The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

V

(photo credit 5.1)

HEROPHILE, DEMOPHILE, SABBE: SUCH are the names of the Sibyls that have come down to us. From Palestine to the Troad they left a few scattered remains, and sometimes verses. One day, converging from every corner of the Mediterranean, they all climbed toward Delphi, which was “difficult to get to even for a strong man.” Herophile prophesied the coming of Helen, “how she would grow up in Sparta to be the ruination of Asia and Europe.” In her verses she sometimes calls herself Artemis, and she also claimed to be Apollo’s sister, or his daughter. Some permanent bond linked her to Apollo Smintheus, the Apollo of the Rat, harbinger of the plague. You can still find Herophile’s tomb in the Troad, among the trees of the wood sacred to Apollo Smintheus, and the epitaph says: “I lie close to the Nymphs and to Hermes. / I have not lost my sovereignty.”

In the latter days of Delphi, the Pythia was selected the same way a priest’s housekeeper is: that is, she had to be over fifty. But originally she had been a young girl chosen from among all the girls of Delphi, and she had worn a simple girl’s tunic without a gold hem. One day Echecrates, the Thessalian, saw the virgin prophesying, was seized by passion, carried the girl off, and raped her. After which the people of Delphi introduced the age limit for the prophetess, although she continued to dress as a little girl. But the situation had been very different in more ancient times. Then the Sibyls came from far away and chanted their prophesies from a rock, later to be hemmed in between the Bouleuterion and the Portico of the Athenians.

In a state of divine possession, they spoke in impeccable verse. In fact, it was only now that men realized what perfect speech could be, since the hexameter was Apollo’s gift to Phemonoe, his daughter, his mountain Nymph, his first Pythia. The god knew that power came from possession, from the snake coiled around the water spring. But that wasn’t enough for Apollo: his women, his soothsaying daughters, must reveal not only the enigmas of the future but verse itself. Poetry thus arrived on the scene as the form structuring those ambiguous words that people came to hear to help them make decisions about their lives, words whose meaning they often appreciated only when it was too late. And Apollo didn’t want slovenly shamans but young virgins from the grottoes of Parnassus, girls still close to the Nymphs, and speaking in well-turned verse.

The moderns have often imagined the operation of the oracle as some kind of collaboration between a team of Madame Sosostris and cold Parnassian priests who polished up the metrics of the Pythia’s groans (and of course derailed her meaning to suit their own dark designs). But the Sibyls, the first women ever to prophesy at Delphi, had no need of prompters. The notion — seemingly self-evident to the moderns — that possession and formal excellence are incompatible would never have occurred to them. Into the impervious history of Delphi, Orpheus and Musaeus arrive almost as parvenus, at least when compared with the Sibyls: “They say that Orpheus put on such airs about his mysteries and was generally so presumptuous that both he and Musaeus, who imitated him in everything, refused to submit themselves to the test and take part in any musical competition.” This was when they were in Delphi. And perhaps Orpheus and Musaeus weren’t avoiding that competition out of arrogance, nor for fear of being beaten, but because right there for all to see, as it still is today, was the rock where Phemonoe pronounced the very first hexameters.

Apollo and Dionysus are false friends, and likewise false enemies. Behind the charade of their clashes, their encounters, their overlapping, there is something that forever unites them, forever distinguishes them from their divine peers: possession. Both Apollo and Dionysus know that possession is the highest form of knowledge, the greatest power. And this is the knowledge, this the power they seek. Zeus too, of course, is practiced in the art of possession, in fact he need only listen to the rustling oaks of Dodona to generate it. But Zeus is everything and hence gives pride of place to nothing. Apollo and Dionysus, in contrast, choose possession as their peculiar weapon and are loath to let others mess with it. For Dionysus, possession is an immediate, unassailable reality; it is with him in all his wanderings, whether in the houses of the city or out on the rugged mountains. If someone refuses to acknowledge it, Dionysus is ready to unleash that possession like a terrifying beast. And it is then that the Proetides, the weaver sisters who were reluctant to follow the call of the god, dash off and race furiously about the mountains. Soon they are killing people, sometimes innocent travelers. This is how Dionysus punishes those who don’t accept his possession, which is like a perennial spring gushing from his body, or the dark liquid that he revealed to men.

For Apollo, possession is a conquest. And, like every conquest, it must be defended by an imperious hand. Like every conquest, it also tends to obliterate whatever power came before it. But the possession that attracted Apollo was very different from the possession that had always been the territory of Dionysus. Apollo wants his possession to be articulated by meter; he wants to stamp the seal of form on the flow of enthusiasm, at the very moment it occurs. Apollo is responsible for imposing logic too: a restraining meter in the flux of thought. When faced with the darting, disordered, furtive intelligence of Hermes, Apollo drew a dividing line; on the one side Hermes could preside over divination by dice and bones, could even have the Thriai, the honey maidens, despite his elder brother’s once having loved them, but the supreme, the invincible oracle of the word, Apollo kept for himself.

