The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

IV

(photo credit 4.1)

OF THE OLYMPIANS, THE FIRST THING WE can say is that they were new gods. They had names and shapes. But Herodotus assures us that “before yesterday” no one knew “where any of these gods had come from, nor whether they had existed eternally, nor what they looked like.” When Herodotus says “yesterday,” he means Homer and Hesiod, whom he calculated as having lived four centuries before himself. And to his mind it was they who “gave the gods their names, shared out arts and honors among them, and revealed what they looked like.” But in Hesiod we can still sense the effort involved in establishing a cosmogony, the slow detachment of the gods from what is either too abstract or too concrete. Only at the end, after the cosmos had quaked again and again, did Zeus “divide the honors among them.”

But Homer is the real scandal, his indifference toward the origin of things, the total absence of pomposity, his presumption in beginning not at the beginning of his tale but at the end, at the last of those ten disastrous years of war beneath the walls of Troy, years that had served, above all else, to wipe out the whole race of the heroes. The heroes were themselves a recent phenomenon, and here was the poet already celebrating their passing. The Olympians had quickly established a constant rhythm to their lives and seemed intent on maintaining it forever, as if it were the obvious choice. The earth was there for raids, whims, intrigues, experiments. But what happened before Olympus? Here and there Homer does give us hints, but fleeting ones. No one is interested in going into details. While the destiny of a Trojan warrior can be most engrossing.

There is something assumed in Homer but never mentioned, something that lies behind both silences and eloquence. It is the idea of perfection. What is perfect is its own origin and does not wish to dwell on how it came into being. What is perfect severs all ties with its surroundings, because sufficient unto itself. Perfection doesn’t explain its own history but offers its completion. In the long history of divinities, the inhabitants of Olympus were the first who wished to be perfect rather than powerful. Like an obsidian blade, the aesthetic for the first time cut away all ties, connections, devotions. What remained was a group of figures, isolated in the air, complete, initiated, perfect — three words that Greek covers in just one: téleios. Even though it would not appear until much later, the statue was the beginning, the way in which these new beings would manifest themselves.

When the Greeks needed to appeal to an ultimate authority, it wasn’t a sacred text but Homer that they went to. Greece was founded on the Iliad. And the Iliad was founded on a play of words, the substitution of a couple of letters in a name. Briseis, Chryseis. The bone of contention that triggers the poem is Briseis kallipárēos, Briseis “of the lovely cheeks”: Agamemnon wants her exchanged with, or substituted for, Chryseis kallipárēos, Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” In Greek only two letters separate the two girls. And it was not “because of the girl,” Achilles childishly insists, that the whole quarrel began but because of the substitution, as if the hero sensed that it was this notion of exchange that had tightened the noose that no hero, nor any generation that came after the heroes, would be able to loosen.

It is the power of exchange in all its manifestations that looms over the opening of the Iliad: there is the woman, or rather the two women, each with lovely cheeks, almost indistinguishable, like coins from the same mint; there are the words of Agamemnon and Achilles, which oppose each other as one force opposes another (antibíosi epéessin); there is the “immense,” the “splendid ransom,” offered by the priest Chryses for his daughter Chryseis, and “the holy hecatomb” the Achaeans offer the priest. On each occasion, the elements of the exchange are presented in pairs: the women, the words, the offerings. The only thing missing is money, which will eventually be composed from the mixing of these elements. But, for money to emerge in its purest form, the heroes must first kill each other off. As early as Thucydides we have the observation that precisely what was lacking during the Trojan War was money. That “lack of money” (achrēmatía) made the whole mixture less potent than it would later be, but far more glorious.

“Helen is the only woman in Homer who clearly has distinctive epithets of her own,” observes Milman Parry. Kallipárēos—“of the lovely cheeks”—is applied to eight women and thus used more than any other female epithet. The Iliad tells the story of two quarrels: the quarrel over Helen, the unique Helen, who no one would dare to substitute; and the quarrel over Briseis “of the lovely cheeks,” who Agamemnon would like to substitute with Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” Between uniqueness unassailable and unassailable substitution, a war flares up on the Trojan plain, a war that can never end.

If we are to give credence to his spouse-sister, Hera, Zeus “was interested in only one thing, going to bed with women, mortal and immortal alike.” But at least one woman rejected him, and, what was worse, an immortal: Thetis. Resentful, Zeus went on “spying on her from on high, against her will.” And, given that she had refused him, he resorted to the most solemn of oaths to make sure she would never have an immortal companion. As Hera saw it, Thetis didn’t yield to Zeus because she was “at once respectful and secretly afraid” of his celestial partner, herself. So the two of them became friends. But here, as elsewhere, Hera’s vision of events is too self-centered. There was a more serious motive behind Thetis’s rejection, indeed the most serious motive possible: her union with Zeus would have led to the birth of the son destined to displace his father: “a son stronger than his father,” say both Pindar and Aeschylus, using exactly the same words.

The primordial Themis revealed the danger to a general assembly of Zeus and the other Olympians. Only then did Zeus really give up on Thetis, because he wanted to “preserve his own power forever.” Perhaps Thetis already knew the secret, perhaps that was why she had rejected the god of gods. Or at least one might conclude as much by analogy, since there was another occasion when Thetis was the only woman who protected Zeus’s sovereignty. This was when various other Olympians, including Athena, who was born from the god’s own temple, wanted to put him in chains. Upon which Thetis, a marine goddess who never went to Olympus, called Briareos, a hundred-headed Titan, to the rescue, and Zeus was saved. Zeus was thus indebted to Thetis for her support, “in both word and deed,” and she would exploit that indebtedness to defend her son, Achilles.

As for the motives behind the Olympian plot to bind Zeus in a thousand knots, Homer’s lips are sealed. But a god in chains is a god dethroned: that, and nothing less than that, was what the Olympians had been plotting. Thus the need for a woman’s help was not limited to the heroes but also applied to the greatest of the gods. Even Zeus, in his unscathed Olympian stability, knew that his reign must end one day. As early as Homer’s time, he already owed his continuing reign to expediency, since on one occasion he had repressed his desire for a woman to avoid the birth of a more powerful son and on another he had been saved only because that same woman had called on the help of Briareos, one of those rough-hewn, primordial creatures the Olympians would generally rather not have mentioned. Even Zeus, then, had opposed cunning to destiny; even the supreme god had put off his own end. The game was not over yet.

Before revealing her secret to the Olympians, Themis had told her son Prometheus. Chained to a rock, Prometheus thought of Zeus endlessly pursuing his “empty-headed” philandering, never knowing which of his conquests might prove fatal to him. Those frivolous adventures were becoming rather like a game of Russian roulette. And Prometheus kept his mouth shut.

Thus Zeus’s womanizing takes on a new light. Each affair might conceal the supreme danger. Every time he approached a woman, Zeus knew he might be about to provoke his own downfall. Thus far the stories take us: but for every myth told, there is another, unnameable, that is not told, another which beckons from the shadows, surfacing only through allusions, fragments, coincidences, with nobody ever daring to tell all in a single story. And here the “son stronger than his father” is not to be born yet, because he is already present: he is Apollo. Over the never-ending Olympian banquet, a father and son are watching each other, while between them, invisible to all but themselves, sparkles the serrated sickle Kronos used to slice off the testicles of his father, Uranus.

Whenever their lives were set aflame, through desire or suffering, or even reflection, the Homeric heroes knew that a god was at work. They endured the god, and observed him, but what actually happened as a result was a surprise most of all for themselves. Thus dispossessed of their emotion, their shame, and their glory too, they were more cautious than anybody when it came to attributing to themselves the origin of their actions. “To me, you are not the cause, only the gods can be causes,” says old Priam, looking at Helen on the Scaean Gate. He couldn’t bring himself to hate her, nor to see her as guilty for nine bloody years’ fighting, even though Helen’s body had become the very image of a war about to end in massacre.

No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” (átē). They knew that this invisible incursion often brought ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.”

Thus a people obsessed with the idea of hubris were also a people who dismissed with the utmost skepticism an agent’s claim actually to do anything. When we know for sure that a person is the agent of some action, then that action is mediocre; as soon as there is a hint of greatness, of whatever kind, be it shameful or virtuous, it is no longer that person acting. The agent sags and flops, like a medium when his voices desert him. For the Homeric heroes there was no guilty party, only guilt, immense guilt. That was the miasma that impregnated blood, dust, and tears. With an intuition the moderns jettisoned and have never recovered, the heroes did not distinguish between the evil of the mind and the evil of the deed, murder and death. Guilt for them is like a boulder blocking the road; it is palpable, it looms. Perhaps the guilty party is as much a sufferer as the victim. In confronting guilt, all we can do is make a ruthless computation of the forces involved. And, when considering the guilty party, there will always be an element of uncertainty. We can never establish just how far he really is guilty, because the guilty party is part and parcel of the guilt and obeys its mechanics. Until eventually he is crushed by it perhaps, perhaps abandoned, perhaps freed, while the guilt rolls on to threaten others, to create new stories, new victims.

Every sudden heightening of intensity brought you into a god’s sphere of influence. And, within that sphere, the god in question would fight against or ally himself with other gods on a second stage alive with presences. From that moment on, every event, every encounter occurred in parallel, in two places. To tell a story meant to weave those two series of parallel events together, to make both worlds visible.

Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel over the géras, that part of the spoils of war which is divided, though not in equal portions, among the prestigious members of the army. Zeus, talking to the other gods assembled on the golden paving of Olympus, reminds them that he is fond of the Trojans because they have never forgotten to give him his géras, that part of the sacrifice dedicated to him through sacrifices. And he makes the point while discussing the fate of Agamemnon, Achilles, and their enemies. Every word in human terminology takes on another meaning in a divine context, but the words themselves frequently remain the same, and every story unfolds simultaneously on earth and in heaven. With Olympian conjuring, it will sometimes even seem that everything is happening on the same stage. When Helen goes to Paris’s bedroom to visit the warrior, just returned from the battlefield “as though from a dance,” it is Aphrodite who gets a chair for her. But this closeness and familiarity doesn’t diminish the distance in the slightest. These beings blessed with the power of speech may be aware of sometimes possessing divine beauty or strength or grace, yet there will always be something they lack: the inextinguishable reserves of the Olympians, their “inextinguishable laughter” when they see Hephaestus limping through their banqueting hall, that capacity for “living easily” which is the hallmark of those few beings who know that they will live forever.

