The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

III

(photo credit 3.1)

DELOS WAS A HUMP OF DESERTED ROCK, drifting about the sea like a stalk of asphodel. It was here that Apollo was born, in a place not even wretched slave girls would come to hide their shame. Before Leda, the only creatures to give birth on that godforsaken rock had been the seals. But there was a palm tree, and the mother clutched it, alone, bracing her knees in the thin grass. Then Apollo emerged, and everything turned to gold, from top to bottom. Even the water in the river turned to gold and the leaves on the olive tree likewise. And the gold must have stretched downward into the depths, because it anchored Delos to the seabed. From that day on, the island drifted no more.

If Olympus differs from every other celestial home, it is thanks to the presence of three unnatural divinities: Apollo, Artemis, Athena. More than mere functions, these imperious custodians of the unique stripped away that thin, shrouding curtain which nature weaves about its forces. The bright enameled surface and the void, the sharp outline, the arrow. These, and not water or earth, are their elements. There is something autistic about Olympus’s unnatural gods. Apollo, Artemis, Athena march forward cloaked in their own auras. They look down at the world when they plan to strike it, but otherwise their eyes are elsewhere, as if gazing at an invisible mirror, where they find their own images detached from all else. When Apollo and Artemis draw their bows to kill, they are serene, abstracted, their eyes steady on the arrow. All around, Niobe’s children lie dying, slumped over rocks, or on the bare earth. The folds of Artemis’s tunic don’t so much as flutter: all her vitality is concentrated in the left arm holding the bow and the right arm reaching behind the shoulder as her fingers select another mortal arrow from her quiver.

The infant Artemis sat on Zeus’s lap. She knew what she wanted for the future and told her father all her wishes one by one: to remain forever a virgin, to have many names, to rival her brother, to possess a bow and arrow, to carry a torch and wear a tunic with a fringe down to the knee, to hunt wild beasts, to have sixty Oceanides as an escort and twenty Amnisian Nymphs as maids to look after her sandals and dogs, to hold sway over all mountains; she could get by without the cities. As she spoke, she tried, but failed, to grab her father’s beard. Zeus laughed and agreed. He would give her everything she wanted. Artemis left him; she knew where she was headed: first to the dense forests of Crete, then to the ocean. There she chose her sixty Nymphs. They were all nine years old.

The perennial virginity young Artemis demanded as a first gift from her father Zeus is the indomitable sign of detachment. Copulation, mîxis, means “mingling” with the world. Virgo, the virgin, is an isolated, sovereign sign. Its counterpart, when the divine reaches down to touch the world, is rape. The image of rape establishes the canonical relationship the divine now has with a world matured and softened by sacrifices: contact is still possible, but it is no longer the contact of a shared meal; rather it is the sudden, obsessive invasion that plucks away the flower of thought.

Man’s relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and, hence, if they are indifferent in our regard, we can be indifferent as to their existence or otherwise. Such is the peculiar situation of the modern world. But returning to earlier times: there was an age when the gods would sit down alongside mortals, as they did at Cadmus and Harmony’s wedding feast in Thebes. At this point gods and men had no difficulty recognizing each other; sometimes they were even companions in adventure, as were Zeus and Cadmus, when the man proved of vital help to the god. Relative roles in the cosmos were not disputed, since they had already been assigned; hence gods and men met simply to share some feast before returning each to his own business. Then came another phase, during which a god might not be recognized. As a result the god had to assume the role he has never abandoned since, right down to our own times, that of the Unknown Guest, the Stranger. One day the sons of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, invited to their table an unknown laborer who was in fact Zeus. “Eager to know whether they were speaking to a real god, they sacrificed a child and mixed his flesh with that of the sacred victims, thinking that if the stranger was a god he would discover what they had done.” Furious, Zeus pushed over the table. That table was the ecliptic plane, which from that day on would be forever tilted. There followed the most tremendous flood.

After that banquet, Zeus made only rare appearances as the Unknown Guest. The role passed, for the most part, to other gods. Now, when Zeus chose to tread the earth, his usual manifestation was through rape. This is the sign of the overwhelming power of the divine, of the residual capacity of distant gods to invade mortal minds and bodies. Rape is at once possessing and possession. With the old convivial familiarity between god and man lost, with ceremonial contact through sacrifice impoverished, man’s soul was left exposed to a gusting violence, an amorous persecution, an obsessional goad. Such are the stories of which mythology is woven: they tell how mortal mind and body are still subject to the divine, even when they are no longer seeking it out, even when the ritual approaches to the divine have become confused.

The twelve gods of Olympus agreed to appear as entirely human. It was the first time a group of divinities had renounced abstraction and animal heads. No more the unrepresentable behind the flower or the swastika, no more the monstrous creature, the stone fallen from heaven, the whirlpool. Now the gods took on a cool, polished skin, or an unreal warmth, and a body where you could see the ripple of muscles, the long veins.

The change brought with it a new exhilaration and a new terror. All previous manifestations seemed tentative and cautious by comparison; they hadn’t risked the boldest of adventures, which was precisely that of the gods’ disguising themselves as human in a human world, having passed through the whole gamut of metamorphoses. Then this last disguise was more exciting than any of the others. More exciting and more dangerous. For it might well be that the gods’ divinity would no longer be grasped in its fullness. On earth they would meet people who treated them with too much familiarity, maybe even provoked them. The unnatural gods, Apollo, Artemis, and Athena, whose very identity depended on detachment, were more subject to this danger than the others. Any old shepherd might claim he played his pipes better than Apollo; whereas it was unlikely that a mere hetaera would try to tell Aphrodite how to do her job. The people of earth were a temptation: alluring because full of stories and intrigues, or sometimes because isolated in their own stubborn perfection that asked nothing from heaven. But they were also treacherous, ready to stab a god in the back, to disfigure the hermae. A new state of mind emerged, something unknown in the past, that of the god who is misunderstood, mocked, belittled. The result was a string of vendettas and punishments, dispatches issued from an ever busy office.