In the thick of the stones, marble, and metal at Delphi, the visitor would think of other ghosts, of the first temples to Apollo, now no more. The first, a hut of laurel branches broken from trees in the valley of Tempe; the second, made of wax and feathers; the third, built in bronze by Hephaestus and Athena. Pindar could still wonder: “Oh Muses, with what patterns did the able hands of Hephaestus and Athena decorate the temple?” We shall never know, but Pindar thought he could recall fragments of an image: “Bronze the walls and bronze too rose the columns; golden above the pediment chanted six Enchantresses.” These words were already sounding obscure by the time Pausanias heard them. At most, he supposed, the Enchantresses might have been an “imitation of Homer’s Sirens.” Yet they held the secret to a long story, the story of the origins of possession.

Iynx was a girl sorceress. She made up love potions. Not for herself, but because she wanted love to make the rounds. One day she offered a drink to Zeus. The god drank it, and the first girl he saw was Io, wandering about in the grounds of Hera’s sanctuary in Argos. Zeus was possessed by love for Io. And so began history on earth, a history of flight, persecution, metamorphosis. The first victim was the sorceress herself. In revenge, Hera turned her into a bird known as the wryneck, because of the way it twists its neck with a sudden jerking movement. When Jason reached Colchis, he knew that if he wanted to get the Golden Fleece he would have to win over the young sorceress Medea. Aphrodite looked down from heaven and decided to help him. A sorceress can only be overcome by a more potent sorcery. So Aphrodite took the wryneck, the “delirious, multicolored bird,” and fixed it with bonds that could not be untied to a little wheel with four spokes. Now the circular motion of the wheel would forever accompany the jerky twisting of the bird’s neck. That small object, that plaything, becomes the mechanism, the artifice of possession. It imposes an obsessive circular motion on the mind, a motion that uproots it from its inertia and hooks it onto the divine wheel, which turns incessantly like the spheres. Even the thoughts of the gods get caught on that wheel.

Jason learned to use Aphrodite’s gift. Medea immediately lost all consideration for her parents. The girl’s mind was obsessed by desire for a distant country, for a name, Greece, which she confused with Jason’s presence. Thus, drawing on her sorcery, her herbs and ointments, Medea saved the Stranger and ruined her own family. It wasn’t Apollo or Dionysus, then, lords of possession that they were, who invented the íynx, this strange object that is the only visible artifact of possession. Aphrodite, goddess of “the swiftest arrows,” got there first; for erotic possession is the starting point for any possession. What at Delphi is an enigma, for Aphrodite is a plaything. The worshipers at Apollo’s temple in Delphi would see small wheels hanging from the ceiling, small wheels with the bodies of birds attached. It was said that those wheels produced a voice, a seductive call. They were the Enchantresses Pindar spoke of, linking the human mind to the circular motion of the heavens.

The boy Apollo straightens in his mother Leto’s arms and lets fly an arrow at an enormous snake wrapped in huge coils around the dappled slopes of Delphi. The youth Apollo, wavy, blond hair falling on his shoulders, chases after a young girl. Just as he is about to catch her, the girl turns herself into a laurel tree. Each of these actions is the shadow of the other. If we look carefully at Python, we can see the delicate Daphne in the snake. Looking at the laurel leaves, we can see the scales of Python.

No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds. Apollo slays the monster, he is the first slayer of monsters. But what is this monster? It is Python’s skin, camouflaging itself among bushes and rock, and it is the soft skin of Daphne, already turning into laurel and marble.

Apollo doesn’t manage to possess the Nymph, and maybe he doesn’t even want to. What he is looking for in the Nymph is the crown of laurel left in his hand as her body dissolves: he wants representation. No Nymph could ever reject or escape Dionysus, because the Nymph is part of himself. There is only one exception, Aura, who has her double in Nikaia. But the rape of Aura would introduce Iacchus to the Eleusinian mysteries. Hence it could not be other than unique, in its initial duality.

The Nymph is possession, and a nymphólēptos is a person who becomes delirious on being captured by the Nymphs. Apollo does not possess the Nymphs, he does not possess possession, but he educates it, governs it. The Muses were wild young girls from Helicon. It was Apollo made them move over to the mountain opposite, Parnassus; it was he trained them in the gifts that made that band of wild girls the Muses, and hence those women who took possession of the mind, but each imposing the laws of an art.

Plutarch, priest of Delphic Apollo, claimed that Dionysus was just as important in Delphi as Apollo. In the freezing winter months, the months when the dead rise and torches wander about the slopes of Parnassus, Dionysus is lord of Delphi. But then Apollo returns from his nordic quest among the Hyperboreans, and for the other nine months of the year he reigns supreme. No victory is ever complete, nor ever enough to last the whole year. Neither Apollo nor Dionysus can reign forever, neither can do without the other, neither can be there all the time. When Apollo reappears and squeezes Dionysus’s arm, we hear the last notes of the dithyrambs, and immediately afterward the first of the paeans. The only continuity is sound.