Ate has bright tresses and a light step. She doesn’t even touch the ground. She alights on men’s heads and traps them in a net. “She tramples whatever is weak,” then moves on to the next head. She doesn’t even flinch before the gods. On one occasion Zeus was foolish enough to start boasting that Alcmene was about to bear him a son, Heracles. The words burst forth happily from his mind, but silent Ate had already slipped in there. The infatuated god swore an oath that his next descendant would reign over all his neighbors. With a single bound, Hera was down in Argos: she delayed Heracles’ birth and speeded up that of another child descended from Zeus, Eurystheus. Thus for years and years Heracles would have to toil in the service of Eurystheus, who reigned over all his neighbors.

Homeric fairness doesn’t distinguish between the fatal infatuations that befall the gods and those that befall men. The imperceptible tread of Ate’s foot may alight on anyone’s head. On this occasion, when Zeus discovered the trick, “a sharp pain stabbed into the depths of his mind,” and he grabbed Ate by her tresses and hurled her to earth. Ate plunged down on top of a hill in Phrygia. There one day Troy would rise.

Ananke, Necessity, who stands above everything in ancient Greece, even Olympus and its gods, was never to have a face. Homer does not personify her, but he does describe her three daughters, the Fates with their spindles; or the Erinyes, her emissaries; or Ate with her light feet. All female figures. There was only one place of worship dedicated to Ananke: on the slopes of the Acrocorinth, the mountain belonging to Aphrodite and her sacred prostitutes, stood a sanctuary to Ananke and Bia, goddess of violence. “But there is a tradition not to enter the temple,” remarks Pausanias. And, indeed, what could one ask of she who does not listen? The difference between gods and men can be grasped above all in their relationship to Ananke. The gods endure her and use her; men merely endure her.

While Achaeans and Trojans do battle, Zeus and Poseidon, the gods who rule sky and sea, are invisibly at work all around them. But what are they up to? “They are tightening that knot that cannot be broken or loosened, but which has loosened the knees of many.” The warriors wave their swords in the empty air until they meet the obstacle that is their enemy. All move, caught in the same net, where innumerable threads are close to being tightened. When the knot is drawn tight, the warrior dies, even before the lethal metal touches him. What Zeus and Poseidon do on the plains of Troy is no different from what Hephaestus did to Ares and Aphrodite when he caught them in bed together, or even what Oceanus does in hugging the earth. Hephaestus’s net was gold, as befitted an object in Olympus, but it was thin as a spider’s web too, and invisible even to the gods who laughed as they watched the embarrassment of the captive lovers. Oceanus wraps the earth in nine liquid coils.

According to Parmenides, being itself is trapped by the “bonds of powerful Ananke’s net.” And in the Platonic vision of things, we find an immense light, “bound to the sky and embracing its whole circumference, the way hempen ropes are bound around the hulls of galleys.” In each case knots and bonds are essential. Necessity is a bond that curves back on itself, a knotted rope (peírar) that holds everything within its limits (péras). Deî, a key word, meaning “it is necessary,” appears for the first time in the Iliad: “Why is it necessary (deî) for the Argives to make war on the Trojans?” That verb form, governed by an impersonal subject, the es of everything that escapes an agent’s will, is traced back by Onians to déō, “to bind,” and not to déō, “to lack,” as other philologists would have it. It is the same image, observes Onians, “that, without being aware of its meaning in the dark history of the race, we find in a common expression of our own language: ‘it is bound to happen.’ ”

Let’s put some pressure now on this word anánkē. Chantraine concludes that “no etymology grasps the real sense of anánkē and its derivations: ‘constriction’ and at the same time ‘kinship.’ The underlying notion that might justify this double semantic development would be that of the bond.” Others see the word as being close to the idea of “taking in one’s arms.” When speaking of Heracles caught in the horrendous shirt of Nessus, the chorus in the Trachiniae begin: “If in the Centaur’s murderous net, a dolopoiòs anánkē torments him …” But how are we to understand that dolopoiòs anánkē? A “deceitful embrace”? Or “deceitful necessity”? Or both? Once again we have the net, and necessity seen as a lethal embrace. With wonderful monotony, the net, its knots ever ready to tighten, is always there. It falls over Aphrodite’s adulterous bed, over the battlefield beneath the walls of Troy, over being itself, and the cosmos, and the blistered body of Heracles. Whatever the situation, that one weapon is more than enough for Ananke. There were many in Greece who doubted the existence of the gods, but none ever expressed a doubt about that net, at once invisible and more powerful than the gods.

When Alexander arrived in Gordium, he went to the acropolis and found the cart that was tied to its yoke with a knot that no one had been able to undo. There was a legend about that cart, “which said that whoever untied the knot that bound the cart to its yoke would rule over all of Asia. The knot was tied with cornel bark, and it was impossible to find either beginning or end. Unable to untie the knot and not wanting to leave it as it was, in case his failure should spread disquiet through his army, some say that he sliced the knot cleanly with his sword and then claimed that he had untied it.” But there’s another version to the story, according to which Alexander “removed the belaying pin from the drawbar [this was a wooden pin forced into the drawbar and around which the knot was secured] and thus removed the yoke from the drawbar.” Then Alexander and his followers “went away from the cart convinced that the oracle’s predictions about the untying of the knot had been fulfilled.” Thus, “the knot that can be neither broken nor loosened,” the knot that Zeus and Poseidon tightened around the heads of the warriors beneath the walls of Troy, was not to be untied even by Alexander. Alexander, however, had come up with what would later be the obvious solution: to get around necessity by removing the pin in the drawbar. And as Alexander thus did what countless others would do after him, Greece itself fell apart. Alexander left, the knot remained intact, “with neither beginning nor end,” but the cart had been separated from its yoke.

In the late pagan era we can still find this in Macrobius: “amor osculo significatur, necessitas nodo”: “love is represented with a kiss, necessity with a knot.” Two circular images, the mouth and the noose, embrace everything that is. Eros, “born when Ananke was lord and everything bowed before her gloomy will,” once boasted that he had gained possession of the “Ogygian scepter,” primordial as the waters of the Styx itself. He could now force “his own decrees upon the gods.” But Eros said nothing of Ananke, who had come before him. There is a hostility between Eros and Ananke, a hostility that springs from an obscure likeness, as between the kiss and the knot.

Ananke belongs to the world of Kronos. Indeed she is his companion and sits with him on their polar throne as Zeus sits beside Hera in Olympus. That is why Ananke has no face, just as her divine spouse has no face. The figure, the mobile shape, will make its appearance only with the world that comes after theirs. The Olympian gods know that the law of Kronos has not been abrogated, nor can it ever be. But they don’t want to feel it weighing down on them every second of every day. Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against the precision of the law, which at that time was referred to as pondus et mensura, “weight and measure.” A vain rebellion, but divine. Kronos’s chains become Hephaestus’s golden web. The gods know that the two imprisoning nets are the same; what has changed is the aesthetic appearance. And it is on this that life on Olympus is based. Of the two, they prefer to submit to Eros rather than Ananke, even though they know that Eros is just a dazzling cover for Ananke. And cover in the literal sense: Ananke’s inflexible bond, which tightens in a great circle around the world, is covered by a speckled belt, which we see in the sky as the Milky Way. But we can also see it, in perfect miniature, on the body of Aphrodite when the goddess wears her “many-hued, embroidered girdle in which all charms and spells reside: tenderness and desire are there, and softly whispered words, the seduction that has stolen the intellect even from those of sound mind.”

Unraveled across the darkness of the sky, that belt denotes not deceit but the splendor of the world. Worn by Aphrodite, the girdle becomes both splendor and deceit. But perhaps this was precisely what the Olympians wanted: that a soft, deceiving sash should cover the inflexible bond of necessity. So it was that, when the time was ripe, Zeus overthrew Kronos with deceit: and now that girdle adorned the waist of Aphrodite.

Why did the Olympians prefer the girdle of deceit to the serpent of necessity, coiled around the cosmos? They were looking for a more colorful life, a life with more play. After millennia of astral submission, they preferred to make believe that they were subject to Eros just as much as to Ananke, though all the time aware that in fact this was just a blasphemous fraud. Sophocles’ Deianira says as much, as if it were obvious: “The gods bow to Eros’s every whim, and so must I.”

If Ananke commands alone, life becomes rigid and ritualistic. And the Olympians were not fond of Mesopotamian gravity, although they did enjoy their sacrifices. What they wanted for themselves was not just eternal life but childish insouciance. When the time had come to be rid of the heroes, a plague would have been quite enough to settle the matter. But a war, a long, complicated war, was far more attractive. So the gods set about starting it off and then making it last. Zeus, from his vantage point in the sky, wouldn’t have been interested in watching the ravages of a plague. But when Trojans and Achaeans return to the battlefield, he is eager to watch them, and sometimes even to suffer with them: he sees Sarpedon, for him “the dearest of men,” come to the end of the role that “had been assigned him of old,” and he can do nothing to spare him the mortal blows of Patroclus. For a moment Zeus imagines he might be able to “snatch him alive” from the battle. It is a moment of sublime Olympian childishness, which Hera immediately crushes. And as she does so we hear Ananke, disguised as a wise administrator, speaking through her.

But war is a spectacle for all the Olympians, not just for Zeus. As the battle approached, “Athena and Apollo, with their silver bows, alighted like vultures on the tall oak of Zeus, who holds the aegis, and enjoyed the sight of the men in their serried ranks, a shiver trembling across shields, helmets, and javelins.”

The Achaean warriors advance, legs and thighs white with dust. The heavy hooves of their horses churn up clouds of it into a bronze sky. Here and there the terrain is sandy. Mydon crashes from his chariot and sticks for a moment, head in the sand, legs in the air, until his own horses trample him into the dust. Two female figures move about in the din of battle. They are Eris, Strife, and Enyo, the War Cry. Eris wears a long, dark, checkered tunic with a pattern of circles and crosses. The same color is picked up in her broad, soft wings. Her arms are naked and white. Enyo is glistening with sweat. Hers is the “shameless uproar of the slaughter.” She delights, they say, in “the blood-sodden clay.”

There is a moment in which the peculiarly Greek breaks away from the Asian continent, like one of those islands off the Anatolian coast whose jagged cliffs still follow the line of the vast maternal mainland. That moment is the Greek discovery of outline, of a new sharpness, a clean, dry daylight. It is the moment when man enters into Zeus, into the clear light of noon. Éndios is what we have when “the earth warmed up / And the sky glittered more brilliantly than crystal.” By the time of the tragedians, dîos has come to mean nothing more than “divine,” insofar as it is a “property of Zeus.” But in the Homeric age dîos means first and foremost “clear,” “brilliant,” “glorious.” To appear in Zeus is to glow with light against the background of the sky. Light on light. When Homer gives the epithet dîos to his characters, the word does not refer first of all to what they may have of “divine,” but to the clarity, the splendor that is always with them and against which they stand out. The leaden eyes of the Sumers are the eyes of nocturnal birds; they sink away into the darkness. With foot arched, and the corners of his mouth upturned in an inexplicable smile, the Homeric hero pushes on toward the smoking earth, and his folly is the Pan-inspired madness of high noon. Before the hour strikes, he achieves a vision of things as sharply separate from one another and complete in themselves as though scissored from the sky by cosmic shears and thrust out into a light from which there is no escape.