That Theseus was a creature of Apollo one can gather from all kinds of signs and gestures of homage scattered throughout his adventures. Theseus is always coming up against monsters, and the first slayer of monsters was Apollo. In Delphi the young hero offers the curl that fell across his forehead to Apollo. When he arrives in Athens, Theseus hurls a bull up in the air. But it is important that this takes place in a temple to Delphinian Apollo. Theseus will go back to the same temple before setting off for Crete, this time bringing a branch of the sacred olive tree wrapped in wool, a request for the god to help him. When he catches the bull at Marathon, and the Athenians go wild with joy, Theseus has it sacrificed to Apollo. After killing the Minotaur, Theseus goes to Delos and performs the dance of the cranes. A code within the dance contains the secret of the labyrinth. And Delos was Apollo’s birthplace.

But Apollo makes no comment. All Theseus’s life, the only thing Apollo ever says to him is “Take Aphrodite as your guide.” The order is decisive. All Theseus’s adventures are cloaked in an erotic aura. During the Cretan expedition, it is Apollo who pulls the strings, but from the shadows. The mission is too delicate an affair for him to be seen to be involved. What we see on the stage is the struggle between Dionysus and the hero Theseus, but, in the darkness behind, Apollo and Dionysus have struck up a pact. What that involved was the translatio imperii from Crete to Athens: one god took over from another; power passed from the secret twists of the labyrinth to the frontal evidence of the acropolis. And all of this came about courtesy of Theseus, because the stories had to tell of other things: of young girls being sacrificed, of love affairs, duels, desertions, suicides. The human melodrama with its songs and chatter must cover up for the silent substance of the divine pact.

This changing of the guard, which occurs with Theseus’s expedition to Crete, implies an affinity between Apollo and Dionysus behind their apparent opposition. But it is an affinity they are not eager to bring out into the open, if only because it is not something to be proud of. First and foremost, what these gods have in common in this story is their having been betrayed by mortal women. Ariadne betrays Dionysus for Theseus; Coronis betrays Apollo with the mortal Ischys. To kill the women who loved and betrayed them, Apollo and Dionysus call on Artemis, the divine assassin, with her bow and arrows. And both of them watch in silence as their women are slain. There could be no greater complicity for the two gods than this having both turned, with the same gesture, to the same assassin, to put to death the women they loved.

Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. Desire came as a sudden shock, it caught him by surprise, and immediately he wanted to have done with it. He descended on Coronis like the night. Their coupling was violent, exhilarating, and fast. In Apollo’s mind the clutch of a body and the shooting of an arrow were superimposed. The meeting of their bodies was not a mingling, as for Dionysus, but a collision. In the same way, Apollo had once killed Hyacinthus, the boy he loved most: they were playing together, and the god let fly a discus.

Coronis was pregnant by Apollo when she found herself attracted to a stranger. He came from Arcadia, and his name was Ischys. A white crow watched over her. Apollo had told the bird to guard the woman he loved, “so that no one might violate her purity.” The crow saw Coronis give herself to Ischys. So off it flew to Delphi and its master to tell the tale. It said it had discovered Coronis’s “secret doings.” In his fury, Apollo threw down his plectrum. His laurel crown fell in the dust. Looking at the crow, his eyes were full of hatred, and the creature’s feathers turned black as pitch. Then Apollo asked his sister Artemis to go and kill Coronis, in Lacereia. Artemis’s arrow pierced the faithless woman’s breast. Along with her, the goddess killed many other women by the rugged shores of Lake Boebeis. Before dying, Coronis whispered to the god that he had killed his own son too. At which Apollo tried to save her. In vain. His medical skills were not up to it. But when the woman’s sweet-smelling body was stretched on a pyre high as a wall, the flames parted before the god’s grasping hand, and from the dead mother’s belly, safe and sound, he pulled out Asclepius, the healer.

Ariadne, Coronis: two stories that call to each other, that answer each other. Not only was the killer the same in both cases — Artemis — but perhaps the mortal seducer was likewise the same — Theseus. Ischys is a shadowy figure, of whom we know nothing apart from his name. But of Theseus we know a great deal: we know that in one version he left Ariadne the moment “he fell desperately in love with Aigle, daughter of Panopeus.” So wrote Hesiod; but Pisistratus chose to delete this very line. Why? Did it reveal too much about the hero? A marble stele found in Epidaurus and signed by Isyllus, explains that Aigle (or Aegla) “was so beautiful that people would also call her Coronis,” and that she had a child called Asclepius. Aigle means “splendor,” as Ariadne-Aridela means “the resplendent one.” Coronis (crown) suggests a beauty that goes beyond diffuse brilliance, involves the etching of a form. But who was “Aigle, daughter of Panopeus”? Her father was the king of a small Phocian town with the same name, Panopeus: “Panopeus with its lovely open space for dancing,” says Homer. And in that square danced the Thyiades, initiates of Dionysus. It was one of the places they stopped in the long procession that took them from Athens to Delphi to “enact secret rites for Dionysus.” And already we are reminded of the open space where Ariadne danced out the labyrinth. What’s more, Pausanias explains that the inhabitants of Panopeus “are not Phocians; originally they were Phlegyans.” And already we are reminded that Coronis was the daughter of Phlegyas, from Thessaly, a hero who took the same name as his people. It was with those people that Phlegyas migrated to Phocis, where he reigned as king.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heracles deserves the compassion of the moderns, because he was one of the last victims of the Zodiac. And the moderns no longer really appreciate what that means. They are no longer in the habit of calculating a man’s deeds in terms of the measures of the heavens. As a hero, Heracles is a beast of burden: he has to plow the immense plain of the heavens in every one of its twelve segments. As a result he never manages to achieve that detachment from self which the modern demands and which Theseus achieves so gloriously. Such detachment entails the hero’s mingling and alternating the deeds he is obliged to do with his own personal acts of caprice and defiance. But for Heracles everything is obligation, right up to the atrocious burns that kill him. A pitiful seriousness weighs him down. All too rarely does he laugh. And sometimes he finds himself having to suffer the laughter of others.

Heracles’ buttocks were like an old leather shield, blackened by long exposure to the sun and by the fiery breaths of Cacus and of the Cretan bull. When Heracles caught the mocking Cercopes, who came in the form of two annoying gadflies to rob him and deprive him of his sleep, first he forced them to return to their human form, then he hung them both by their feet on a beam and lifted them on his shoulders, balancing out the weight on both sides. The heads of the two tiny rascals thus dangled at the level of the hero’s powerful buttocks, left uncovered by his lionskin. At which the Cercops remembered the prophetic words of their mother: “My little White Asses, beware of the moment when you meet the great Black Ass.” Hanging upside down, the two thieves shook with laughter, while the hero’s buttocks continued to rise and fall as he marched steadily on. And, as he walked, the hero heard their muffled sneering behind his back. He was sad. Even the people he thrashed didn’t take him seriously. He let the two rascals down and started laughing with them. Others say he killed them.