In the Pythia’s ádyton, Apollo has a golden statue, Dionysus only the base of his tomb. Yet everything seems to proceed smoothly enough. As interlocking and alternating powers, Apollo and Dionysus are loath to let anything of their past emerge in this place. Few recall that, beneath the bronze lid of the tripod where the Pythia now sits, the dismembered limbs of Dionysus Zagreus once boiled. Or even that Dionysus, as some claim, was the first to prophesy from the tripod. Or even that a snake once coiled around the feet of that tripod. All this would have made it all too easy to confuse the stories of Dionysus with those of the Enemy: Python, a snake, and thus close to Dionysus, the god generated by Zeus when in the form of a snake and escorted by virgins who tied snakes around their foreheads like ribbons; Python forerunner of Apollo as prophet; Python who was himself (or herself) buried in the ádyton, beneath the omphalós. Had all this been remembered, Dionysus, who reigned in Apollo’s stead during his winter absence, would have been revealed in his occult role as the Enemy, an emanation of Python, of the power Apollo had killed and left to rot in the sun.

In its heyday, and likewise in its decadence, Delphi was the opposite of what the Hellenophiles of the last century imagined as the classical spirit. It was a market, a hoard of trophies, a burial ground. Its guiding principle demanded accumulation. Shields and figureheads, the gifts of victorious soldiers. Lyres, tripods, chariots, bronze tables, basins, paterae, caldrons, wine bowls, spits: such was the vision that greeted the eye in the mégaron of Apollo’s temple. Leading through to the Pythia’s chamber, this hall was cluttered with objects leaning against the walls and columns, and hanging from the ceiling. Each of these objects was an event, summed up a life, sometimes many lives and many deaths. Up in the air, moving ever so slightly when a draft slipped in from outside, hung light chariot wheels. And the sashes and bands of athletes drifted back and forth like gossamer fans.

On entering Apollo’s temple in Delphi, bewildered by the throng of metallic objects leaning from the walls and sparkling in the shadows, you could sometimes make out, in the background, the bust of a woman (and for many years it would have been a young woman) who seemed to grow right out of the floor: she wore the simple tunic local girls wore; she was the Pythia. Squatting on her tripod, as though on a stool in a bar, she watched the new arrivals as they came into the mégaron. The Pythia’s chamber, the ádyton, was smaller than the main hall of the temple, and a little over a yard lower. Beside it was a small booth with a bench where those who came to consult the oracle would sit, unable to see the Pythia as she prophesied among her sacred objects: the tall tripod anchored to the floor above a crevice in the ground, the umbilical stone wrapped in the cords of a double net, the base of the tomb of Dionysus, a golden statue of Apollo, a laurel tree that got a little light from above, a trickle of water that ran behind her.

There is an object that represents one of the highest peaks of civilization, with respect to which all others we are familiar with are but watered down derivatives: the bronze caldron. In the China of the Shang dynasty it became the cult object around which people’s lives revolved. Even today we can only reconstruct that world through those bronze caldrons. It was then that the sacred vessel was given a certain number of canonical forms (how many is still a matter of debate), which were to survive for more than two thousand years, the materials changing, the caldrons themselves becoming ever more fragile and secular. In Doric Greece, the caldron was made in just the one dominant form: the tripod. During the geometric age, the formal thrust of the Greek mind seemed to concentrate on these objects. They become the sacred objects par excellence. That which has an indispensable, humble function — to cook food — is imperiously subtracted from any function other than that of making offerings to the gods. Iaròn Diós, “sacred to Zeus,” we read on the rim of a three-legged basin in the Olympia Museum. And in both China and Greece we find bronze caldrons being decorated with animal figures: in China the most common is the tao-t’ieh, a monster made up of other animals and ideograms, from the owl to the cicada, the leopard to the snake; in Greece it is usually the griffin, its powerful beak open and tongue darting out, but there are also bronze caldrons decorated with lions and bulls.

The choice of those canonical forms, established as early as the Shang dynasty, was to put a stamp on the whole of Chinese civilization, right down to the present day. The time would come when the bronzes with their green patina would be lost, buried in the loess or in museum collections. But Chinese design would be a genetic continuation of the canon of these bronzes. Decorative devices and features of architectural style would always hark back, some more directly, some less, to that beginning. In Greece too the tripod design has the splendor of an important beginning, but then it disappears forever, replaced by another form: the human figure. From that moment on, in both Delphi and Olympia, we find fewer and fewer bronze tripods being dedicated to the gods, and more and more statues. Often they were statues of gods, but sometimes they represented the winners of some war or race who wanted to dedicate themselves. It was the opposite of what happens today: instead of the winner receiving a laughable little statuette as a prize, his prize was the permission to raise a statue of himself, sometimes a huge statue, and dedicate it to a god. Human figures appeared on tall columns, figures with names and dedications. And yet these figures, at the opposite extreme from the complete anonymity of the tripod, for a while inherited its sacred quality. What disappeared entirely was the food or drink that had bubbled in the caldron for the god. That energy migrated into the drapes of a marble tunic, into a horse’s harness, the wings of a Sphinx. The offering was no longer something that could be eaten: now, for the first time, you could only look.

