example, or Ares. But, even as he spoke, Dionysus was already beginning to feel vaguely impatient. He had beaten Pallene. She was his lover now. Soon she would become a faithful follower like so many others. Yet only that once had Dionysus experienced the excitement of finding himself wrestling in the dust with a woman he desired but couldn’t dominate. And he yearned for an unattainable body.

He went off alone into the mountains. He couldn’t stop fantasizing a strong, elusive woman, a woman as capable of hurting him as he was of hurting her. The time was ripe for Eros to have him longing for an even more unattainable body. He sensed in a sudden gust of wind that a woman even stronger, even more beautiful, and even more hostile than the wrestler Pallene was hiding right there in the woods: Aura. And already he knew that she would flee from him; she would never surrender. For once Dionysus decided to go it alone and in silence, free from the clamor of his Bacchants. Crouching behind a bush, he caught a glimpse of Aura’s white thigh thrusting through the dark undergrowth. Dogs bayed all around. And Dionysus found himself melting like a woman. He had never felt so powerless. The idea of talking to the girl seemed as pointless as talking to an oak tree. But a hamadryad living in the roots of a pine told him what he needed to know: he would never lie down with Aura in a bed. Only in the forest and only if he bound her hands and feet would he ever be able to possess her. And he should remember not to leave her any gifts.

While the exhausted Dionysus was sleeping, Ariadne appeared to him again. Why did he always desert his women the same way he had deserted her? Why, having desired the girl so much when they were rolling about together in the sand, was he now completely forgetting Pallene? In the end Theseus had been the better of the two. And, before she went, Ariadne made an ironic gesture. She gave him a spindle and asked him to give it to his next victim as a gift so that one day people would say, She gave Theseus the thread and Dionysus the spindle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attica was soon in the thrall of an extraordinary epidemic of suicides: as in Wedekind’s Germany, where the schoolchildren killed themselves with the coming of spring, in Athens young girls began to hang themselves for no apparent reason. Apollo’s oracle proposed a remedy: they must introduce a ceremony in honor of the peasant’s daughter to be found hanging from a branch of the big tree above the well. In the middle of the ceremony was a swing. Then dolls and masks were hung on trees, to sway back and forth in the wind.

Meanwhile, Icarius’s murderers had escaped to the island of Ceos. These were the dog days of the year with Sirius ascendant; the island was suffering from a devastating heat wave. Everything had burned up and died. This time Apollo spoke through his son Aristaeus, who was king of the island. Icarius’s murderers must be punished. As soon as they had been killed, a cool northwesterly wind began to blow, the meltemi which makes life possible in Greece and which would reappear every year from then on, along with the dog days.

From a rock, Ariadne watches Phaedra on her swing. Their mother, Pasiphaë, hangs herself. Ariadne hangs herself. Phaedra hangs herself. Erigone hangs herself. Erigone is not a princess, but it is she who ascends to the heavens as the hanged woman. Her celestial home is the constellation of Virgo. Ariadne is nearby, in the sky, but as Dionysus’s bride. With Erigone we come to the first of the hanged women. And we also come back to the swing. Behind the swing is the image of “the golden swing in the sky,” mentioned in the Rig Veda. Every time the sun approaches the solstices, it risks going out of control; the world trembles; its star may just go on along its trajectory, carried away by its momentum, rather than turning back. And it is precisely here, at the solstice, that we have that curve which forms the golden swing in the sky. Having reached the limit of its oscillation, the sun turns back, as does the Athenian girl on her swing, pushed by a satyr. But, for this to happen, people have to die. Some of the victims are guilty, like Icarius’s murderers. But, before them, we must have a perfectly innocent victim: Erigone. The swinging stops in the perpendicular jerk of the hanged woman.

The tree where Erigone’s body was to remain hanging is not just large, it is immense: it covers the whole earth, and its branches stretch away among the constellations. In the sky, Erigone holds an ear of corn in her hand. She has rejected a bunch of those grapes that brought death to her father and herself. Icarius’s last words were “The sweet [Dionysus] is Erigone’s enemy.” That hanged orphan reminds us of the death that is not assimilated back into life, the death that wanders about continually in the air, with the spirits of the dead, the dolls and masks hung from a tree.