A mythical event can mean a change of landscape. The Rock of Argos once looked out over a countryside famous for its droughts. And from dry dust one went straight into the mud of the Lerna marshes. So Argos lacked a clean supply of fresh running water. Before it could have one, the bloody affair of the Danaids must take place. A fifty-oared galley arrived from Egypt. With a girl at every oar. They were the fifty daughters of Danaus, the Danaids, with their father. Driven by “an innate repulsion for men,” they were fleeing forced marriages with their fifty cousins, sons of Aegyptus. And, having fled, they had chosen to return to their family’s ancestral home, the place where the wanderings of their forebear Io had begun. They spoke a foreign language, and their skin had been darkened by the African sun. The old king of Argos, Pelasgus, immediately saw their arrival as an unmanageable invasion. Coming toward him were fifty women with extravagant, barbaric clothes and nomadic desert eyes, but from the left arm hole of each Danaid protruded an olive branch wound in white wool. It was the only recognizably Greek sign they carried, but it was a clear one: they were asking for asylum. And they added that, if they were not granted it, they would hang themselves. They were more specific: they would hang themselves from the statues in the temple, using the girdles from their tunics. Fifty women hanging themselves from fifty statues! What a pestilence, dense and poisonous as the muggy airs of Egypt! Better risk a war than that.

Pelasgus gave asylum to this crowd of beautiful barbarians and took them into the town. He was a shade embarrassed: he didn’t know whether to have them sleep in the houses of his subjects or apart, in buildings placed at their disposition. He sensed he was risking his kingdom for these unknown foreigners, who had arrived only the day before. But he didn’t dare send them away. Every time he wavered, he would see fifty statues with fifty women hanging from them. From the Rock of Argos, the ships of the defiant cousins were spotted on the horizon, coming to get their women. They were Egyptians and respected only Egyptian gods; there wasn’t a shrine in the whole of Greece could stop them. Pelasgus had always hoped some sort of compromise might be reached. What if the piratical abduction were dressed up as a series of peaceful marriages? Fifty couples reunited in a huge party? In the end the Danaids gave in. But each went to her marriage bed concealing a knife. And forty-nine times that night a woman’s hand plunged its blade into the body of the man who lay beside her. Only the eldest sister broke the pact: Hypermestra. She let her husband, Lynceus, escape. Throughout the bloody night, torch signals were exchanged among the hills. Hypermestra’s sisters cut off forty-nine heads and went to toss them into the Lerna marshes. Then they heaped up the headless corpses before the gates of Argos.

What happened to the Danaids after that is far from clear. We do know that they were purified by Athena and Hermes. And we know that around the scorching Argos they discovered springs of the purest water. This, together with the massacre of their husbands, was their greatest achievement. Then their father decided they should marry again. Not an easy matter. Nobody came forward with any nuptial gifts. So the deal was turned on its head: the Danaids would be given away to the winners of a series of races. Only Hypermestra, who had run off with Lynceus, and Amymone, abducted by the god Poseidon, were missing. Lined up like a chorus in a play, Danaus gave away the forty-eight remaining girls at the finish line. Whoever touched the tunic of a Danaid first could have her as his bride. “The fastest matchmaking ever,” Pindar remarked. By noon it was all over.

And they’re lined up again the next time we see them, with all their enchanting names — Autonoe, Automate, Cleopatra, Pirene, Iphimedusa, Asteria, Gorge, Hyperippe, Clite — but this time in the underworld, not far from where Sisyphus is pushing his rock. Each is holding a jar. They are taking turns pouring water into a big, leaky pitcher. The water flows out and runs away. For many commentators this became an image of the unhappiness related to something that can never be achieved. But Bachofen sees the forty-eight girls differently. He doesn’t place them in the underworld but in a primordial landscape of reeds and marshes, where the Nile splits up into its delta and sinks into the thirsty soil. The Danaids had come from Africa to the driest place in the Peloponnese, bringing with them the gift of water. Their ancestor Io also liked to appear with a reed in her hand, a creature of the marshes. As Bachofen saw it, that constant pouring of water into a bottomless container had nothing futile or despairing about it. On the contrary, it was almost an image of happiness. He recalled another mythical girl: Iphimedeia. She had fallen in love with Poseidon, as had Io with Zeus. So she would often walk along the beach, go down into the sea, raise the water from the waves and pour it over her breasts. A gesture of love. Then one day Poseidon appeared, wrapped himself around her, and generated two children. Iphimedeia’s gesture has something blissful and timeless about it; it is the motion of feminine substance toward the other, toward any other. A motion that cannot be satisfied, satisfied only in its unfailing repetition.

The Greeks welcomed the gift of water, but rejected the Danaids. Lérnē kakôn, “Lerna, place of evil,” became a proverbial saying recalling another: Lmnia kaká, which evoked the crime of the women of Lemnos. The two massacres had much in common. On both occasions the murderers were Amazons. On both occasions all the men but one got their throats cut. On Lemnos, Hypsipyle took pity on her father, Thoas. In Argos, Hypermestra took pity on her husband, Lynceus. “Of all crimes, that of the women of Lemnos was the worst,” says Aeschylus. It was the utmost iniquity. With time, from the forty-nine putrefied heads of the sons of Aegyptus, a countless-headed hydra was born. It would take Heracles, scourge of the Amazons and descendant of Hypermestra, the only Danaid who broke the pact, to kill that monster.

Aeschylus wrote two trilogies that take absolution as their theme: the Oresteia and the Danaides. The first has come down to us complete; of the second we have only the first tragedy, the Supplices, and a few fragments. In the first trilogy, Athena absolves Orestes of a crime he has indeed committed, matricide. In the second, Aphrodite absolves Hypermestra of the charge of not having committed a crime, not having killed her husband. It was upon these two absolutions that classical Athens was founded.