The first human beings the Olympians saw from their ether were the mountain Nymphs. These extremely long-lived though ultimately mortal women would appear and disappear among woods and undergrowth, often in pursuit of wild beasts. It was they who kindled the first fires of desire in the Olympians, served as their initiation almost into the creatures of the earth. Apollo was not always happy in his loves, male or female. At a certain point, something would go wrong — a fatal frenzy, as happened with Hyacinthus, and with Coronis. But at least with Cyrene it would seem that all went well.

He watched Cyrene for a long time, from on high, while she hunted on Mount Pelion. He was impressed and pleased by her scorn for things domestic. The loom was not for her. She went out day and night to chase the wildest of beasts. This reminded Apollo of his sister, Artemis. And what reminded him even more strongly of his sister was that Cyrene “liked being a virgin and keeping an unstained bed.” Playing innocent, Apollo called on Chiron, Cyrene’s father, and asked him who this girl fighting the lion might be. Chiron smiled at the god’s ingenuousness in pretending he didn’t know. In the meantime, Cyrene had beaten the lion yet again. To have her surrender her virginity without regrets, Apollo chose one of his most secret forms: the wolf. It was the form that would give most pleasure both to her and to himself. Afterward there were the usual nuptial honors: Apollo took Cyrene to Libya in a golden chariot, and Aphrodite led them to a golden palace deep in a luxuriant garden. But as far as sex was concerned, they were never to improve on that first time. Apollo gave Cyrene this part of Africa for her to hunt her wild beasts in, and he brought along other Nymphs to serve her. Then their child, Aristaeus, was born. Like another child of Apollo, Asclepius, he possessed the gift of healing. The Muses brought him up on prophesy and honey.

The power of the abstract begins as a rejection of that epic encyclopedism where every element, whether it be a comment on the power of the gods or instructions on how to fix the axles to a cart, has the same importance, the same impact on the mosaic surface of the narrative. Anaximander and Heraclitus aimed for the opposite: sentences that subsumed whole cycles of reality and almost eclipsed them, dazzling the reader with their own light. The lógos, when it appears, annihilates the particular, the accumulation of detritus typical of every experience, that obligation to repeat every detail. Like the cipher, like the arrow of Abaris, the lógos transfixes in the merest atom of time what the rhapsodies had strung together and repeated over and over for night after smoky night.

The resulting thrill was without precedent. People had heard stories from the East, stories more occult than their own. But it was no longer a question of stories. In comparison with what had gone before, these were bare propositions that stamped things with “the seal of ‘that which is.’ ” And the seal would live on, closed away inside itself, proud, immobile, like the epsilon engraved on the temple at Delphi. There, for the first time, the priests realized that the knowledge that is power derives not only from the secret stories of the gods but from the hypothetical syllogism.

Every day, at dawn, Ion would begin to sweep the area in front of Apollo’s temple in Delphi. He picked up the leftovers from the sacrifices, watched the hawks circling down from Parnassus, and threatened them with his bow before they could peck at the golden rooftops. Carefully, he laid out fresh olive garlands and poured buckets of cold water on the temple floor. It was a chore he liked, a humble, solemn duty. Everything had to look clean and whole for when the crowd of visitors and those who came to consult the oracle would swarm up the twisting path to the sanctuary. This temple of prophecy perched high up on the rocks was all Ion had ever seen of the world. And he imagined he would always live here, as though in an eternal orphanage. In the end he was only alive at all because one day, at this same time, in the early morning, the Pythia had found a basket in the temple gardens and, with strange benevolence, picked it up. With similarly strange benevolence, the god let the little boy grow up, playing among the altars. Then they made him guardian of Apollo’s treasures. He knew nothing of his father or mother, he was less than a slave, a nobody, and nobody’s child; yet he thought of Apollo as his father and of the Pythia as his mother. He owed his life, he felt, to them alone. Nothing else mattered, or even existed for him really. Young, pure, devout, cheerful, Ion welcomed the visitors, showed them the various rooms, the various ceremonies. But the best time of the day was this silent hour at dawn, when he swept and cleaned and all the while looked about him.