Erigone is an Isis flung by the mystical law of inversion to a point exactly opposite that of the celestial queen: in terrestrial terms Erigone represents the total impotence of the poor and vagrant orphan girl. But Isis too had been a beggar in the world when looking for the body of Osiris. In the heavens, Isis and Erigone find themselves together in the same constellation: Virgo. In Sirius they see the dog that helped them: Anubis in the case of Isis, Maera in the case of Erigone. After Osiris’s death, Isis tore out a lock of her hair. Erigone too tore out a lock of her hair after Icarius’s death. Not far from Virgo and from the Dog, we find the locks placed on top of each other in Berenice’s Hair, also known as the Lock, and even Ariadne’s Lock. And Nonnus uses the same word, bótrys, to mean either a lock of hair or a bunch of grapes. Dionysus didn’t let Erigone escape him, even in the heavens. He is there in the gift of mourning.

Dionysus would arrive in Athens for the Anthesteria with the spirits of the dead, then disappear with them. The big sealed jars were opened, the new wine flowed. They carried it in carts pulled by donkeys to Dionysus’s shrine in the Marshes, and there they worshiped the god. It was an enigmatic place: there were no marshes where the small shrine stood, nor had there ever been any. But the gods inhabit a different world from our own, and the marsh from which Dionysus was supposed to emerge belonged to that world. Farmers, slaves, and the laborers of large landowners all gathered together. They danced and waited for the feast. The shrine opened at sundown and would stay open only for that one day of the year. It was an unclean day. The fresh pitch on the doors of the houses reminded people of the spirits roaming about who would eventually be chased off. All the other shrines were closed, their doors tied tight with ropes. Paralysis seized the very heart of the city.

In the evening, a trumpet blast marked the beginning of a drinking contest. “The King drinks, the Queen laughs.” But they drank without talking, without singing, without praying. There were hundreds of them, under many roofs, each with his big pitcher. Yet there was the same silence the herald commanded during sacrifices. Even the children had their own tables, their own pitchers, and sat silent. An invisible guest was among them: Orestes, the impure, who had once sought refuge in Athens. Nobody had dared take him into their homes, but nor had anyone dared send him away. Athens loves the guilty. Sitting alone at a table, a pitcher all to himself, the man who had killed his mother drank in silence. And that had been the first day of this feast, the Choes. Wine and blood ran together, as they had when Icarius was killed by the shepherds. In opening the big jugs, the worshipers had released not only the wine but also the dead, and now they stalked about disguised with masks. Often they were women: Nymphs or others of Dionysus’s creatures. They asked for food and wine, begging as Erigone had. None of them must be left unsatisfied. When it was over, everybody took their jugs and heather crowns back to Dionysus’s shrine like broken toys. They arrived, staggering in the evening torchlight, as the fourteen dames of honor chosen by the king took their secret oaths over the baskets. Then there was another procession, from the shrine to the house of the king-archon, in the agorá, the marketplace. And there, in the king’s very bed, Dionysus would take the man’s place and possess the queen, the Basilinna. This wasn’t a temple but the house of an important public official, and the Basilinna was not one of the god’s priestesses. For one night Dionysus imposed his presence in the bed of an important citizen. He had arrived in Piraeus that very day, a sailor from far away. His ship had been solemnly hauled as far as the city. Now he was demanding a night of passion, surrounded by secrecy. A still damp prow forced its way through the door of a bedroom in the city center.

This is Dionysus. He arrives, unexpected, and possesses. There was a considerable scandal when on one occasion the Basilinna happened to be the daughter of a notorious hetaera, and not even an Athenian at that. The mother’s name was Neaera; she had sold her body time and again and all too soon had arranged to sell her daughter’s too, until her husband, a pander and sycophant, managed to marry the girl off to an Athenian from an old family, one of the Coroinids, who later became the king-archon. Thus the god found himself being welcomed by a girl already used to dealing with customers and pimps.

Summoned by the women of Argos as a bull rising from the sea, Dionysus, of all the gods, is the one who feels most supremely at ease with women. His enemies “used to say that he revealed the religious mysteries and initiations so as to seduce other men’s women.” If the Charites make him a gift, it will be a peplos, a woman’s tunic. Dionysus doesn’t descend on women like a predator, clutch them to his chest, then suddenly let go and disappear. He is constantly in the process of seducing them, because their life forces come together in him. The juice of the vine is his, and likewise the many juices of life. “Sovereign of all that is moist,” Dionysus himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us. “Mad for the women,” Nonnus, the last poet to celebrate the god, frequently calls him, “mad for the girls.” And with Christian malice Clement of Alexandria speaks of Dionysus as choiropsálēs, “the one who touches the vulva”: the one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre. The Sicyonians worshiped him as “lord of the female sex.” Dionysus is the only god who doesn’t need to demonstrate his virility, not even in war. When his army sets out for India, it looks like a gaggle of noisy girls.