In its dark age, after four hundred years with neither writing nor cultural center, Greece rediscovered splendor. In Homer whatever is good and beautiful is also dazzling. Breastplates shine from afar, bodies from close up. Yet around them, while the bards were chanting the Iliad, the Greeks had very little that was splendid to enjoy. Gone the high-vaulted palaces, all burned, all ravaged. Gone the Asian jewels. Gone the embossed gold goblets. Gone the grand chariots of war.

The splendor was all in the mind. Among the objects they handled were jars and vases where the same geometric figures were stubbornly repeated over and over, as if all at once the Greeks had decided there was only one thing that mattered: outline, the sharp, the angular profile, separation. On the immense urn found in the Dipylon, one band of geometric patterns follows hard on another, until framed between them we find a scene with human figures. It is a funeral, and the men are black, faceless silhouettes, their muscles in sharp relief. The corpse lies on a long coffin, like a dangerous insect. The Homeric radiance and the sharp profile of that insect presuppose each other, balance each other off. In all surviving evidence of archaic Greece, the one is included in the other.

Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad. The perfection of the first step makes any idea of progressive ascension ridiculous. But at the same time the Iliad is an act of provocation as far as forms and shapes are concerned; it defies them and draws them into a fan that has yet to be fully opened. And this state is thanks precisely to the commanding sharpness with which the poem excludes, even expels from within itself, what for centuries to come would be articulated in language. That perfect beginning, through its very appearance, evokes absent counterweights: Mallarmé.

Odysseus stands out among the Achaean leaders because he “can think.” The others revere his complex mind the way they revere the fleet foot of Achilles. But this doesn’t make Odysseus feel any more independent of the gods than his peers. He doesn’t have the solid eloquence of Diomedes, or the rounded periods of Nestor, but he looks for the propitious moment, when he can get the gods’ attention with a word, and not a word too many. Odysseus is he who can “escape from a burning brazier.” In the word that gives us that “escape” (nostésaimen) we get close to the meaning of “coming back” (nóstos): to escape unharmed is to come back. And no one is capable of coming back like Odysseus. There is something firm, solid, but never mentioned, on which the hero knows he can always fall back and put his weight, even when his wanderings take him far from home. That this is only a small island in the mind gives us a sense of the spatial relationship between that rocky splinter and the vast surrounding seascape. Yet that small, tough mental outcrop, like the hero’s broad chest, is something that will resist, a constant support. Odysseus experiences fire, faces it, defies it. But more than that, and unlike so many other men and women who live close to the divine, Odysseus is able to escape the fire. That is why the powerful Diomedes feels safer in the dark if he has Odysseus beside him, like a watchful shadow.

In what is the darkest of all nights for the Achaeans, when they have been pushed back to their ships by a counterattack from the besieged Trojans and when, with Diomedes, he is about to set out on a dangerous mission to steal secrets from the enemy camp, Odysseus hears the cry of a heron unseen in the night. It’s Athena alerting him to her presence. And Odysseus speaks to the goddess, who has always been at his side. He speaks just a few brief, intimate words, less than half of what Diomedes will say immediately afterward. Odysseus doesn’t remind her of paternal precedents, nor does he promise sacrifices. He says to the goddess: “One more time, Athena, love me, as much as you can.”

Between the ingenuous ostentation of Diomedes and the spare directness of Odysseus a story would open up that was to take centuries of repetitions and subversions to work itself out. But that night the two are still united, just as the “awesome weapons” the heroes only a moment ago belted on are still brushing against each other. And the goddess is still equally present to each of them. They communicate with her before they talk to each other. She is “the fire of heaven,” in which the Greeks share, before the sobriety of Odysseus crosses it, unharmed, before that sobriety is left to survive alone, with no memory of the fire it once crossed, no memory of its antique familiarity with a goddess who once let the hero insist that she love him, “one more time, as much as you can.”

Achilles is unique, and hence also an only child, “nature’s enfant gâté.” Six brothers before him died thanks to their mother Thetis’s attempts to render them immortal. They did not survive her trial by fire. The flames that licked Achilles made him almost immortal. And what that meant was more mortal than other mortals. He was destined to have a shorter life than others because, for Thetis, he took the place of the son who was supposed to overthrow Zeus and who was never born. Instead of a god who would live longer than other gods, he became a man who would have a shorter life than other men. And yet, of all men, he was the closest to being a god. Because he had taken the place of he who should have put an end to Zeus, his own end was forcibly etched into his flesh. Achilles is time in its purest state, drumming hooves galloping away. Compressed into the piercing fraction of a mortal life span, he came closest to having the qualities the Olympians lived and breathed: intensity and facility. His furious temper, which sets the Iliad moving, is more intense than that of any other warrior, and the fleetness of his foot is that of one who cleaves the air without meeting resistance.

No hero was on more intimate terms with women than Achilles. At nine he was playing in Scyros as a girl among other girls, and it was only the blast of Odysseus’s trumpet that woke him from his girlish dream. Born of a sea goddess, brought up by two Naiads, Achilles’ girl companions nicknamed him Pyrrha, the Blonde, the tawny blonde. Thus he enjoyed a bliss never granted to any other male: that of being at once a girl and a seducer of girls. Ostensibly, he was a foreign girl playing with the daughters of Lycomedes, but the oldest of those daughters, Deidameia, soon gave birth to the child of their “secret passion”: Neoptolemus. There was a meadow on windswept Scyros, beneath a tower, and here Lycomedes’ daughters would gather armfuls of flowers. They had an open expression in their eyes, round cheeks, a dashing gait. Playing with them, Achilles could be distinguished only by the brusque way he would toss back his hair.

His boyhood loves behind him, women would come to spell death for Achilles. And death would be with him always. The dog days dragged on in Aulis, and the restless heroes exercised outside their tents to kill the time. Achilles was fantasizing “a thousand girls” came “hunting to his bed” when the girl who claimed she was destined to share his marriage bed appeared: Iphigenia.

It was an appalling equivocation: her father, Agamemnon, had used the marriage as a bait to lure her to her death as a sacrificial victim. Upon which Clytemnestra said to Achilles: “It would be a woeful omen for your future marriage if my daughter were to be killed.” The omen remained suspended in the air, intact.

From then on, Achilles’ passions, which had begun as child’s play, would be framed and smothered in blood. And, like Iphigenia, Achilles himself would be killed with a fake nuptial crown on his head. Agamemnon’s trick prefigured something nobody had imagined, least of all Agamemnon himself, something that linked Iphigenia to Achilles. One writer even claims they had a child. If so, they must have had it without ever having been together, except in the sense that they were both lured into the same fatal trap.

There was a time when hierogamy and sacrifice were the same thing. In the course of history, this unnameable unity gradually split into two. In the beginning, the primordial god would copulate and kill himself at the same time. Men recalling this feat could hardly emulate it if they wanted to survive and were thus forced to divide it into two phases: killing and copulation, sacrifice and marriage. But the flavor of marriage lingers on in the sacrifice, just as the flavor of the sacrifice lingers on in marriage. A tangible object unites the two events: the crown. One is crowned whether going to the altar as a victim or going as a bride. And the ambiguity of that crown is the constant, never articulated heart of tragedy: the misunderstandings, recognitions, and double meanings that tense the tragic nerve all derive from the primordial double meaning contained within the crown.

It would be ingenuous to suppose that only the moderns have been able to appreciate all this, as if in classical tragedy it had always remained implicit and unconscious. On the contrary, this notion seems to have formed the canonical background underlying tragedy. Otherwise, to quote just one example, why would Euripides’ chorus in Iphigenia in Aulis move so abruptly from the evocation of Peleus and Thetis’s marriage, at which the gods are among the guests, to the description of Iphigenia as a “spotted heifer” from whose “mortal throat blood will be made to flow” in Aulis, where her father claims to be bringing her to her marriage. That truncated passage, split into two dismembered parts, marriage and sacrifice, is, as Euripides saw it, one single speech: and we pass from one part to the other of necessity, because they belong together. In the same way, the ancient texts make perfectly clear that the tension of tragedy is the tension between murder and sacrifice, the crushing of the one against the other or, alternatively, the splitting apart of the two terms. In fact, all the surviving tragedies could be classified according to the angle of impact between murder and sacrifice or according to the varying densities of ambiguity in the way the two phenomena are presented. In Iphigenia in Aulis we are hammered time after time with the verb kteínein, “to kill,” while thúein, “to sacrifice,” is used only rarely, the distance between the two being spanned by spházein, “to slit a throat.” Yet the plot to this tragedy hinges on a sacrifice, not a murder. Whereas Agamemnon, which tells the story of a murder, is saturated in the terminology of sacrifice.

When Iphigenia agrees to her own sacrifice, agrees, as she puts it, “to this wicked spilling of blood by a wicked father,” because “the whole of Greece is looking to her” and her death will allow “the Greeks to reign over the barbarians rather than the barbarians over the Greeks,” for “the barbarians stand for slavery, the Greeks for freedom”—when a speech like this pours rapidly, confidently, from the mouth of the virgin of Mycenae, it’s clear that any cosmic vision of sacrifice has already foundered. Sacrifice here no longer has to do with the equilibrium between gods and men but between men and other men, between “the kings of men” and that dangerous multitude milling around the tents.

But here comes the outrageous enigma: man now discovers that sacrifice is just as effective as a tool of social manipulation as it was to appease the gods. Any cosmic tension evaporates. What we’re left with is an unsuspecting girl whose throat is to be cut before an army mad with the lust to be setting sail for an almighty bloodletting (it’s Aphrodite, not Ares, who’s goading them on). And that killing turns out to be very useful. It is the first pro patria mori, and it stands apart from all the others and dwarfs them, just as Pericles’ speech on democracy dwarfs thousands of later speeches on the subject. Even before the Achaeans hoisted their sails for Troy, Iphigenia’s body had been used as the medium for a radical secularization of the practice of sacrifice. The gods were still there, intact, but man’s relationship with them was now taking on the same spareness and pathos as that between daughter and father, servant and master, lover and beloved, husband and wife. The only thing that separated heaven and earth now was an immense inequality in terms of power. Not an inequality of mind, or heart, or ceremony at all. With all the cosmic scaffolding that had stood between gods and men having thus collapsed, life seemed the more buoyant and resplendent, but lonely too, fleeting and irretrievable. Such is the dominant sentiment that runs through the lucid age of Greece from Homer to Euripides. Everything is reduced to a few simple elements that can be reduced no further. Life is no longer a series of trade-offs between invisible powers but “the sweetness of looking at the light.” Thus speaks the philopsychía in Iphigenia, that last “clutching at life.” And her conclusion is brusque: “To look into the light is the sweetest thing for a mortal; what lies beneath the earth is nothingness.”