One was never alone at Delphi: hundreds of sculpted and painted figures greeted you wherever you went. By now he knew them one by one and could recount all their adventures. Heracles, the Giants, Athena, the thyrsus, the Gorgons … He would think about their struggles and flights, about those monsters, those weapons, those embraces, those ambushes. He would think about the gods, and he talked to no one. Visitors would tell him the most awful things that were happening in the world outside, the world he had never seen. But as he listened, Ion would have a faint smile on his face, and he thought how he had heard it all before. For the tales they told him were all repetitions of the silent stories sculpted and painted round about him, dull repetitions when set against the temple’s pediments flooded with the day’s first light. And perhaps somewhat less malign too. A swan was waddling up to the altar, on the lookout, like the hawks, for sacrificial crumbs. Cheerful as ever, Ion chased the creature away, told him to fly off to Delos. Everything in Delphi must be fragrant, completely free from the wear and tear that man brings with him, not so much as a footprint on the ground, inviolate, like Parnassus at dawn.

Then he set to thinking again: the gods were the example and model of every evil, and it wasn’t fair to blame men for imitating actions the gods had committed before them. His favorite mental game was to try to recall, as exhaustively as possible, all the rapes attributed to Zeus and Poseidon. But there was always one that got away. And Ion chuckled to himself. He didn’t realize that he himself was part of those stories, didn’t realize that he was the fruit of one of those rapes, but one by Apollo, the god Ion thought of as his real father. And he was.

The chain of Erichthonius, majestic heirloom of the ruling house of Athens, was passed down from generation to generation. When Erechtheus gave it to Creusa, the girl wore it on her wrist like a bracelet. And on her white wrists, one day as she was gathering crocuses on her own, lost in thought on the northern slopes of the Acropolis, Creusa felt the iron grip of Apollo. All she saw of the god was a glimpse of flashing light from his hair. Something of that light was picked up in the saffron flowers she had gathered in the fold of her tunic, over her lap. Creusa screamed: “Oh, Mother!” and that scream was the only sound to be heard as Apollo dragged her to Pan’s cave a little farther up the slope. The god never let go his grip on the girl’s wrists. Creusa felt the links of the bracelet being forced into her flesh. Apollo stretched her on the ground in the dark, opening her arms wide. It was the fastest and most violent of all his loves. Not a word said, not a moan.

When Apollo had gone, Creusa lay motionless in the dark, hurt, and determined to hurt the god in return. She swore no one would know. Months later she gave birth in the cave, in the exact place where the god had held her with her arms outspread. Then she wrapped the tiny Ion in swaddling clothes and laid him in a round basket on a piece of embroidery she had sewn as a child: it showed the head of Medusa, the features vague and clumsy. The baby’s screams as the hawks and wild beasts came to devour him were the only voice that might get through to the hateful, impassive god, busy strumming his lyre; it was the only outrage Creusa could commit to reproduce the outrage of her “bitter nuptials.”

Apollo the Oblique tangled up the threads that were Creusa’s and Ion’s lives. Indeed he so arranged matters that mother and son were only to recognize each other after the mother had tried to kill her son, and the son his mother. To kill Ion, Creusa used the lethal drop of Medusa’s blood still sealed in her bracelet. But the drop fell to the ground, and only a greedy dove was killed. To kill Creusa, Ion was about to violate the sacred law that protected supplicants in the temple. But his devotion made him hesitate. Pinned against the altar of Apollo, Creusa awaited her death at the hands of her son, whom she still imagined to be some nameless guardian of Delphi. Then the Pythia came in. She was holding a basket. She opened it and from among the swaddling clothes and wickerwork, still undamaged by mold, took out a clumsy piece of childish embroidery showing Medusa’s head in the middle of a piece of cloth fringed with snakes, as in the aegis.

At which the mother recognized her son. Now Ion could become king of Athens. For he, like Erichthonius, had lain beside Medusa’s head. He too had been wrapped in the aegis. Of course, this was not, as in Erichthonius’s case, the aegis Athena had warmed at her breast but a common piece of cloth embroidered by a little girl. But that was in line with the way the world was going. A unique blazon of unbearable intensity gradually rippled outward in a thousand copies sculpted on the pediments of temples or embroidered on shawls. And, as the copies multiplied, the original power was diluted. Even the gifts of the gods were subject to the passing of time, lost their brilliance: Creusa had wasted the lethal drop sealed in her bracelet, and the other drop, the healing drop that contained “the nutrients of life,” she forgot about. Nobody ever bothered to use it. Ion and Creusa had other things on their minds now: they thought of things divine, of how one way or another they always come too late, “yet are not powerless in their conclusion [télos].”

The hawks that flew over Delphi would drop turtles on the rocks to break their hard shells. Croesus reigned far away from Delphi, on the other side of a wide sea, and felt, like many others, spied upon from that nest of priests perched way up on the mountain. It occurred to him to put the Pythia and those elusive figures around her people called “the saintly ones” to the test. He challenged the Delphic oracle, together with six of the other most famous oracles in the world, to divine what he, Croesus, would be doing the hundredth day after the departure of his messengers.