The Oresteia has survived the centuries intact, and its story is common knowledge; the Danaides has been forgotten, and few think of the fifty sisters as an exemplary subject for tragedy. But one may assume that to Aeschylus’s mind the two absolutions were mirror images of each other and the two trilogies had the same weight, the one counterbalancing the other. One absolved a man, the other a woman. Everybody feels that Orestes’ guilt is the more obvious, Hypermestra’s the more paradoxical: how can one consider it a crime to back out of a premeditated and traitorous murder? But Aeschylus has weighed his crimes well. Hypermestra’s real crime is her betrayal of her sisters. She is the African Amazon breaking away from her tribe. And this is the kind of crime that Athens understands, makes its own, just as it will make Antiope, queen of the Amazons, its own once she has become Theseus’s bride. It is a mysteriously fecund crime. Antiope will give birth to Hippolytus, the handsome Orphic, dressed in white linen, who flees the girls; one of Hypermestra’s descendants will be Heracles, enemy of the Amazons. The Amazon graft is a precious one, a delicate one, producing useful, antidotal fruits. Just as Athena defends Orestes, so does Aphrodite Hypermestra, and with the same high eloquence: “The pure sky loves to violate the land, / and the land is seized by desire for this embrace; / the teeming rain from the sky / makes the earth fecund, so that for mortals it generates / the pastures for their flocks and the sap of Demeter / and the fruit on the trees. From these moist embraces / everything which is comes into being. And I am the cause of this.” Greece was a nuptial land of sexual union, attracted by divine virginity. But it feared those Amazons with neither home nor husband. Hypermestra had betrayed them. For that she deserved to be saved.

Apollo was the first slayer of monsters; then came Cadmus, Perseus, Bellerophon, Heracles, Jason, Theseus. Alongside this list of monster slayers we could place a list of traitors, of women: Hypermestra, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, Antiope, Helen, Antigone. These women don’t have a god as their forebear, but a priestess: Io, who betrayed her goddess, Hera, in whose sanctuary she lived as “guardian of the keys.” “Io illustrates the awakening of woman from the long sleep of an untroubled infancy, a happiness that was ignorant but perfect, to a tormenting love that will be at once the delight and sorrow of her life, forever. She has been dazzled by the divinity of Zeus.”

The heroic gesture of woman is betrayal: its influence on the course of events is just as great as the slaying of monsters. With the monster slain, an impurity lingers on to dog the hero. There will also be the withered remains of the foe whose power the hero turns to his advantage. Heracles clothes himself in the skin of the Nemean lion; Perseus brandishes the petrifying face of the Gorgon as he goes into battle. Leave only emptiness and the chatter of human voices. The isthmus becomes practicable, people trade, and write poems recalling monsters.

The effects of woman’s betrayal are more subtle and less immediate perhaps, but equally devastating. Helen provokes a war that wipes out the entire race of heroes, ushering in a completely new age, when the heroes will merely be remembered in verse. And as a civilizing gesture, woman’s betrayal is no less effective than man’s monster slaying. The monster is an enemy beaten in a duel; in her betrayal, the traitor suppresses her own roots, detaching her life from its natural context. Ariadne is the ruin of Crete, where she was born; Antiope dies fighting the Amazons, her own subjects who were faithfully rallying to her aid; Helen leads the heroes she has loved to their downfall; Medea forsakes the country of sorcery to arrive, at the end of her adventures, in the country of law, Athens; Antigone betrays the law of her city to make a gesture of mercy toward a dead man who does not belong to that city. Like a spiral, woman’s betrayal twists around on itself, forever rejecting that which is given. It is not the negation that comes into play in the frontal and mortal collision of forces but the negation that amounts to a gradual breaking away from ourselves, opposition to ourselves, effacement of ourselves, in a game that may exalt or destroy and which generally both exalts and destroys.

The slaying of monsters and woman’s betrayal are two ways in which negation can operate. The first clears a space, leaves an evocative vacuum where before there was a clutter, thick with heads and tentacles, a scaly arabesque. Woman’s betrayal does not alter the elements in space but rearranges them. The influence of certain pieces on the chessboard is inverted. White attacks white. Black attacks black. The effect is confusing, above all disturbing. For the first time roles have been reversed. And it is always a woman who reverses them. There’s an obstinacy about the hero that obliges him to keep on and on, following just the one path and no other. Hence his need to be complemented, his need of another form of negation. The woman with her betrayal completes the hero’s work: she brings it to its conclusion and winds up the story. This is done in agreement with the hero. It is part of the hero’s civilizing work to suppress himself, because the hero is monstrous. Immediately after the monsters, die the heroes.

With the heroes, man takes his first step beyond the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art. And with the heroes a new world of love is disclosed. The woman helps the hero to slay monsters and capture talismans. A shining initiator into religious mystagogue, she has a splendor that ranges from the glimmering radiance of Ariadne to the dazzle of Medea. But the heroes also ushered in a new kind of love: that between man and man. Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades — all enjoyed what Aeschylus calls “the sacred communion of thighs,” a communion Achilles chided Patroclus for having forgotten merely because he was dead.

The love of one man for another appears with the heroes and immediately reaches its perfect expression. Only the heroes — and precisely because they were heroes — could have overcome what so far for the Greeks had been an insurmountable obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between erasts and erómenos, lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to being painfully short and stifled by the strictest rules. The cruelest of these rules was that, while the lover was granted his swift and predatory pleasure, the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure at all but must submit himself to the other only reluctantly, in something like the way nineteenth-century wives were encouraged to submit to their husbands. And the lover could not look into the eyes of his beloved as he ravished him, so as to avoid embarrassment. The heroes swept all these rules aside. Their relationships were long lasting — only death could end them — and their love didn’t fade merely because the beloved grew hairs on his legs or because his skin, hardened by a life of adventure, lost its youthful smoothness. Thus the heroes achieved that most yearned for of states, in which the distinction between lover and beloved begins to blur. Between Orestes and Pylades, “it would have been difficult to say which of the two was the lover, since the lover’s tenderness found its reflection in the other’s face as in a mirror.” In the same way, these words from the Pseudo-Lucian hold up a late mirror to what was the most constant erotic wish of Greek men, and the most vain.