This brazen speech, the daring claim that the whole world of spirits is “nothingness,” points to the affinity that predestined the girl to be Achilles’ bride. For the defiant words she hurls at Agamemnon as she is about to die prefigure Achilles’ answer to Odysseus in the underworld, his scorn for any vain sovereignty over the dead and his heartrending desire for a part, however miserable, in the life above.

The whole classical world, from the Minoan frescoes to the Roman banquets, is strewn with leafy crowns. To be a coronarius in Rome was to have a profitable business, since crowns were used on all kinds of occasions. “In the olden times,” Pliny recalls, “crowns were used to show respect for the gods and the Lares, public and private, the tombs and the Manes.” Then there were crowns for the statues of the gods, for sacrificial victims, and for brides and bridegrooms. Crowns for the winning athletes at the games. Crowns for poets and soldiers who excelled. Crowns worn for fun at banquets. Lovers would hang crowns on their beloveds’ doors. And Cleopatra even had the idea of poisoning Antony with the petals of a crown. From the Egyptian mummies to the Christian polemicists, who tried to avoid this pagan usage but lapsed back into it just the same, you could say that the Mediterranean world lived and moved for centuries within that circular image, those symbolic but ephemeral flowers, different for every occasion. Such was the ubiquitousness of the crown that a whole literature sprang up around it. Few other subjects seemed so well suited to contests of erudition between sophists at banquets. But, if we look behind their relaxed chatter to the origin of the crown, what do we find?

The first crown was a gift from Zeus to Prometheus. It thus came from the gods as homage to a man whose relationship with them was anything but clear, at once a threat and a means of salvation. The crown in fact was supposed to compensate for the fetters in which Zeus himself had long imprisoned Prometheus. The cold grip of the metal was thus transformed into what Aeschylus calls “the best of all fetters”: a circular weave of leaves, twigs, and flowers. It was the same process by which Aphrodite’s many-colored girdle had come to be superimposed over Ate’s suffocating net. And, just as deceit was woven into Aphrodite’s girdle, in the crown of Prometheus we can see deceit throwing down its ultimate challenge. Hyginus writes: “Nonnulli etiam coronam habuisse dixerunt, ut se victorem impune peccasse diceret”: “Some say that [Prometheus] got hold of a crown, so that he could claim to have triumphed, unpunished for his crime.” Like the girdle of Aphrodite, Prometheus’s crown is the fetter of necessity. Except that now, dispersed in petals and transformed by beauty, that fetter approaches the delicate superfluousness of ornament. The veil of aesthetic appearance can conceal beneath it even the gamble of the man who attempts to elude necessity, the man who still seeks an impunity anánkē does not concede. Or so Hyginus insinuates.

Aeschylus, however, has a different vision of events. He describes the crown given to Prometheus as an antípoina, a “retribution,” which is also a ransom. Prometheus had earned his ransom by revealing to Zeus that, if he had a child with Thetis, it would overthrow him. Hence, having first deceived the god, Prometheus had then saved him. And now he was to remain among men and bring them a second revelation, after that of fire: the crown. From chain to crown: it was still a fetter of a kind; anything strong that grips us is a fetter. But now the fetter had been lightened; it became fragile and soft, gently encircling the head, for “all our feelings are in our heads.” What did that vegetable weave conceal, then, that was so precious? Perfection. It was the Greek gift par excellence, the goal this people always sought.

It would be a long time before crowns were being handed out at banquets. In the beginning, it was the idea of separation that was essential. Forerunner of the magic circle, the crown divided the world in two: there was the sacred fragment within the crown (sacrificial victim, spouse, or statue) and everything else outside. “Everything that belonged to the cult, whether people, animals, victims, or symbols, would be marked out by a crown or a band, as a sign of consecration, and often by both crown and band.” At this point the crown was “herald of the holy silence,” prelude to the sacrificial killing. But, having begun with this cult use, the Greeks developed the crown in a way all their own. The sacred is something that impregnates, it pours into the young girl, the animal, the statue, and fills them. Hence the sacred comes to partake of fullness, and fullness with perfection, since as Aristotle puts it, “we offer to the gods only that which is perfect and whole.” The Iliad speaks of “youths who filled [or crowned: epestépsanto] the bowls with wine.” The crown was the rim of the goblet, the point at which fullness becomes excess. The crown was a mobile templum, bringing together election and danger. The perfect brings death upon itself, since one can’t have fullness without spillage, and what spills out is the excess that sacrifice claims for itself. “What is full, is perfect, and coronation signifies perfection of some kind.” So says Athenaeus. Animals for sacrifice would only be crowned once it was clear that they were perfect, “so as not to kill something that was not useful.”

At first the crown enclosed the sacred, separating it off from the profane world. In the end, it enclosed the perfect in its self-sufficient fullness. With a deft and unspoken shifting of contexts, the Greeks removed the crown from blood and sacrifice. They wanted it to celebrate what was perfect in its own right. From now on it would not form part of a ceremony that was acted out but would celebrate something that simply existed in itself. The crown is nothing less than the highest, the most exposed level of existence. Sappho says to Dika: “Weave stems of anise with your soft hands and top your curls with sweet crowns; for the blessed Charites prefer to look at those adorned with flowers, and turn away from whoever is without a crown to wear.” By this point, Dika is perfection itself, attracting the benevolent gaze of the Charites. We’ve come a long way from Iphigenia, who believed she was wearing her crown as a bride, whereas in fact that crown singled her out as the victim to be slain on the altar.

The Greeks escaped from the sacred to the perfect, trusting in the sovereignty of the aesthetic. It would be a desperately brief escape, one that lasted only as long as the tension between sacred and perfect could be maintained, only as long as the sacred and perfect were able to live side by side without taking anything away from each other. But no other people had attempted so much. If it is in Sappho that we first find a crown that seems to attract the gaze of the Charites purely for itself, if it is with her that the ritual use first appears to become a pretext for aesthetic polish, then we owe this carefree immediacy not to tò kalón, too serious a matter altogether, but to habrosýnē, a word that did not catch on among philosophers and which one can only translate today by mixing notions such as delicacy and splendor, grace and luxury. “I love habrosýnē,” says Sappho in another line, and perhaps it is the only one of her confessions we have no cause to doubt.

Crown, necklace, garland: they all have the same shape, and often the one will become the other. When Amphiaraus left his palace in Corinth to fight beneath the walls of Thebes, he knew perfectly well, clairvoyant as he was, that the adventure would end in his death. It was only the treachery of his wife, Eriphyle, that had managed to winkle him out of concealment and force him to go to the field of Polynices: in return for her betrayal, Polynices gave Eriphyle the necklace that had once been Aphrodite’s gift to Harmony. In the courtyard of the palace, as the horses tugged at their reins, impatient to be off, with helmet already on his head and sword pointing heavenward, Amphiaraus turned to look back one last time. And what he looked at most of all was his young son, Alcmaeon. He had already patiently explained to the child how one day he would have to kill his mother to avenge the father who was now saying good-bye forever. The boy hadn’t seemed to be paying attention, laughing and fooling about as he listened, but his father’s words would haunt his memory like a refrain from a nursery rhyme. Amphiaraus looked at him now, naked, healthy, arms raised to wave good-bye, against a backdrop of women. Behind him other arms were waving, white arms, Demonassa and Eurydice, his daughters. Then the bony arms of the old wet nurse. And behind them all, head wrapped in a shawl, Eriphyle: Amphiaraus met her cold stare, which rivaled his own in its hatred. One of her arms was hidden: she didn’t lift it to wave, and, from the fingers of that hand, huge and brilliant, hung Harmony’s necklace, a garland of golden light dangling almost to the ground.

In scenes like these, which mark the beginning of the end of a noble house, each respects his own role, as if everything were perfectly normal, even though all are aware of the impending disaster. But outside the group there will always be one person crouching down, a hand lifted to his head. It is he who sees but cannot act. One day he will become the tragic poet, he will tell these stories. But for the moment he is silent. To the unpracticed eye there is nothing out of the ordinary about the scene: the head of a family is riding off to war, a common enough event. Only the observer who kept his eyes on the ground would have realized that something terrible was happening. For the courtyard is swarming with animals: fearless lizards slither between people’s legs; a hedgehog is in danger of being crushed under Amphiaraus’s heel; a majestically large scorpion is climbing slowly along the groove of one of the columns of the atrium; a nervous, trembling hare rubs its flank along the chariot; an owl has alighted on a horse’s mane; and, amid the stones outside the courtyard, a snake lifts its head, motionless, and watches.

Many generations passed, and the story of Amphiaraus and Eriphyle was turned into verse and widely discussed. Now, after all the trouble it had caused, Harmony’s necklace, like the necklace Menelaus gave to Helen, was kept in the temple of Delphi. During the second Sacred War, the Phocians sacked the temple and their leaders decided to share out the famous jewels among their wives. They drew lots to see who got what. Eriphyle’s necklace went to “a woman who looked sad and resentful, though deeply serious, while Helen’s went to a woman of outstanding beauty and loose morals. The latter fell in love with a young man from Epirus and ran off with him, while the other hatched a plot to kill her husband.” The woman who eloped later sank to prostitution, “throwing her beauty at anyone who wished to abuse her.” The woman who killed her husband was burned alive in her own home. The fire was started by her eldest son, who had gone crazy.

The necklace, the crown, the garland. As the years passed the leaves and petals of beauty fell away, leaving only the cold fetter of the circle, unadorned necessity; and what once had given rise to whole cycles of stories, the Theban cycle, the Trojan cycle, now shrank back into the stuff of commonplace crime where the protagonists remain nameless and only the bare events are remembered: an elopement, a murder, in a Greece that had nothing to look forward to now but its capitulation to Alexander and wanted only to forget the past. But all of this, and no less than this, was of the nature of the crown, the necklace, the garland.