Dionysus’s phallus is more hallucinogenic than coercive. It is close to a fungus, or a parasite in nature, or to the toxic grass stuffed in the cavity of the thyrsus. It has none of the faithfulness of the farmer’s crop, it won’t stretch out in the plowed furrow where Iasion made love to Demeter, nor does it push its way up amid flourishing harvest fields, but rather in the most intractable woodland. It is a metallic tip concealed beneath innocuous green leaves. It doesn’t intoxicate to promote growth; yet, growth sustains intoxication, as the stem of a goblet holds up the wine. Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together, but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies. Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will abandon their looms to dash off after him into the mountains. Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.

For centuries poets, philosophers, and mythographers recounted and expounded all the many variations of the scene where a goddess is seen while bathing: whether it be Artemis spied on by Actaeon, Athena watched by Tiresias, or Persephone under the all-seeing eyes of Zeus. But it is not until we arrive at the death knells of the pagan world, a century after Constantine, that the poet Nonnus at last reveals what happened before the goddess went off to bathe. For it wasn’t just the noon heat that sent those mythical bodies running to the water. In the case of Semele it was, more than anything else, the need to wash away blood, streams of blood.

But how did it all begin? Princess Semele was leading her mules along the streets of Thebes, wielding a silver whip. Suddenly she remembered a strange dream from the night before. There was a huge tree and sticking out from among its leaves a big, as yet unripe piece of fruit, covered with a beading of dew. A flash of lightning from above burned up the tree trunk, but the piece of fruit remained untouched. She just glimpsed the wings of a bird snatching the fruit up into the sky. Then high above, tearing through the canvas backdrop of the heavens, a male thigh appeared, and a hand sewed the piece of fruit into the thigh, shutting it away under golden buckles. Then the swelling burst open, and a figure with a man’s body and a bull’s head appeared. Semele knew that she was the tree.

She told her father about the dream. Cadmus sent for Tiresias. Semele guessed what his answer would be: a sacrifice. Whenever something strange and frightening came up, you killed an animal. But what animal? A bull, said Tiresias. And Semele would have to sacrifice it with her own hands. She lit the fire on the altar herself. She was standing very close to the animal, and when it was killed a jet of blood spurted across her stomach. Touching her plaited hair, she found it was sticky. And looking down she saw her whole tunic was sodden with blood. So she ran, through the cover of the high reeds, toward the river Asopus. A few moments later and the blood was forgotten. She had bathed in this water since earliest childhood and swam with her head up, against the stream, shaking off the night’s terror in the wind.

Stung by love, Zeus watched Semele swimming from on high. He forgot the earth spread out beneath his feet to stare at that pool of water and the girl swimming. Patiently waiting for their mistress, her mules looked on, and likewise Zeus. The god’s eyes slithered over her wet skin, from toes to bare neck, refraining only from the mysteries of the groin. They lingered over her chest, glistening like armor. The tips of her breasts sent sharp javelins flying into the wound Eros had opened. For a moment Zeus thought he was seeing another princess, Europa, who he had carried off from Sidon. But no, it wasn’t Europa, though there was a blood relation, since Cadmus was Europa’s brother — and above all they shared the same splendor, the same resplendent sheen. In his mind Zeus left the heavens to swim at Semele’s side. He watched the sun impatiently. He wouldn’t be able to go to her bed till nightfall.

The bars defending the palace of Thebes rose silently in the dark. Zeus stretched out on Semele’s bed in the form of a bull with human limbs. Then he was a panther. Then a young man with vine shoots in his curls. Finally he settled into that most perfect of shapes: the serpent. Zeus prolonged their union like some story without end, a rehearsal of the life of the god about to be generated. The snake slithered over Semele’s trembling body and gently licked her neck. Then, gripping her bust in one of his coils, wrapping her breasts in a scaly sash, he sprinkled her not with poison but with liquid honey. Now the snake was pressing his mouth against Semele’s mouth, a dribble of nectar trickling down onto her lips intoxicated her, and all the while vine leaves were sprouting up on the bed and there was a sound of drums beating in the darkness. The earth laughed. Dionysus was conceived just as Zeus shouted the name with which for centuries he was to be evoked: “Evoe!”