The messengers came back with their sealed answers. All wrong. But the Pythia had answered in hexameters even before she’d heard the question: “I can count the grains of sand and the waves. / I hear the dumb. I understand the silent. / I smell a smell of giant turtle. / It boils in bronze with lamb’s flesh. / There’s bronze beneath it, and bronze above covering it.” Now, on the day in question, Croesus had in fact cut up “a turtle and a lamb, and with his own hands put them to boil in a bronze cooking pot with a bronze lid.” He claimed to have thought up this charade because he felt it would be the most unlikely of all. A pathetic lie. The scene was a mute message, in which Croesus mimed exactly what had been going on back in the sanctuary since time immemorial: sitting on the lid of a bronze tripod, swathed in smoke, the Pythia gave her answers to whoever came to consult her. But did that smoke rise only from the crevice in the ground beneath the tripod, or from the tripod itself as well? Right from the beginning, lamb’s meat had been mixed with turtle meat beneath that lid. The lamb was the lamb the Thyiads, followers of Dionysus, had torn apart only a little farther up the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The turtle meat had been separated from the shell that Apollo used, as Hermes had taught him, to make his lyre and play, again on the slopes of Parnassus, to his Thriai. Apollo and Dionysus boiled together in the caldron: that was the mixture, the sharp, sharp smell of Delphi.

Far more than the strangled voice of the Pythia or the crevice in the ground archaeologists have searched for in vain, the source of Delphic power was a three-legged bronze caldron protected by animal masks, where something was simmering away. Something offered, sacrificed. From the sacrifice came the voice, the meaning. That was the primordial talisman, the object Apollo’s enemies would want to steal, to rob him of his voice. Pythias or priests were two a penny, but power resided in a bronze caldron protected by griffins and caked with meat. The Pythia sat on the lid to demonstrate her possession. And the oracle would fall into decline the day Delphi was stripped of all the innumerable tripods that had been consecrated there. Nor were they taken just for the metal. The plunderers were absolutely determined to strip of all its talismans the place that for so long had radiated their power.

Thus in challenging the oracle from his kingdom far away, Croesus had wanted to show that not only was he able to fill it, as he had done, with gifts of images of lions and of girls bringing bread, all in solid gold, but also that he knew where its power base lay. Most likely the oracle was not impressed, since every oracle wants to know but not to be known. When Croesus consulted Delphi before taking the most momentous step in his long reign — the war against Cyrus of Persia — the Pythia’s answer was perfect in its ambiguity: “You will destroy a great empire.” Croesus thought the great empire was Cyrus’s, whereas in fact the oracle was referring to his own. Old and beaten, enslaved by Cyrus, Croesus chose to send to Delphi a last gift, his chains. No king had ever had, nor would have, such a long and intimate relationship with the oracle.

When accused of ingratitude, Delphi’s answer to Croesus showed a level of pathos and sense of compassion quite unusual for the oracle. As though to justify himself, Apollo told this extremely rich king that he had done everything he could to wring out of destiny what little destiny would concede. He had managed, for example, to delay the fall of Sardis for three years. It was one of those rare occasions when the god was sincere. With a gesture of humility almost, he revealed that he reigned only over what was surplus, over the excess that destiny left to his control. And this he had indeed given to Croesus, just as Croesus had given Apollo another kind of surplus, the thousands of slaughtered animals and thousands of pounds of gold he had sent up to Delphi.

But isn’t the surplus life itself? Isn’t life always a fragment of life, an unhoped for delay in the death sentence, like the three years Croesus was granted, like the extraordinary moment when, with a sudden rainstorm, Apollo put out the flames of Croesus’s pyre? But one can go so far and no further. As a last gift the king bequeathed his chains. And those were not a surplus. Faced with those, even the god was helpless.

In his dialogue between Croesus and Solon, Herodotus sets up the first verbal duel between Asia and Europe. Of all potentates, Croesus is the one who possesses the most gold. Solon is chief legislator in Athens, and since the Athenians have committed themselves to maintaining the law unchanged for ten years, he sets out on a ten-year journey. Then Solon doesn’t trust the Athenians. “That is the real reason why he went away, even if he claimed he wanted to see the world.” One of the curiosities the world has to offer is Croesus’s palace, where Solon duly arrives.

Croesus is eager for Solon to recognize him as not only the most powerful but also the happiest of men. Solon responds by citing, as an example of a happy man, an unknown Athenian who died, old, in battle. Solon doesn’t mean to contrast the common man with the king. That would be banal. He is explaining the Greek paradox as far as happiness is concerned: that one arrives at it only in death. Happiness is an element of life which, before it can come into being, demands that life disappear. If happiness is a quality that sums up the whole man, then it must wait until a man’s life is complete in death.

This paradox doesn’t exist in isolation. On the contrary, it is only one of the many paradoxes of wholeness to which the Greeks were so sensitive. Their basis can be found in the language itself: telos, the Greek word par excellence, means at once “perfection,” “completion,” “death.” What we hear in Solon’s voice is the Greek diffidence toward the happy man’s obtuseness, and the national passion for logic. But it is the elegance with which he puts his case that strikes us most. Never has such an effective circumlocution been found for telling a truth that, if told straight, would be too brutal, and perhaps not even true anymore: that happiness does not exist.