When it came to slaying monsters, the hero’s model was Apollo killing Python; when it came to making love to young boys it was Apollo’s love for Hyacinthus and Cyparissus, But there is an episode in the god’s life that hints at something even more arcane than those often fatal love affairs. It is the story of how Apollo became a servant to Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly. Of Admetus we know that he was handsome, that he was famous for his herds of cattle, that he loved sumptuous feasts, and that he possessed the gift of hospitality. So much and no more. But we know a great deal about what people did for him. Out of love for Admetus, Apollo was willing to pass as a hireling. For a long time, “inflamed by love for the young Admetus,” this proudest of gods became a mere herdsman, taking a provincial king’s cattle out to graze. In so doing, he left his shock of dazzling hair unkempt and even forsook his lyre, making music on nothing better than a reed pipe.

His sister Artemis blushed with shame. And out of love for Admetus, his Alcestis, the most beautiful of Pelias’s daughters, agreed to die like a stranger, unthreatened by anybody, taking the place of a hostage condemned to death. For love of Admetus, Apollo got the Fates drunk: it must have been the wildest party ever, although we know nothing about it except that it happened. In Plutarch’s vision of things, the Fates, those young girls whose beautiful arms spin the thread of every life on earth, were “the daughters of Ananke,” Necessity. And Necessity, as Euripides reminds us, having met her, “as he wandered among Muse and mountaintop,” without ever “discovering anything more powerful,” is the only power that has neither altars nor statues. Ananke is the only divinity who pays no heed to sacrifices. Her daughters can only be fooled by drunkenness. And very rarely does drink get the better of them. It was a hard task, but Apollo managed it, merely out of love for Admetus, because he wanted to delay the man’s death.

Apollo has an old feud with death. Zeus had forced him to become a servant — oh blessed servitude — to Admetus because Asclepius, son of Apollo and the faithless Coronis, had dared to bring a man back from the dead. Zeus shriveled Asclepius with a thunderbolt, and in revenge Apollo killed the Cyclopes who forged the thunderbolts. Zeus responded by planning a terrible punishment for Apollo. He had meant to hurl him down into Tartarus, and it was only when Leto, his old mistress, begged him not to that he decided to send the god to Thessaly, condemned to be a servant to Admetus. With Apollo’s other lovers, Hyacinthus for example, and Cyparissus, love had always ended in death. Accidents they may have been, and they caused him pain, but the fact was that Apollo himself had killed them. While playing with Hyacinthus, the god hurled a discus that shattered the boy’s skull. Cyparissus fled from Apollo’s advances and in desperation turned himself into a cypress. With Admetus the pattern was reversed. Apollo’s love was so great that in trying to snatch Admetus from death he himself again risked what for a god is the equivalent of death: exile. Yet another thing Apollo did out of love for Admetus, and perhaps it was the most momentous of all, was to accept payment from his beloved, like a pórnos, a merest prostitute, unprotected by any rights, a stranger in his own city, despised first and foremost by his own lovers. It was the first example ever of bonheur dans l’esclavage. That it should have been Apollo who submitted to it made the adventure all the more astounding.

Thus Apollo, lover par excellence, took his love to an extreme where no human after him could follow. Not only did he confound the roles of lover and beloved, as would Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, but he went so far as to become the prostitute of his beloved, and hence one of those beings, “considered the worst of all perverts,” in whose defense no one in Greece ever ventured to speak so much as a word. And, as servant to his beloved, he attempted to roll back the borders of death, something not even Zeus himself had dared interfere with, not even for his own son Sarpedon.

But who was Admetus? When he heard from Apollo that his death could be delayed if somebody else were ready to die in his place, Admetus began to make the rounds of friends and relations. He asked all of them if they were willing to take his place. No one would. So Admetus went to his two old parents, sure they would agree. But even they said no. Next it was the turn of his young and beautiful bride. And Alcestis said yes. The Greeks questioned whether woman was capable of philía in a man’s regard, capable that is of that friendship which grows out of love (“philía dià tòn érōta,” as Plato puts it), and which only men were supposed to experience. But Alcestis actually lifted philía to a higher plane by making the ultimate sacrifice. Even Plato was forced to admit that in comparison with Admetus’s wife, Orpheus “seems weak spirited, nothing more than a zither strummer,” because he went into the underworld alive in his search for Eurydice rather than simply agreeing to die, as Alcestis did, without any hope of return or salvation. True, Alcestis remains the only feminine example of philía the Greeks ever quote, but it is an awesome example. So much so that the gods themselves allowed Heracles to snatch her back just as the young woman was about to cross the calm waters of the lake of the dead. So Alcestis was brought back among the living, back to the grief-stricken Admetus. The king of Pherae had been saved on three occasions: by a god, by a woman, and by a hero. And all this merely because he had shown himself hospitable.

In this elusive, because supernatural, story, the point of maximum impenetrability is the object of love: Admetus. Euripides has Alcestis die onstage like a heroine out of Ibsen, and before dying she bares her heart to us. Ancient literature offers plenty of eloquent references to Apollo’s passion, although texts never connect his having been Admetus’s lover to his having been paid as the king’s servant. The two images of Apollo are always kept separate. Of Admetus we know only that he insulted his old father for refusing to die in his place. All else is obscure, no less so than the way gods are obscure to mortals. Only one character trait shines through the ancient texts: Admetus was hospitable.

But who is Admetus? Dazzled by Alcestis and Apollo, who loved him to the point of self-denial, we might choose to leave the object of their love in the shadows. But let’s stop awhile and take a good look at him: let’s scan the landscape and the names. And we shall discover that Admetus belongs to the shadows as of right.

The landscape is Thessaly, a land that “in olden times was a lake surrounded by mountains high as the sky itself” (one of them was Olympus); a land that preserved its familiarity with the deep waters which periodically burst forth to flood it from a hundred springs and rivers; a fertile country, yellow, rugged, with plenty of horses, cattle, witches. The presiding divinity is not the cool, transparent Athena but a great goddess who looms from the darkness, Pheraia. She holds a torch in each hand and is rarely mentioned. And this too is typical of the spirit of Thessaly, a land where divinity is closer to the primordial anonymity, where the gods rarely assume a human face, and where the Olympians are loath to descend. When a god does appear, he bursts forth, brusque and wild, like the horse Scapheus, whose mane leaps out from the rock split open by his own hooves. The horses that gallop around Thessaly are creatures of the deep, shooting out of the cracks in the ground, the cracks from which Poseidon’s wave rises to flood the plain. They are the dead, brilliantly white, brilliantly black. And Pheraia is a local name for Hecate, the night-roaming, underworld goddess who rends the dark with her torches. As a goddess, she is horse, bull, lioness, dog, but she is also she who appears on the back of bull, horse, or lion. A nurse to boys, a multiplier of cattle. In Thessaly she is Brimó, the strong one, who unites with Hermes, son of Ischys, also the strong one, the lover Coronis preferred to Apollo. And strength (alk) also forms part of the name Alcestis. In the land of Thessaly, rather than as a person divinity presents itself as pure force. But Pheraia, says Hesychius’s dictionary, is also the “daughter [kórē] of Admetus.” Is it possible that before becoming a pair of provincial rulers, Alcestis and Admetus were already sitting side by side as sovereigns of the underworld?