In the girdle of Aphrodite, in the crown, in the body of Helen and of her phantom, beauty is superimposed over necessity, cloaking it in deceit. The necessary has a certain splendor, and behind any splendor one senses a metallic coldness, as though of a weapon poised to strike. The real split in Greek consciousness, like all the other irreversible steps it took, comes when Plato for the first time affirms, “How very different is the nature of the necessary from the nature of the good.” And he means an immense, an unbridgeable distance — the same distance that made atheists of “those who study astronomy and other sciences of the necessary, when they see that what is, is so out of necessity and not out of any plan conceived by some will to accomplish the good.” The Beautiful, in this scenario, must either be quickly reabsorbed into the Good — as its agent, instrument, and pedagogue — or left up in the air, like a malignant spell (goteuma) bewitching the mind only to subject it even more helplessly to the fiat of necessity. With Homer we are still at a stage when the Good isn’t even mentioned: happy and unhappy, the poet’s warriors know only the many-colored weave of necessity and sate themselves with its splendor, which at the end of the day will destroy them. “The mortal cannot go intrepid through these many-colored beauties,” says Agamemnon, a few seconds before falling beneath Clytemnestra’s ax.

Agamemnon, ánax andrôn, “king of men,” is kingship itself. As such, he must preside over relations with heaven and with earth. It is on him that all exchanges converge. And at the origin of exchange there is always a death of some kind. Such is the shove that sets the wheel moving, that breaks “the silence of the winds.” For Agamemnon, this becomes clear with the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. The person who controls the mechanism of exchange, the king, is that unique person who must sacrifice the uniqueness of every other, including his daughter. But this one master of exchanges, prince of substitutions, may in turn be attacked by uniqueness. When the priest Chryses asks to ransom his daughter Chryseis and, to replace her, Agamemnon demands that Achilles hand over Briseis, uniqueness rises in rebellion against exchange.

Achilles is kingship without a kingdom. He carries his grace within himself and does not need a hierarchical order to sustain it. It is in his grace, not his power, that Achilles is more kingly than the others. And that is precisely why Agamemnon is so determined to show him who is really king, as Nestor explains with near pedantic exactness: “Son of Peleus, don’t be so stubborn as to clash head on with a king: no prestige can equal that of a king who holds the scepter, a king to whom Zeus has granted glory. You are strong, your mother is a goddess; but he is even stronger than you, because he commands more men.” On the one hand, we have a king who is considered such because a whole society converges on his person; on the other hand, we have an individual who is kingly in his very isolation, in the uniqueness of his gift. With Achilles we witness, in Homeric radiance, the emergence of a quality that Vedic mathematics never guessed at: the unique, unsustained by the sacred, precarious, fleeting, irreplaceable, not exchangeable, entrusted to a brief appearance ending in death, and for this very reason incommensurable. That which exists only once, and for only a short time, cannot be measured against any other commodity.

Shut away in his tent, furious with Agamemnon, Achilles sleeps with Diomeda “of the lovely cheeks,” just as Briseis had been “of the lovely cheeks.” But still Achilles refuses to accept the substitution of Briseis. The elderly Phoenix, who loves Achilles as only an old servant whose chest the baby hero once belched wine over can, simply does not understand this absurd insistence. How can Achilles, “for just one girl!” turn down the seven girls of Lesbos, plus “some even better ones,” together with a host of other gifts Agamemnon is offering to keep him sweet. Phoenix, in his tribal devotion, can’t even conceive of the claim to uniqueness. But it is precisely to Achilles that the poem gives the speech that for the first time announces this discovery, this emotion that will put its stamp on history from that moment on and has survived intact to this very day: a foothold in the vast shipwreck of ideas, the only thing still self-evident to everybody, blasphemous and devout alike, in this age that no longer manages to be either blasphemous or devout. This is what Achilles says: “Fat sheep and oxen you can steal; cooking pots and golden-maned horses you can buy; but once it has left the circle of his teeth, the life of a man [andròs psych] can be neither replaced, nor stolen, nor bought.” Not only have these words never been confuted with the passing centuries, but they have gathered further intensity and urgency, as beliefs and principles withered away all around to leave them standing alone. Today, whenever somebody who doesn’t belong to any creed refuses to kill, Achilles’ words live on in him.

The aesthetic justification of existence was not an invention of the young Nietzsche. He was just the first to give it a name. Earlier, it had been the tacit premise of life in Greece under the Olympians. Perfection of the outward appearance was indissolubly linked to the acceptance of a life without redemption, without salvation, without hope of repetition, circumscribed by the precarious wonder of its brief apparition. Achilles is the son of a goddess, and this fact gives him a strength and grace unknown to others, but he chooses a brief and resplendent life, which is irrecoverable.

Rather than the life of one individual, the life Achilles chooses is an image of all life as Homer understood it. Later, in the underworld, Achilles comes out with a speech that offers a mirror image of the one he made when refusing Agamemnon’s gifts. The hero now appears as just one among many, “unfeeling shades of exhausted mortals.” All that’s left of life is a long weariness. Odysseus tries to call him “happy,” even among the dead, and claims to admire him because even here he has preserved his “great power.” But once again Achilles is ready with words that will prove unanswerable: “Don’t try to prettify death for me, noble Odysseus. I would rather live as a cowherd in the service of a poor peasant, with barely enough to eat, than reign over all these wasted dead.” It is only because life is irretrievable and irrepeatable that the glory of appearance can reach such intensity. Here there is no hidden meaning, no reference to, nor hint of, anything else, such as the Platonic tyranny will later impose. Here appearance is everything, is the essential integrity of what exists only for the brief period when it is present and visible. It is a fleeting figure briefly capturing the perfection of those other figures who live on unhindered, on Olympus.

On two occasions, before the beginning and after the end of the Trojan War, Agamemnon finds himself obliged to preside over the sacrifice of a virgin. The first time it is his daughter Iphigenia, whom he lures to Aulis by pretending to offer her in marriage to Achilles. The second time it is the Trojan Polyxena, whom Achilles thought he was going to meet and marry in the temple where, hiding behind a column, treacherous Apollo kills him. Iphigenia is sacrificed because the long, windless calm is preventing the Achaean ships from leaving; Polyxena is sacrificed because the long, windless calm is preventing the Achaean ships from returning. In the case of Iphigenia, the deceived bride, Achilles tries to oppose the sacrifice; in the case of Polyxena, Achilles, the deceived groom, reappears as a ghost to claim his victim.

Right from the beginning, the lives of Agamemnon and Achilles run in perfect parallel. Agamemnon is never the cause of the sacrifice, but it is always he who carries it out, with a watchful eye on the multitude who obey him and who are kept under control by these gestures. His concern is that murder should be sufficiently well camouflaged as sacrifice, until he himself is murdered like a sacrificial beast by Clytemnestra. There is a circularity in his destiny that allows of no deviation. Achilles opposes him every step of the way: it is he who is about to marry the victim of both sacrifices. The first time, alive, he rejects the sacrifice; the second, dead, he demands it. Agamemnon carries out the law of men; Achilles wants to escape the will of the gods, or to assume their role himself. Agamemnon does not touch the victim but gives orders for her to be killed; it will be Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, who actually plunges his knife into Polyxena’s throat. Agamemnon is death’s administrator; for Achilles, death is always either too attractive or too repugnant. At the two extremes of the stage stand the two heroes. In the center, in ceremonial silence, the two sacrifices that open and close the Trojan War are consummated.

This is how Iphigenia is sacrificed: “After the prayer, Agamemnon made a sign to the servants officiating with him to seize his daughter Iphigenia just as she was falling to the ground wrapped in her tunics, then to lift her on top of the altar like a goat and with mute violence stop her mouth with its fine line like the prow of a ship, using a gag [or a horse bit?], so that she might not curse her family. Her saffron-dyed tunic having slithered to the ground, Iphigenia’s eyes darted arrows at each of her sacrificers, moving them to pity, as though she were a painting that wanted to speak, she who had so often sung at banquets in the beautiful halls of her father’s palace, lovingly intoning in her pure virgin voice the third good-luck paean to her beloved father.”

This is how Polyxena is sacrificed: “The people cheered her, and King Agamemnon told the young men to let go of the virgin.… When she heard the king’s words, Polyxena grabbed her tunic and tore it from her shoulder right down to her waist, near her navel, so that everybody could see her beautiful breasts and torso. She was like a statue. And sinking to one knee, she spoke the boldest and saddest speech of all: ‘Look, young man, here is my breast; if you want to strike here, then strike; if you would prefer the neck, then here is my throat, ready.’ And he, Neoptolemus, both wishing and, out of pity for the girl, not wishing to, cut her windpipe with his knife. The blood gushed out. Yet, even as she died, she was most careful to fall in proper fashion, hiding what must be hidden from the eyes of men.” After which some of the warriors scattered leaves on the girl. A scholiast notes in the margin: “They throw leaves over Polyxena, as if she had won an event at the games: for this was the way they congratulated the winners.”

Achilles always seeks out the woman who is hostile and distant. He fell in love with Polyxena when he saw her on the walls of Troy throwing down buckles and earrings as ransom for the return of Hector’s body. This was the woman Achilles was to die for. The nuptial crown on his head, he went into the temple of Apollo Thymbraeus, the same temple where he had killed one of Polyxena’s brothers, Troilus. Apollo was supposed to be a witness to the marriage. Instead, hidden behind a column, the god let fly the arrow that struck Achilles’ heel. It was a story of intertwining betrayals. How could Achilles have imagined that the god who had always been opposed to him would now be a benevolent witness at his marriage to one of Priam’s daughters? And what were his Achaean comrades supposed to make of his decision? Achilles is capable of betrayal but not of reflecting on it: his actions are impulsive surges, changing direction unexpectedly. Thus he rains a frenzy of blows onto the body of Penthesilea, convinced he is slaying a mighty Trojan warrior not even Ajax had been able to handle. Then he lifts the helm of the dying Amazon. He looks Penthesilea in the eye for the first time, precisely as he plunges his sword into her breast. And in that instant he is overwhelmed by passion. He had pinned the Amazon to her horse. Now he takes the virgin warrior in his arms with loving care. In the dust and blood, Achilles made love to Penthesilea, lifeless in her armor.

The hideous Thersites was fool enough to laugh over that rape. Achilles slew him with a punch. He insisted that Penthesilea have the same funeral honors as Patroclus. He crossed the battlefield with the Amazon’s body on his back. And once again the Achaeans were against him. Furious over the death of his relative Thersites, Diomedes tried to throw Penthesilea’s body into the river Scamander, dragging her away by one foot. The others, shouting and screaming, wanted to toss her to the dogs. That woman was the closest thing to himself Achilles had ever come across. But he didn’t find out until a moment after he had killed her. She was hostile, and dead: everything Achilles loved in a woman.