By the time the Hellenistic age was ushered in, the open space in front of Apollo’s temple in Delphi had grown crowded indeed. On the left, the bronze wolf donated by the people of Delphi kept guard. On the right, Praxiteles’ golden Phryne shone out among numerous Apollos (commissioned by the Epidaurians or Megarians after some victory), as though the hetaera were still conversing with her admirers; a conversation made possible by her lover, Praxiteles, who had sculpted her body. One of those Apollos was enormous: the Apollo Sitalkas rose above a column to a height of seventy feet, more than double that of the temple columns. Then there was a bronze palm tree with, next to it, a gilded Athena from which a flock of crows had pecked away part of the gilding when the Athenians set out on their Sicilian expedition. Or at least so Clytodemos would have us believe. There were also numerous statues of generals from various places, as well as the bronze donkey of the Ambracians and the sacrificial procession, again in bronze, of the Sicyonians: this was their way of fulfilling a vow that would otherwise have obliged them to sacrifice an enormous number of animals to Apollo every year, so many they would have been ruined. In bronze, their sacrifice became eternal. Beyond Phryne stood another solid gold statue whose model owed nothing to matters military: this was Gorgias of Leontini, the defender of Helen, and the man who had preached the supreme power of the word.

In 279 B.C. the Gauls, under Brennus, reached Thermopylae, the “hot gates” of Greece, with just one thought in mind: to sack Delphi. They weren’t interested in anything else. They didn’t care about Athens, or Thebes, or Sparta, just the treasures of Delphi. Even Brennus, in the remote North, had heard tell of the “cave of the god that spewed up gold.” To the Greeks it seemed that history was repeating itself, though stripped of its glory this time. Instead of the great Xerxes’ Persians with their pointed helmets and colorful Oriental pomp, these new invaders were bands of blond “beasts, full of dash and fury, but brainless,” advancing out of sheer impetuosity, even when shot through with arrows and javelins, so long as their madness, their berserk, was upon them. To oppose them, instead of the Spartans of Leonidas, were a rabble of desperate provincials, Aetolians, Boeotians, and Phocians. The defenders were aware that the war could end in only two ways: either they won or they would be exterminated. It wasn’t a war for liberty, as it had been against the Persians, but for survival.

In the first battle at Thermopylae, the Greeks once again managed to hold out, while many of the Celts were swallowed up by the marshes: how many we shall never know. At this Brennus decided to attack the Greek flank to draw forces away from the center. Forty thousand infantry and a few hundred cavalry stormed into Aetolia. They massacred all the males they could find, including newborn babies. “They raped the dying and the dead.” But less than half of the Gauls who had set off on the expedition returned to the main camp at Thermopylae. Brennus was undeterred: this time he went around the Greeks under cover of fog. Just before they could be completely encircled, the Greeks withdrew toward their hometowns. Brennus didn’t even wait for his own men to regroup before ordering the march on Delphi. Perhaps that was the last time the god of the tripod made his power known. In reply to the terrorized people of Delphi, the oracle told them it would look after itself.

Brennus’s men arrived to find Delphi protected only by the Phocians and a few Aetolians, the rest being busy in their own lands. Also waiting for them, however, was a divine and invisible coalition. Apollo had gone for help to Poseidon and Pan, the earlier divinities of the place, whom he himself had eclipsed. The ground the Gauls advanced across quaked every day, shaken deep below by Poseidon. And, fighting beside the Greeks, their enemies would see the shades of the Hyperborean heroes, Hyperocus and Laodocus, together with the White Virgins. Thus the mythical North of Apollo took on the historical North of biology. Even Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, whom Apollo had killed in his temple in Delphi, as years before in another temple he had killed Achilles, fought among the lightning bolts that consumed the wicker shields of the Gauls.

Delphi’s entire past, a long saga of murders and treachery, an arcane and seething history, rallied around that day to offer an impregnable front of gods, ghosts, and soldiers. And if the day brought horror to the Gauls, that horror only grew when night fell. Pan came down from the Corycian Cave and sowed terror among the barbarian troops, for “they say that terror without reason is the work of Pan.” No sooner had twilight faded than the Gauls heard a drumming of hooves. They split into two ranks and faced each other. “So delirious with panic were they, that each of the ranks imagined they were facing Greeks, wearing Greek armor and speaking Greek, and this madness brought upon them by the god led to a huge massacre of Gauls.” More of Brennus’s soldiers were slain by one another that night than had died during the battle. Brennus himself was wounded, without hope, and chose to die, drinking wine unmixed with water.