Now the landscape yields up its secret. It is the luxuriant country of the dead, this Thessaly where Apollo must be slave for a “great year,” until the stars return to their original positions — that is, for nine years. Apollo’s stay in Thessaly is a time cycle in Hades. The fact that Zeus chose this place instead of Tartarus as a punishment for Apollo itself suggests that this is a land of death. The name Admetus means “indomitable.” And who is more indomitable than the lord of the dead? Now the few things we know about Admetus take on new meaning: who could be more hospitable than the king of the dead? His is the inn that closes its doors to no one, at no hour of the day or night. And no one has such numerous herds as the king of the dead. When Admetus invites friends and relations to die for him, he is scarcely doing anything unusual: it’s what he does all the time. And the reason Admetus fully expects others to substitute for him in death is now clear: he is the lord of death, he greets the arriving corpses, sorts them and spreads them out across his extensive domains.

Now we see how truly extreme Apollo’s love is, more so even than it had seemed: out of love, Apollo tries to save the king of the dead from death. Now the love of both Apollo and Alcestis reveals itself as thoroughly provocative: it is a love for the shadow that steals all away. From Alcestis we discover what the kóre, snatched by Hades while gathering narcissi, never told us: that the god of the invisible is not just an abductor but a lover too.

The texts have little to say about Apollo’s period of servitude because it would mean touching on matters best kept secret. About Heracles’ servitude under Omphale the poets chose to be ironic. But, when it came to Apollo’s under Admetus, no one wanted to risk it. All that remains is the exemplum of a love so great as to compensate for any amount of shame and suffering. According to Apollonius Rhodius, after killing the Cyclopes, Apollo was punished by being sent not to Thessaly but to the Hyperboreans in the far North. There he wept tears of amber, even though a god cannot weep. But what really put the story out of bounds was not just the scandalous suffering (and scandalously servile passion) of the “pure god in flight from the heavens.” There was something else behind it. An ancient prophecy, the secret of Prometheus: the prediction that Zeus would one day see his throne usurped, by his most luminous son.

Apollo often plays around the borders of death. But Zeus is watching from on high. He knows that, if ignored, his son’s game will bring about the advent of a new age, the collapse of the Olympian order. Within the secret that lies behind this, and it’s a secret rarely even alluded to, Apollo is to Zeus what Zeus had been to Kronos. And the place where the powers of the two gods always collide is death. Even beneath the sun of the dead, among the herds of Thessaly, Apollo doesn’t forget his challenge to his father and chooses to snatch, if only for a short while, his indomitable beloved, Admetus, from that moment when “the established day does him violence.” The never-mentioned dispute between father and son is left forever unsettled at that point.

The admirable asymmetry on which the Athenian man’s love for the younger boy is based is described in minute detail by that surveyor of all matters erotic, Plato. The entire metaphysics of love is concentrated in the gesture with which the beloved grants his grace (cháris) to the lover. This gesture, still echoed in the Italian expression concedere le proprie grazie, and again in the passionate intertwining drawn tight by the French verb agréer (and derivations: agréments, agréable, and so on), is the very core of erotic drama and mystery. How should we think of it? How achieve it? For the Barbarians it is something to condemn; for the more lascivious Greeks and those incapable of expressing themselves, such as the Spartans or the Boeotians, it is simply something enjoyable, and as such obligatory: to give way to a lover becomes a state directive. But as ever the Athenians are a little more complicated and multifarious (poikíloi) than their neighbors, even when it comes to “the law of love.” They are not so impudent as to speak of a “grace” that actually turns out to be an obligation. What could they come up with, then, to achieve the beloved’s grace, without ever being sure of it? The word.

As warriors besieging a fortress will try one ruse after another to have that object so long before their eyes fall at last into their hands, so the Athenian lover engages in a war of words, surrounds his beloved with arguments that hem him in like soldiers. And the things he says are not just crude gallantries but the first blazing precursors of what one day, using a Greek word without remembering its origin, will be called metaphysics. The notion that thought derives from erotic dialogue is, for the great Athenians, true in the most straightforward, literal sense. Indeed, that link between a body to be captured like a fortress and the flight of metaphysics is, for Plato, the very image of eros. The rest of the world are mere Barbarians who simply don’t understand, or other Greeks with no talent for language, in other words, suffering from “mental sloth.” They too are excluded from that finest of wars, which is the war of love.

As far as the lover was concerned, Athens invented a perfect duplicity, which uplifted him while leaving his undertaking forever uncertain. On the one hand, there is nothing the lover may not do; he is forgiven any and every excess. He alone can break his oath without the gods punishing him, since “there are no oaths in the affairs of Aphrodite.” And again, the lover may get wildly excited, or choose to sleep the night outside the barred door of his beloved’s house, and nobody will take it upon himself to criticize him. On the other hand, endless difficulties are placed in his way: his beloved will go to the gymnasium accompanied by a lynx-eyed pedagogue hired by the boy’s father precisely to prevent him from listening to the advances of any would-be lover lying in wait. And the boy’s friends are worse still: they watch him carefully, and if ever he shows signs of giving way, they taunt him and make him feel ashamed of that first hint of a passion that, encouraged by the lover’s alluring words, could lead to the desired exchange of graces, to the moment when the lover will breathe “intelligence and every other virtue” into the mouth and body of his beloved, while the latter submits to his lover’s advances because he wishes to gain “education and knowledge of every kind.” [Eispneîn, “breathe into,” is first and foremost the lover’s prerogative, and eíspnelos, “he who breathes into another,” was another word for “lover.”) This is the only and arduous “meeting point” admitted between the two asymmetrical laws that govern the lives of the lover and his beloved. Thus, at that fleeting and paradoxical point, “it is good for the young beloved to surrender himself to his lover; but only at that point and at no other.” So says Plato. And such was the life of the lover, the most precarious, the most risky, and the most provocative of all the roles the Athenians invented.