Beneath the walls of Troy, Achilles loved Briseis, Penthesilea, Polyxena. And each time his love met with a sorry end. But there was another woman constantly on his mind, a woman he had never even seen: Helen. As he camped in his pine hut on the plain of Ilium, he thought of Helen as the woman who “sends shivers down the spine.” But at night he dreamed of her, “tossing and turning on his bed at the apparition of her imagined face.” There are those who claim that, like two crafty pimps, Tethys and Aphrodite arranged a meeting between Achilles and Helen during one of the truces. But most believe that the two only saw each other after Achilles’ death. Helen was a phantom as she always had been. Achilles became her fifth husband.

On leaving the Danube for the open sea, sailors must pass by Leuke, the White Island. They see a coastline of dunes, rocks, and woods. It’s an island for castaways and people who want to offer up a sacrifice. No one has ever dared stay there after sundown. And no woman has ever trod its sandy beaches. The only building on the island is a temple with two statues: Achilles and Helen. Piled inside are heaps of precious votive gifts. The temple guards are sea gulls. Every morning they wet their wings in the sea and sprinkle water on the stones. And with their wings they sweep the floor. Achilles lives on the island as Helen’s fifth husband. Some have seen him appear in the dazzling armor that once blinded Homer with its brilliance. Around the statues, visitors have seen Ajax Telamonius and Ajax Oileus, Patroclus and Antilochus. At night they chant the poetry of Homer in high, clear voices. Sometimes, when boats drop anchor off the beach, the sailors hear a drumming of horses’ hooves, the clashing of weapons, and cries of warriors.

Helen ends in whiteness, as in whiteness she began. The foam of the waves from which Aphrodite was born dried and hardened to become the white shell of a swan’s egg, which was then tossed “into a swampy place.” The mobile immensity of the sea had shrunk to a patch of stagnant water, surrounded by reeds. When that egg hatched in the swamp, Helen appeared. Some authors say the Dioscuri were huddled in the same egg. So right from the start, Helen, the unique one, is linked to the notion of twinship and division. The unique one appears as the Double. When people speak of Helen, we can never know whether they are referring to her body or her phantom copy.

Like the young Spartan women, she used to play outside with the boys, “thighs naked and tunics lifting in the wind, around the racetrack and in the gymnasium.” One day an Athenian was passing by with a friend, and stopped to look at her. “At that the all-knowing Theseus quite rightly became excited, and even to so great a man you seemed a worthy prey (digna rapina) to carry off, as you sported in the gymnasium, glistening with oil, a nude girl among nude boys, as was the custom among your people.” Helen had met her first man. She was twelve years old, Theseus was fifty. He sodomized her and shut her away on the rock of Aphidna. Theseus’s mother, Aethra, lived there, and Helen was soon entrusted to her, because Theseus was impatient to be off on his adventures with Peirithous again. They were planning to go down to Hades this time. The twins Castor and Pollux were furious and promptly set off in search of their sister. When they arrived on Aphidna, Theseus had already gone. They besieged the rock and got Helen back. Among the slaves they took away was Aethra.

Back in Sparta, the hero’s mother became Helen’s maid. She saw thirty-eight suitors turn up at the palace to ask for the princess’s hand. She saw Helen choose Menelaus, and she saw the marriage and the birth of Hermione. One day an Asian prince arrived, a man more handsome than any other and loaded with precious things that nobody in Sparta had ever seen before. On meeting him, Helen asked in a whisper whether he was Dionysus or Eros and immediately became tongue-tied. The prince galloped about Laconia with Menelaus, who took pride in being a good host and showing off everything interesting his kingdom could boast. Helen only saw the guest over the dinner table. The prince recounted adventures, some of them amorous. Hiding behind his cup, he kept looking at her. Sometimes he couldn’t keep from sighing. Helen laughed in his face. One evening, Helen’s tunic fell open for a second, leaving “free passage for his eyes” to her white breasts. The prince was lifting a cup to his lips, and the decorated handle slipped from his fingers. The cup shattered on the floor. Menelaus went on talking men’s talk. Helen said nothing, looking after little Hermione.

Of all times to go away, the prince chuckled to himself, Menelaus had chosen these very days. He was going off to Crete, for his grandfather Catreus’s funeral. As he left, Menelaus, serious as ever, told Helen to look after their guest. After that, there were absolutely no other men about. Helen and the prince were each sleeping alone in the same palace. In the emptiness of the palace halls, Aphrodite assembled those archons of desire Himeros and Pothos, and the Charites too. But on the visible plane, the person who acted as pimp was Aethra. Paris gripped Helen’s wrist. The Trojan’s escorts loaded up her riches and the things the prince had pretended were gifts. Paris stood tall on a chariot drawn by four horses. Helen was next to him, tunic tossed back over her shoulders, offering her body half naked to the night, where nothing could be seen but Eros’s dazzling torch twisting and turning in front of them. Behind the fleeing couple, another Eros was waving a torch. The two lovers and their escorts raced across the open space of red earth and scattered olive trees that led down from Sparta to the coast. Unnoticed among the Trojans, Aethra was with them too. On reaching the water, they saw a tiny island, a toy almost, just a few yards from the shore. On that island, as though on a huge bed covered with a green canopy of pine trees and surrounded by deep water, Helen spent her first night with her third lover.

Helen is the power of the phantom, the simulacrum — and the simulacrum is that place where absence is sovereign. Of her five husbands, the ones she loved most were Paris and Achilles. And, for both Paris and Achilles, Helen was a phantom before she was a woman. Ever since Aphrodite promised the shepherd of Ida that he would possess Helen of Sparta, that pure name had canceled out the powers and kingdoms Athena and Hera were offering him. Despite grim omens, the shepherd of Ida, now recognized as a prince, set off with galleys full of treasure toward that name.

As for Achilles, he was the only one of the Achaean leaders who hadn’t rushed off to Sparta to ask for Helen’s hand. He thus set off to a war he knew would end in death for him, for a woman about whom he knew nothing but her name. In nine years of siege, Achilles could have said no more about Helen than did Paris himself before he left Troy to find her: “Te vigilans oculis, animo te nocte videbam.” So much the longer, indeed never ending, would be their life together as phantoms on Leuke, island of white splendor.

Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Ate, Aisa, Dike, Nemesis, Erinyes, Heimarmene: such are the names that embody necessity. And they are all women. While Kronos dreams, deep in ambrosia, and in his dreams calculates the measures of the universe, these women keep watch, making sure that every being plays his part, no more and no less, so that nothing and no one may exceed their established bounds. Yet all life is excess. That is why we find these women on the prowl everywhere. They are wet nurses, helmswomen, weavers, flitting, towering. They are all related: Dike and Ananke are daughters of Kronos. Dike is a priestess to Adrasteia. The Moirai and the Erinyes are sisters. They share a family resemblance, the family of destiny. They hail from that distant past when the only powers that existed were abstract and faceless or at most hybrid, compound creatures. They move “in the fog, in black cloud,” women’s torsos looming from balconies of smoke. And even these strange bodies come and go: Moira has temples, but without statues, where worshipers practice her cult; or sometimes she has statues, but without temples, where no cult is practiced. The more all-encompassing they are, like Ananke, the less they are represented. While the emissaries of necessity — the Erinyes, the Moirai, or Ate — are regular guests among men, beautiful even, when the nature of their work doesn’t make them terrifying, and they only talk among themselves.

One of these women did have a body that was both stable and very beautiful: Nemesis. Rich, thick hair, white clothes. She always had a friend with her, Aidós. One day their names would be translated as Vengeance and Shame, but at the time we’re talking of, when they had only just emerged from the black cloud, their natures were far more complex and variegated. What did they have in common? The notion of offense. Aidós held people back from offending. Nemesis represented the ineluctable consequences of offending. They were united in a vision of life as something that gets wounded and then, as it writhes, wounds in its turn. Zeus began to watch Nemesis. Nothing like this had ever happened with the women of necessity: never had Zeus felt any desire for the bodies of Adrasteia, Moira, Tyche, Ananke, Aisa, or the Erinyes. And once, in his anger, he had even hurled Ate down from heaven. When it came to his amorous adventures, Zeus found mortal women far more attractive. He wasn’t interested in bothering those figures of fate; they were too similar to one another, disturbing the way twins can be, too ancient, and, in the end, hostile. But with Nemesis it was different. Something tremendous must have been at stake in that erotic conquest.

Never, for a woman, had Zeus traveled so far, crossing country after country, sea after sea, “beneath the earth, beneath the black, unfished waters,” and on and on to “the ends of the earth,” the watery snake, Oceanus. Stubborn and desperate, Nemesis transformed herself into all kinds of animals, while Zeus never let up following her. And when all the feather flapping was finally done, when atlas and zoology were exhausted, what was left? A wild goose and a swan. The swan settled on the goose and forced her to yield. Zeus “passionately united himself with her, out of powerful necessity.” But how bizarre! Nemesis, a figure of necessity, is overcome by necessity. And, as the swan assaults her, Nemesis, friend of Aidós, is “mentally torn apart aidoî kaì nemései” (which in too modern a translation might be rendered as “by shame and vengeance”). Thus, Nemesis is torn apart by herself. Offending us as it does with such paradoxes, this can hardly be one of Zeus’s usual adventures. But whenever his adventures are too grand, Zeus allows them to be repeated with variations, so that each version may possess a shining fragment of the truth. Such was the case with Nemesis.

Zeus spent half a night of love with Leda, leaving the other half to her husband, Tyndareos. During that night, Leda conceived four children, divided between heaven and earth: Helen and Pollux by Zeus, Clytemnestra and Castor by Tyndareos. That night was the delicate cameo and repetition of another night, at once dangerous and sublime, that Zeus had spent with Nemesis, as that other night with Nemesis was a delicate cameo and repetition of the long chase across the entire face of the earth that had ended in the violent coupling of swan and wild goose.

To seduce necessity: it had to be the most difficult of amorous undertakings. It was what men would later call a contradiction. And in fact Nemesis wasn’t interested in Zeus and rejected his imploring advances. What was needed was a trick, a divine trick. Zeus asked Aphrodite to help him. Together they agreed that Zeus would turn himself into a swan while Aphrodite, in the guise of an eagle, would pretend to follow him. Nemesis was making a sacrifice when she saw a splendid swan flapping toward her, exhausted. From the top of a nearby rock, an eagle was watching them, motionless and threatening, ready to spread its wings and dive on its prey. The frightened swan huddled against Nemesis’s lap. She didn’t reject the animal. She wanted to protect it from that menacing eagle. She fell asleep with the creature, squeezing it between her thighs. They slept. And Nemesis was still sleeping when the swan raped her. Then from Nemesis’ womb a white egg appeared. Hermes took it, carried it to Sparta, and placed it in Leda’s womb. When the big egg hatched, from inside the shell emerged a tiny, perfect female figure: Helen.