There was a drought that year in Delphi. Followed by famine. The people knew they couldn’t survive with the food they had left, so they decided to go, all of them, with their women and children, to the gates of the king’s palace to beg for food. The king appeared and looked at them. Next to him his servants had a few meager baskets. The king scooped out barley and vegetables and handed them out to the people. He began with the local worthies. As he drew closer to the poorer people, his servants dug deeper and deeper into the baskets, pulling out smaller and smaller portions. Finally the baskets were empty, and there were still many poor people waiting. One of them, an orphan girl, Charila, who was there on her own with no one to look after her, stepped forward to ask the king for food. Grim faced, the king took off a sandal and flung it in Charila’s face. The orphan went back to stand in line with the poor. Then everybody went home, hungry.

Charila left Delphi. Walking across the slopes of the Phaedriades, she found a place that fell away into the dark green of a ravine. Beside a tall tree, Charila undid her virgin’s girdle and tied it in a noose around her neck. Then she hung herself from a branch. In Delphi the famine showed no sign of abating. Epidemics were raging now too, making an easy prey of wasted bodies. The king went to consult the Pythia. “Appease Charila, the virgin suicide” came the response. But the king didn’t know who Charila was. He went down to Delphi and called an assembly of the people. Who was Charila? No one knew. Could she be some mythical figure everybody had forgotten about? Or was this “virgin suicide” a riddle, hardly a novelty for the oracle? Everybody in Delphi was obsessed by the name Charila until one of the Thyiads, the priestesses of Dionysus, remembered the king’s angry gesture, the thrown sandal, and connected it with the fact that the girl hadn’t been seen since. The priestess knew Charila because she was soon to have become one of them. She would have followed them up Parnassus, in the December frosts, and perhaps one day the people of Delphi would have found her in the thick of the blizzard, her cloak “stiff as a board, so that it broke when you opened it.” But wrapped in that cloak would be the body of a Thyiad, resisting the icy cold with her torrid excitement. The priestess left Delphi with other Thyiads. In an inaccessible place, amid the dark green foliage, she saw Charila’s body, still hanging from a branch, swinging in the wind. The name Thyiads means “the rustling ones.” Some call them the Brides of the Wind. With loving care, they took the girl’s body down from the tree. Then they laid it on the ground and buried it. Back in Delphi, the Thyiads explained how they had found Charila. Now she would have to be appeased, through expiation. But how?

The highest ranking Delphic theologians, the five Hosioi, the college of the Thyiads, the king: all mulled the problem over. They must find the right formula to respond to the Pythia’s command. In the end, they decided to combine a sacrifice with an act of purification. But how could they make a sacrifice in a time of famine? The Delphic theologians knew that a sacrifice was a sign of imbalance in life with respect to the necessary: imbalance in terms of surplus but also in terms of deficiency. In both cases, whether it be dissipation or renunciation, there was a part of life that had to be expelled before one could achieve a balanced distribution, that state, as the Apollonian precept put it, of “nothing too much.” By leaving out the poor when he distributed the food, the king had expelled them from life. Striking Charila, he had made a sacrifice without ceremony. Charila had raised that gesture to consciousness by hanging herself. But still her sacrifice had passed unnoticed. Decimated by starvation and epidemics, the people of Delphi didn’t register her disappearance, hadn’t realized that Charila was not just another victim of the famine but a sacrifice. They had forgotten her because she was too perfect a victim: a virgin, an orphan, overlooked by everyone, insulted by the king. And victims who are too perfect scare people, because they illuminate an unbearable truth. The Delphic theologians were profound inquirers into the art of dialectics and hypothetical syllogisms, if only because they were faithful to the god “who loves the truth above all things.” The ultimate goal for them was not mindless devotion but knowledge. To expiate a crime didn’t mean to do something that was the opposite of that crime but to repeat the same crime with slight variations in order to immerse oneself in guilt and bring it to consciousness. The crime lay not so much in having done certain things but in having done them without realizing what one was doing. The crime lay in not having realized that Charila had disappeared.

So the people of Delphi organized their ceremony. The citizens came to the king to ask for food, as they had done the day Charila was with them. The king distributed the food, but this time gave a portion to everybody, even the foreigners. Then an effigy of Charila was brought out from the crowd. The king took off his sandal and flung it in the effigy’s face. The head priestess of the Thyiads then took the effigy, tied a rope around its neck, and carried it to where Charila had been found. She hung the effigy from the branches of the tree, letting it swing in the wind. Then the effigy was buried next to Charila’s body. That ceremony marked the end of the famine. From then on the ritual would be repeated every eight years. But, just as the people of Delphi hadn’t realized that Charila was gone until the lone voice of the Pythia reminded them, history would soon forget Charila and the ceremonies that were held for centuries in her name, until another lone voice, that of Plutarch, priest of Delphi, mentioned her again.

By now she had become one of the many “Greek Questions,” one of the hundreds of fragments of the past whose meaning and origin no one could remember. Patient and erudite, Plutarch answered the question that he himself had put: “Who was Charila in Delphi?” His answer is the only trace of the little orphan’s life that now remains to us.