After slaughtering their men, the women of Lemnos were struck by a kind of revenge the gods had never used before nor would again: they began to smell. And in this revenge we glimpse the grievance that Greece nursed against womankind. Greek men thought of women as of a perfume that is too strong, a perfume that breaks down to become a suffocating stench, a sorcery, “sparkling with desire, laden with aromas, glorious,” but stupefying, something that must be shaken off. It is an attitude betrayed by small gestures, like that passage in the Pseudo-Lucian where we hear of a man climbing out of bed, “saturated with femininity,” and immediately wanting to dive into cold water. When it comes to women, Greek sensibility brings together both fear and repugnance: on the one hand, there is the horror at the woman without her makeup who “gets up in the morning uglier than a monkey”; on the other, there is the suspicion that makeup is being used as a weapon of apátè, of irresistible deceit. Makeup and female smells combine to generate a softness that bewitches and exhausts. Better for men the sweat and dust of the gymnasium. “Boys’ sweat has a finer smell than anything in a woman’s makeup box.”

One gets a sense, in these reactions to womankind, of something remote being revealed as though through nervous reflex. In the later, more private and idiosyncratic writers, we pick up echoes that take us back to a time long, long before, to the terror roused by the invasion of the Amazons, to the loathsome crime of the women of Lemnos.

For the Greeks, the unnameable aspect of eros was passivity during coitus. If the male beloved (erómenos) has to be so careful and to observe so many rules in order to distinguish his behavior beyond any shadow of a doubt from that of the male prostitute, who, “despite having a man’s body, sins a woman’s sins,” it is not simply because of the indignity attached to whoever accepts the woman’s part, thus debasing his own sexual status. Rather, it is the very pleasure of the woman, the pleasure of passivity, that is suspect and perhaps conceals a profound malignancy. This treacherous pleasure incites the Greek man to rage against the grossness inherent in the physiology and anatomy of these aesthetically inferior beings, obliged to parade “prominent, shapeless breasts, which they keep bound up like prisoners.” But he rages precisely because he senses that this grossness might conceal a mocking power that eludes male control. The Athenians were extremely evasive on this question, although they never tired of mentioning cases of male love for boys.

As for what women might get up to when alone and unobserved by masculine eyes, a reverent and ominous silence appears to reign. And when it comes to love between women, the writers sometimes daren’t even use the word. In fact it is pathetic to see how in certain passages on the subject, modern translators will translate that forbidden word as lesbianism, without even sensing any incongruousness. The word lesbianism meant nothing to the Greeks, whereas the verb lesbiázein meant “licking the sexual organs,” and the word tribádes, “the rubbers,” referred to women who had sex with other women, as though in the fury of their embrace they wanted to consume each other’s vulvas.

But it wasn’t so much love between women that scandalized the Greeks — to their credit they were not easily scandalized — as the suspicion, which had taken root in their minds, that women might have their own indecipherable erotic self-sufficiency, and that those rites and mysteries they celebrated, and in which they refused to let men participate, might be the proof of this. And, behind it all, their most serious suspicion had to do with pleasure in coitus. Only Tiresias had been able to glimpse the truth, and that was precisely why he was blinded.

One day Zeus and Hera were quarreling. They called Tiresias and asked him which of the two, man or woman, got the most pleasure from sex. Tiresias answered that if the pleasure were divided into ten parts, the woman enjoyed nine and the man only one. On hearing this, Hera got mad and blinded Tiresias. But why did Hera get mad? Couldn’t she glory in her own superiority, something that set her above even Zeus? No, because here Tiresias was trespassing on a secret, one of those secrets sages are called upon to safeguard rather than reveal. This sexual tittle-tattle continued to make the rounds, however. Centuries later it was still being bandied about, though, as always, with distortions: now they were saying that a woman’s pleasure was only twice that of the man. But it was enough: it confirmed an antique doubt, a fear at least as old as the ruttish daughters of the sun. Perhaps woman, that creature shut away in the gynaeceum, where “not a single particle of true eros penetrates,” knew a great deal more than her master, who was always cruising about gymnasiums and porticoes.

“Make up your minds who you think are better, those who love boys, or those who like women. I, in fact, who have enjoyed both kinds of passion, am like balanced scales with the two plates either side at exactly the same height.” So says Theomnestus. Since time immemorial the question as to which took the erotic prize, love with boys or with women, had been a real thorn in the flesh for the Greeks. Some even maintained that Orpheus was torn apart by women because he had been the first to declare the superiority of love with boys. Later on, even though the debate had been settled before it started in favor of the boys, the rule was that one wasn’t to say so too openly. Finally, in the late and loquacious years of the Pseudo-Lucian, we hear a cackle of voices — spiteful or mellifluous, uncertain or arrogant — still debating the issue. Licinus answers Theomnestus’s question in the best way possible: with a story. One day, walking beneath the porticoes of Rhodes, he met two old acquaintances: Caricles, a young man from Corinth, and the impetuous Callicratides, an Athenian. Caricles was wearing, as always, a little makeup. He thought it made him more attractive to women. And there was never any shortage of those around him. His house was full of dancers and singers. The only voices heard there were women’s voices, except, that is, for one old cook, past it now, and a few very young slave boys. Quite the opposite of Callicratides’ house. Callicratides did the rounds of the gymnasiums and surrounded himself exclusively with attractive and as yet hairless boys. When the first suspicion of a beard began to scratch their skin, he would move them on to administrative work and bring in others. The three friends decided to spend a few lazy days together taking turns discussing that old chestnut: who takes the erotic palm, boys or women?

For Callicratides, women were “an abyss,” like the great ravines in the rocks around Athens where criminals were thrown. Caricles, however, couldn’t respond to boys at all and thought incessantly about women. Having taken a boat to Cnidos, the three friends were eager to see the famous Aphrodite by Praxiteles. Even before they went into Aphrodite’s temple, they could feel a light breeze blowing from it. It was the aura. The courtyard of the sanctuary wasn’t paved with the usual austere slabs of gray stone but was full of plants and fruit trees. In the garden all around them they saw myrtles with their berries and other shrubs associated with the goddess. Plants typical of Dionysus were also in abundance, since “Aphrodite is even more delightful when she is with Dionysus, and their gifts are sweeter if mixed together.” Finally the three friends went into the temple. In the center they saw the Parian marble of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, naked, a faint lift to the corners of her lips, a faint hint of arrogance. Caricles immediately began to rave over the stunning frontal view. One could suffer anything for a woman like that, and so saying he stretched up to kiss her. Callicratides watched in silence. There was a door behind the statue, and the three friends asked one of the temple guardians if she had the keys to it. It was then that Callicratides was stunned by the beauty of Aphrodite’s buttocks. He yelled his admiration, and Caricles’ eyes were wet with tears.