The life of Helen marked a moment of precarious, fleeting equilibrium, when, thanks to the deceitful cunning of Zeus, necessity and beauty were superimposed the one over the other. The rape of Nemesis was the most formidable theological gamble of Zeus’s reign. To provoke a forced convergence of beauty and necessity was to challenge the law of heaven. Only Olympus could have sustained such a thing, certainly not the earth, where that challenge blazed uncontrollably throughout Helen’s lifetime. It was a time marked from beginning to end by calamity. But it was also the time men would go on dreaming of, long after that fire had gone out.

On their wedding night, when the bride and groom retired to their bedroom where the whitewash was still damp on the walls, Menelaus found his legs sluggish and his mind dazed. The long, nerve-racking courtship, the oath over the quartered horse, the honors, the festivals, the banquets — everything fused in one powerful impulse to flop down on his bed and sleep. Helen lay awake and thought of the friends who until a short while ago had been singing and dancing for her in the palace. They were a “band of young women,” two hundred and forty girls, who exercised along the river Eurotas, their bodies greased with oil like boys’. And now they would be thinking of her, as she, Helen, shared her bed with Menelaus for the first time.

The next morning, at dawn, those girls would gather water lilies near the meadows where they always went and weave them into a crown. Then they would go and hang the crown from the branches of a big plane tree, raising to the sky and abandoning to the breeze those flowers that had grown from slime. One of them would take out a golden cruet and, drop by drop, pour an oil used in funeral sacrifices over the tree. Others of them would carve on the bark “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree.” So Helen lay awake, through the night, fantasizing.

After the flight from Sparta, after the years of war in Troy, after the eventful return trip to Sparta, after the death of Menelaus, Helen found herself caught between two stepsons who loathed her: Nicostratus and Megapenthe. So she decided to run off again, alone this time, to seek refuge with a childhood friend. She sailed as far as Rhodes, which was ruled by Polyxo, a widow now, one of the many widows the Trojan War had left scattered across these islands. Helen was finally seeking refuge in a woman, in her memories of girlhood. Polyxo wanted to avenge her husband, Tlepolemus. Like so many other women, she blamed Helen for his death. But she greeted her with kindness.

For the first time in her life, Helen was not being pestered by men. One day she was lying, daydreaming, in the bath when some of Polyxo’s serving maids burst in disguised as Erinyes. They seized her, naked, fingernails digging into her flesh, dragged her dripping from the water, and carried her off. Outside they hung her from a tree. The big plane tree near Sparta would still bear the carved inscription “Worship me: I am Helen’s tree” when the people of Rhodes founded their temple to Helen Dendritis, Helen of the Tree, next to the plane tree where they had found her body hanging.

While they were fleeing Sparta, gusting winds forced Helen and Paris to land on the beach in Sidon. Thus it was that Leda’s white daughter and her lover came to seek refuge on the very beach where Europa had been carried off by the white bull. They then sailed on as far as Egypt, to the Canopic mouth of the Nile. “On that shore there was, and still is, a sanctuary to Heracles: if even the merest servant takes refuge there and marks himself with the sacred signs, thereby consecrating himself to the god, it is forbidden to touch him.” The two lovers felt they were safe. But there are people who always get to know everything, and look on unmoved: the Egyptian priests. Even as he interrogated the stranger, and Paris ducked his questions, Proteus, king of Memphis, had already heard the true story of the wandering lovers from the temple priests. At the end of his interrogation he passed judgment: he couldn’t have this criminal, Paris, killed, as he would have liked, because he was a foreigner and untouchable. But he would keep Helen and her riches. Paris could go back to Troy, but only with a phantom copy of her.

The way Herodotus saw it, Homer was perfectly aware of this episode in Helen’s story and lets us know as much when he speaks of “the Sidon women’s embroidered veils, which godlike Paris brought back across the vast sea from Sidon, on that voyage when he carried off the noble Helen.” But then why doesn’t the poet ever mention it? Especially when one considers how essential an element it is, because it means that the Trojans knew they didn’t have Helen within their walls at all, but only a phantom. For ten years the war had raged around an absent woman, whom the Trojans would have been more than happy to hand over to the Achaeans, if only they had actually had her. Why on earth did Homer keep quiet about that extraordinary fact in the events leading up to the war? Herodotus answers: “because this story was not suitable for epic composition.” It is an explanation that leaves us dumbfounded. So the centuries-old accusation against Homer, that he was a craftsman of deceit, turns out to be true, does it? For overridingly literary motives, Homer kept quiet about the supreme scandal of the Trojan War: that blood had been spilled for a woman who was not actually there, for an impalpable ghost. For hundreds, even thousands of years, the poet’s story would be repeated, prolonging to the end of time the deceit that took the heroes to their deaths beneath the walls of Troy. What treachery could have prompted Homer to do such a thing?

The epos, the epic poem, is a compact, reflecting surface, where the building bricks of formulaic locutions are laid one after the other. Homer did not want to reveal the secret about the nature of Helen, the fact that she was a phantom, because this would have created a vacuum in the surface of his poem. The name Helen must designate a being no less solid than the towering Diomedes. And it is precisely in this way that the phantom is sovereign, when it is hidden away, eating into the bodies from inside.

Homer foresaw his great future enemy: Plato, evoker of copies, of unstoppable cascades of copies that would flood the world. And illuminating those copies with the art of reason, Plato would try to dissolve Helen’s enchantment, the enchantment of the unique, in their profusion. But the unique Helen shines more brightly than any other, precisely because she hides the simulacrum within herself, her phantom and the twins she was born with. Faced with the flood of copies Plato released upon the world, the eye would retreat, overcome by an ultimate sense of bewilderment. After which, it would turn elsewhere, toward something invisible and secure, beyond, where the bodiless prototypes are at rest: the ideas. For the unique woman, Plato’s idea is a disaster, because it aims to replace her. The two look at each other sidelong, like rivals, ready for anything, each examining the other’s makeup. To defend herself, Helen relies on the brilliant surface, makes it throb as no other figure, however fleshy, could, since other figures had no doubles, and indeed as no idea ever could, since ideas have no pores: this is the supreme level of existence, mocking every other. The object of the dispute between Homer and Plato is the body of Helen. Both men won. When we see the goddess reproduced thousands upon thousands of times, the Platonic curse of the copy triumphs. But the goddess is a star and occupies a unique, unassailable place, in the sky.

The Trojan War remains unique among all wars, “not just for the great passion involved, but likewise for how long it lasted and how much effort went into it.” Unique not just on earth but in heaven too. For the Twelve Olympians the war was “a greater and more terrible struggle than their fight with the Giants.” Thus writes Isocrates, spokesman for the mainstream of Athenian thought.

But how could a cosmic event such as the Gigantomachy have troubled the gods less than a war between men? As the up and coming celestial generation, the Olympians had presented a united front against the giants. Yet, when they looked down at what was happening on the plains of Troy, a kind of civil war broke out among them: “they fought among themselves over that woman [Helen].” Unbearable to men, Helen’s beauty was likewise dangerous for the gods. The risk they ran was that of becoming too like men, to the point of engaging in that ultimate and peculiarly human of horrors, the civil war. Isocrates has a wonderful way of prettifying the truth. Hence he has nothing to add to this remark, which, however, stands out all the more coming from him.

If the Trojan War was a dangerous business for gods as well as men, this was because it served to generate that mighty “upheaval” which once and for all shifted the civilized world’s center of gravity to Greece and the Greek city of Athens, the city of Theseus, the man who first recognized Helen, when she was a prepubescent girl and immediately decided that he couldn’t live without “her intimacy.” In the Athenian twilight, Helen appeared as the felix culpa that had allowed Greece to see off the opulent barbarians. Behind Greece’s transformation into the dominant civilization, which Isocrates was so proud of, stood not a founding hero, nor a king, nor a warrior, but an adulterous woman of whom only two qualities have been obsessively documented: her flair for betrayal and her beauty.

In the vaster historical perspective, the adulteries disappeared but not the beauty. Helen had been the living proof of the Athenian theorem, according to which “beauty, by nature, rules over strength.” It is a sovereignty that comes into its own only when strength has pushed itself to the limit, in the slaughter of the heroes. It was then that beauty finally asserted itself, as it asserted itself over Theseus, that champion of physical strength, “sovereign of himself,” who left in Athenian customs a “trace of his sweetness.”

More than acts of worship, it was beauty that offered a firm link between the life of the city and that of the Olympians. Mortals and immortals communicated through beauty, without any need for ceremonies. Even Zeus agreed to renounce the use of force and “humble himself” only when he found himself before the beauty of a mortal woman. And he agreed “always to hunt that nature with art and not with violence.” So highly did the Olympians value beauty that they even forgave “their own women when they were overcome by it.” When beauty seduced her into an earthly adventure, no goddess “ever tried to hide what had happened, as though it were something to be ashamed of.” On the contrary, rather than have people keep quiet about it, they wanted it to be celebrated. And this distinguishes the gods sharply from mortals, who have never been able to forgive their beautiful women. Helen lived surrounded by the love of a few men and the hate of both innumerable other men and all women. For centuries she would be subjected to insults and blasphemy. Yet she would always remain “the only woman Zeus allowed to call him father.” Thus Helen behaved with the same shamelessness as the Olympian goddesses when “she appeared one night to Homer and ordered him to write a poem about the warriors of Troy, wishing to make their deaths more enviable than those of other men; and it was partly thanks to Homer’s artfulness, but above all because of her, that that poem became so seductive [epaphróditon] and famous everywhere.” Rather than weep over her crimes, Helen, like a sovereign, commissioned the Iliad from Homer to celebrate them. And literature obeyed her command, assimilating Helen’s Aphrodite-like charm.

These were the last years of freedom for Athens, and through Isocrates the city recounted its history. His speech on Helen seems to go straight on into the Panathenaicus, that grandiose celebration of the declining Athens. Isocrates, “the most modest of orators,” was ninety-four years old when he started writing it, and he worked on it for three years, fighting illness all the while. Then, when news of the defeat at Chaeronea came, he decided to starve himself to death. The Macedonians would soon have conquered Attica, as the peninsula’s eastern enemies had so often tried to do and failed. “Some say that he died on the ninth day of his abstinence from food; others say on the fourth, the day they held the funerals for those who had fallen at Chaeronea.”

Behind what the Greeks called eídōlon, which is at once the idol, the statue, the simulacrum, the phantom, lies the mental image. This fanciful and insubstantial creature imitates the world and at the same time subjects it to a frenzy of different combinations, confounding its forms in inexhaustible proliferation. It emanates a prodigious strength, our awe in the face of what we see in the invisible. It has all the features of the arbitrary, of what is born in the dark, from formlessness, the way our world was perhaps once born. But this time the chaos is the vast shadowy canvas that lies behind our eyes and on which phosphenic patterns constantly merge and fade. Such constant formation of images occurs in each one of us in every instant. But these are not the only peculiarities of the phenomenon. When the phantom, the mental image, takes over our minds, when it begins to join with other similar or alien figures, then little by little it fills the whole space of the mind in an ever more detailed and ever richer concatenation. What initially presented itself as the prodigy of appearance, cut off from everything, is now linked, from one phantom to another, to everything.

At one extreme of the mental image lies our amazement at form, at its self-sufficient and sovereign existence. At the other lies our amazement at the chain of connections that reproduce in the mind the necessity of the material world. It is hard to see those two opposite points in the phantom’s spectrum. To see them simultaneously would be unbearable. For the Greeks, Helen was the embodiment of that vision, beauty hatched from the egg of necessity.

The tension between Helen’s body and Helen’s phantom was too strong: after Homer the Greeks were no longer able to hold the two together. The first sign of breakdown came with Stesichorus: after writing his Helen, in which she is presented as “bigamous and trigamous, a betrayer of men,” he had to produce a poem in her defense after she blinded him in revenge. In Homer, body and phantom existed tacitly side by side: after Homer, the knot that held them together in a single being was gradually loosened, until finally it came apart. On the one hand, there would be the guilty woman, “with her many lovers,” “sold over and over for her beauty,” like the commonest hetaera. On the other, a Helen who had been the victim of divine malice and who waited in Egypt for the return of Menelaus while rejecting the advances of the local king, another Penelope almost.

Euripides dedicated two tragedies—Helen and The Trojan Women—to this two-faced heroine, illuminating first one side, then the other. The plays mark the earliest emergence of that grim matrimonial morality on which all melodrama would later be based. Helen’s ill-omened adultery, with its wildly disproportionate consequences, would thus go on and on gripping audiences right to the end, right up to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Hofmannsthal-Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Helen resembled her two brothers, Castor and Pollux. She had a “simple spirit” (whatever that might mean), mild manners, splendid hair, a beauty spot between her eyebrows, a small mouth, perfect breasts. In Lindos she consecrated an amber cup that exactly covered one of them. When he burst into Troy to kill her, “they say that no sooner had he glimpsed Helen’s naked breasts than Menelaus dropped his sword.”

All her life Helen did nothing but show herself off and betray. We know little about how she felt, and what we do know is subject to doubt, because she had such a talent for mimicry (another of Aphrodite’s gifts) that they used to call her Echo. So she could easily have faked anything she wanted to. She brought nothing new to mankind, not even the disasters she caused. As Horace says, with the dismissive dispatch of the Quirites: “the cunt had been a terrible provoker of wars long before Helen came on the scene.” So even though some do grant her “skill in tapestry,” and even if she did (like a host of others) learn “many doctrines” from the learned Egyptians, Helen nevertheless remains the least virtuous of beings one could imagine. Maybe she had no psychology. And maybe it was impossible for her to have one. If she weeps, as she does on the Scaean Gate, a veil, dazzling as Zeus’s thunderbolts, hides her tears. The only thing she cared about was appearance, and hence poetry too. When she arrived in Mycenae with Menelaus and found the corpse of her sister, Clytemnestra, throat freshly slashed by Orestes, Helen did, as a sign of grief, cut the ends of her hair, but not so much as to risk making herself ugly. Not only did she compel Homer to write about her but, as one charming Byzantine author would later claim, she actually composed a poem about the Trojan War herself, which Homer then used for his own.

Napoleon began as a novelist: Helen wished to end up as the narrator of her own life. In any event, there must have been a profound affinity between her and poetry, for no woman in literature has ever been so exalted and so savaged. The chorus of Euripides’ Cyclops speaks of her thus: “So then, when you’d got your hands on the girl, did you take turns at balling her, seeing that she likes swapping husbands?”

Nemesis fled to the ends of the earth to escape Zeus, transforming herself into one animal after another, just as the manifest flees and scatters before being caught and pinned down by its principle. The same sequence of flight with metamorphoses followed by rape is repeated when Peleus chases Thetis and finally couples with her in the form of a cuttlefish. The repetition of a mythical event, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us. There is no such thing as the isolated mythical event, just as there is no such thing as the isolated word. Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order, covered in seaweed.

Those two marine rapes, preceded by animal metamorphoses, stand out among hundreds of amorous adventures, just as the solitary children born from them stand out amid all others: Helen and Achilles, the two unique ones. Helen was unique in being Zeus’s only daughter on an earth swarming with the god’s bastard sons. Achilles was unique in that he was born to substitute for the truly unique one: that son Thetis never bore who would have replaced Zeus. And if Achilles, the unique one, is also a substitute for the unique one, this points to the fact that the realm of substitutions contains within itself the realm of the unique, without which, however, it could have neither meaning nor intensity. The most archaic form of the amorous chase, still close to the realm of perennial metamorphosis, was thus only a hairbreadth away from the most modern of dangers, that of the dawning of a post-Olympian era.

Having brought about the existence of Helen and Achilles, Zeus realized that he had already stretched the potential of his realm to the limit. Helen and Achilles had made their appearance; now nothing could prevent the consequences. But the apparition was to be a darting flash and no more. The blaze of Troy would consume them. After that, they could safely be allowed to proceed to the innocuous Blessed Isles. Or maybe they could get together on Leuke, as phantoms. But the world would never again know that tension, so insidious to the gods and for mortals unbearable, except in their memories, their poetry. We have mentioned four realms here: the realm of perennial metamorphosis is that of every beginning, when the word has not yet detached itself from the thing, nor the mind from the matter; the realm of substitution is the world of the digit, above all the digit as sign, as incessant substitution; the realm of the unique is the world that always eludes the clutches of language, the very appearing of the irrepeatable; the realm of Zeus is that of the Greek stories, of which we are still a part.

In Eratosthenes’ version, Nemesis’s long flight came to an end in the sea off Rhamnus in Attica, when Zeus the swan settled on the wild duck. That was the only time Nemesis would ever play a passive role. From then on, and for hundreds, thousands of years, she would appear as a young woman, of calm and grave expression, roaming all over the earth, treading, as often as not, on lifeless corpses. That remote animal scene in a wilderness of sea, unwatched by any eye, is the only episode of her life we know about. It was also the greatest exploit of Zeus’s reign: that of having forced necessity to bring forth beauty.

When the inhabitants of Rhamnus decided to consecrate a sanctuary to Nemesis, they commissioned Phidias to sculpt a giant statue of the goddess. Some claim that the Rhamnus Nemesis was in fact an Aphrodite sculpted by Agoracritus, Phidias’s pupil and lover. Others say that Phidias allowed the sculpture to be passed off as the work of his lover. Either way, the statue would be famous for centuries. Varro preferred it above all others. A fragment of the head has been discovered; the rest we must reconstruct from descriptions and coins. So the base of the statue showed Leda leading a reluctant Helen toward her real mother, Nemesis. But what was the relationship between mother and daughter? We know a great deal about Helen, whereas only a few details have come down to us about the divine figure of Nemesis, and even these are often enigmatic. This goddess of the offense that boomerangs back on its perpetrator must have been very beautiful if people could mistake her for Aphrodite. Herself the great enemy of hubris, she gave birth to a daughter whose very body was an offense and in doing so provoked the most magnificent unfolding of hubris in all of Greek history: the Trojan War.

In one hand Nemesis held a designer’s square, or a pair of reins, or an apple branch. The wheel of destiny stood beside her and could become the wheel of her griffin-drawn chariot. She also held the urn of destiny. “Queen of motives and arbitress of all things,” she had always possessed the power to bind men in the “never-to-be-loosened net of necessity” (necessitatis insolubili retinaculo vinciens). Often Nemesis would lift a hand to her shoulder, as if to adjust her tunic. And often she bowed her head, eyes on her breast, as though deep in thought. Some of the ancients said that when she did this she was spitting into her tunic to ward off bad luck. Phidias (or Agoracritus) sculpted a handsome crown on her head with representations of stags and of Nike, goddess of victory. She held a decorated goblet in her hand showing figures of Negroes. When Pausanias saw the statue, he was puzzled by this goblet. He wasn’t convinced by the explanations people gave him, that it showed a group of Ethiopians, because Nemesis’s father was Oceanus and the Ethiopians lived near Oceanus. In a doggedly determined digression on the Ethiopians, he demonstrates that such a supposition was baseless. But he didn’t dare to suggest an alternative and moved on. Other classical authors found it equally difficult to account for all Nemesis’s attributes. The designer’s square stood for the notion of measure, the cosmic rule that punishes every excess, but what was that aphrodisian apple branch about? And the impressive stags around her forehead? And why that frequently repeated gesture of raising a hand to one shoulder, where she had a buckle in the shape of a griffin, her favorite animal? Was it to cover herself better, or to undo the buckle?

Nemesis came from Asia Minor. Before arriving in Rhamnus, she was worshiped in Smyrna. Above the cult’s statues were hung the three golden Charites, by Bupalus. And in Smyrna we find that Nemesis was not just one figure. Here the faithful worshiped two identical Nemeses. One day Alexander the Great went hunting on Mount Pagus. On his way back, he stopped to rest under a large plane tree near the sanctuary of the two Nemeses. And two identical women appeared to him in a dream. They were looking at each other, and each had a hand on her tunic buckle, one the left hand, the other the right, as though in a mirror. They told him to found a new Smyrna beyond the Meles, the river “with the finest water of all, rising in a cavern where it is said Homer composed his poems.” Alexander obeyed.

But why should Nemesis, this guardian of the cosmic law, which is intrinsically indivisible, appear as two figures? Perhaps here we have found our way back to the place where the phantom began its long journey. Helen was born with the Dioscuri twins. She was the unique one; she brought together in a single body all the beauty that in the normal way of things would have been shared out equally among everybody in obedience to the némein that many of the ancients had even then linked to Nemesis. But right from the egg she hatched out of, Helen was also pursued by duplication, which reigns within the phantom. And it wasn’t just a question of her twin brothers; her mother was also split into two figures. Now, as her mother, Leda, took her toward her other mother, her real mother, Helen realized that Nemesis too had a double. Not only beauty itself, but likewise the destiny of being double, the realm of the phantom, all these things can be traced back to that Asiatic mother with the mysterious gesture, the woman Zeus chose to generate his only daughter to live among men.