Then the three fell silent as they continued to contemplate that marble body. Behind a thigh they noticed a mark, like a stain on a tunic. Licinus assumed it was a defect in the marble and remarked on this as yet another reason for admiring Praxiteles: how clever of him to hide this blemish in one of the least visible parts of the statue. But the guardian who had opened the door and was standing beside the visitors told them that the real story behind the stain was rather different.

She explained that a young man from a prominent family had once been in the habit of visiting the temple and had fallen in love with the goddess. He would spend whole days parading his devotion. He got up at dawn to go to the sanctuary and went home only reluctantly after sundown. Standing before the statue, he would whisper on and on in some secret lover’s conversation, breaking off every now and then to consult the oracle by tossing a few Libyan gazelle bones. He was waiting anxiously for Aphrodite’s throw to come up. That was when every face of the bones bore a different number. One evening, when the guardians came to close the temple, the young man hid behind the door where the three visitors were now standing and spent “an unspeakable night” with the statue. The fruits of his lovemaking had stained the statue. That mark on the white marble demonstrated the indignity the image of the goddess had suffered. The young man was never seen again. Rumor had it that he drowned himself in the sea. When the guardian had finished, Caricles immediately exclaimed: “So, men love women even when they are made out of stone. Just imagine if she had been alive …” But Callicratides smiled and said that actually the story supported his side of the argument. For despite being alone a whole night with the statue, and completely free to do whatever he wanted, the young man had embraced the marble as if it were a boy and hadn’t wanted to take the woman from the front. The two antagonists began arguing again, and Licinus was hard put to persuade them to leave the temple and continue elsewhere. In the meantime the worshipers were beginning to arrive.

To a considerable extent classical morality developed around reflections on the nature of men’s love for boys; basically such reflections stressed the quality of aret and played down something self-evident: pleasure. aret means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached; the morality wasn’t just something added by mischievous latecomers. In any event, aret is incandescent whenever manifest in a man’s love for a boy. In its Kantian, unattached isolation, the Greeks would scarcely have appreciated the quality at all. The last and ultimate image of aret Greece offers us is a field strewn with the corpses of young Thebans after the battle of Chaeronea. The corpses were found lying in pairs: they were all couples, lovers, who had gone into battle together against the Macedonians. It was to be Greece’s last stand. Afterward, Philip II and Alexander set about turning the country into a museum.

“Nothing beautiful or charming ever comes to a man except through the Charites,” says Theocritus. But how did the Charites come down to man? As three rough stones that fell from heaven in Orchomenus. Only much later were statues placed next to those stones. What falls from heaven is indomitable, forever. Yet man is obliged to conquer those stones, or girls with fine tresses, if he wants his singing to be “full of the breath of the Charites.” How to go about it? From the Chárites, one passes to cháris, from the Graces to grace. And it is Plutarch who tells us what the relationship is: “The ancients, Protogenes, used the word cháris to mean the spontaneous consent of the woman to the man.” Grace, then, the inconquerable, surrenders itself only to he who strives to conquer it through erotic siege, even though he knows he can never enter the citadel if the citadel doesn’t open, grace-fully, for him.

The relationship between erasts and erómenos, lover and beloved, was highly formalized and to a certain extent followed the rules of a ritual. In Sparta and Crete, the main centers of love between men, one could still find clear evidence of these rites. In Crete, each boy’s parents knew that one day they would be forewarned of their son’s imminent abduction. The lover would then arrive and, if the parents considered him worthy, would be free to carry off the boy and disappear into the country with him. Their whereabouts unknown, they would live together in complete privacy for two months. Finally the beloved would reappear in the city with “a piece of armor, an ox, and a cup,” ceremonial gifts from his lover. Athens, with its vocation for modernity, was less rigid than Crete but equally tough below the surface. Here the rite was transformed into set behavior patterns that, though immersed in the buzz and chatter of the city square, remained as recognizable as dance steps. The lovers would cruise around the gymnasiums with a fake air of abstraction, their eyes running over the youngsters working out in the dust. It was the primordial setting for desire. The lovers would watch the boys, throwing furtive glances at “hips and thighs, the way sacrificing priests and seers size up their victims.” They would sneak glances at the prints their genitals left in the sand. They would wait till midday, when, with the combination of oil, sweat, and sand, “dew and down would bloom on the boys’ genitals as on the skin of a peach.” The place was drenched with pleasure, but the word pleasure couldn’t be mentioned, because pleasure was common property — even slaves and immigrants could enjoy it — whereas the amorous journey undertaken that morning aimed at an excellence, a splendor and glory, that belonged to one and one alone: an Athenian, the chosen one, the boy who, through subterfuge and gifts of garlands, would become the beloved.

That reluctance to admit the pleasure involved would never be dropped, not even in the ultimate intimacy: “in the act of love the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure, as does the woman; but contemplates, in a state of sobriety, the excitement of the other drunken with Aphrodite.” When the lover approaches, the beloved stands upright and looks straight ahead, his eyes not meeting those of his lover, who bends down and almost doubles up over him, greedily. The vase painters generally show thigh-to-thigh contact rather than anal penetration: this allows the beloved to maintain his erect, indifferent, detached position. But all too soon the whole situation would be reversed. The first facial hair marked the beginning of the end of the boy’s period as beloved. The hairs were called Harmodius and Aristogiton because they freed the boy from this erotic tyranny. Then, as though in need of a little time out, the boy escapes “from the tempest and torment of male love.” But very soon he is back in that tempest, and in a new role: instead of being eyed, nude in the gymnasium, he is himself cruising around younger boys, in the same places, nosing out his prey. Transformed from erómenos into erasts, he would finally discover, as a lover, what it means to be possessed by love. Only the lover is éntheos, says Plato. Only the lover is “full of god.”