The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

VI

(photo credit 6.1)

SINCE OLYMPIA IS THE IMAGE OF HAPPINESS, it could only have appeared in the Golden Age. The men who lived at that time built a temple to Kronos in Olympia. Zeus hadn’t even been born. In fact the first to run races in Olympia were the guardians Rhea gave the baby Zeus to when she wanted to hide him. The five Curetes, Heracles among them, came to Olympia from Crete, and Heracles was the first to crown a winning athlete with a chaplet of wild olive. He had brought the plant from the extreme North, beyond the source of the Danube, brought it back for the sole purpose of providing shade for the winning post in Olympia. The shade and the winning post, that was Olympia forever: the supreme exposure and the most profound withdrawal, the perfect pendulum. But the generations passed, and between the reigns of Oxylus and Iphitus the Olympic games were abandoned, forgotten. “When Iphitus restored the games, people still couldn’t remember how they had been in ancient times; gradually they did remember, and each time they remembered something, they added it.” It is the very image of the Platonic process of learning: nothing is new, remembering is all. What is new is the most ancient thing we have. With admirable candor, Pausanias adds: “This can be demonstrated.” And he tells us when each memory surfaced: “At the eighteenth Olympiad, they remembered the pentathlon and wrestling.”

Climbing the spiral staircase inside the temple took you to the upper galleries, where you could get a closer view of Phidias’s Zeus. To Quintilianus’s mind, this statue had “added something to the religion of men.” Its gold and ivory surfaces were broken only by gems, except on the throne, which also had some ebony. The drapery was strewn with animals and lilies. Zeus wore a crown of olive twigs and in his right hand held a Nike, goddess of victory, with a ribbon and a crown. Beneath each of the throne’s four feet were other small Nikes, like dancing elves. But something else was going on among those feet: winged Sphinxes carried off Theban youths in their claws, and Apollo and Artemis loosed their arrows at Niobe’s children again. And as it grew accustomed to the teeming dark, the eye would make out one new scene after another, sculpted on the cross-struts of the throne. The farther down you looked, the more figures you saw. Twenty-nine in all on the cross-struts: the Amazons, Heracles with his escort, Theseus. A boy is adjusting a ribbon on his forehead: is it Pantarckes, Phidias’s young lover? You can’t go right up to the throne, because of the painted barriers, which again show Theseus and Heracles, and then Peirithous, Ajax, Cassandra, Hippodamia, Sterope, Prometheus, Penthesilea, Achilles, two Hesperides. Other beings sprout from the top of the throne: three Charites and three Hours. Then the eye moves back down to Zeus’s footstool and finds still more figures: Theseus yet again, and again the Amazons and golden lions. As one looks down even farther, at the base that supports the huge Zeus and his parasites, other scenes become apparent: Helios climbs onto his chariot, Hermes advances as Hestia follows, Eros greets Aphrodite as she rises from the waves and Peitho crowns her. Nor has the sculptor forgotten Apollo and Artemis, Athena and Heracles, Amphitryon and Poseidon, and Selene on a horse. A seated giant encrusted with creatures, Zeus was reflected in a floor of shiny black stone where oil flowed in abundance to preserve the ivory.

No other statue was so admired by the Greeks, nor even by Zeus himself, who hurled an approving thunderbolt down on the black paving when Phidias finished the job and asked the god for a sign. Olympia’s chryselephantine Zeus was destroyed in a palace fire in Byzantium in the fifth century. All that remains are some Elean coins showing the statue, and the words of those who, like Callimachus and Pausanias, saw it and were impressed. Paulus Aemilius claimed that Phidias had given form to Homer’s Zeus.

The moderns have been cowed and confused by these descriptions. Too many colors, too much Oriental pomp, the suspicion of a lapse of taste. Could Phidias, they wonder, in this, his most ambitious project, have tossed aside all the qualities so admired in the Parthenon friezes? The mistake of the moderns is to think of Phidias’s Zeus as a statue, in the sense in which Praxiteles’ Hermes is a statue. For it was something else. Shut away and sparkling in its temple cell, Phidias’s Zeus was closer to a dolmen, a bethel, a stone fallen from heaven, to which other gods and heroes clung in order to live. The gold and ivory seethed like an ants’ nest. Zeus didn’t exist except as a support for animals and lilies, arches and drapes, old scenes forever repeated. But Zeus was more than just the motionless guardian seated on his throne: Zeus was all those scenes, those deeds, muddled and shuffled about, rippling his body and throne in tiny shivers. Without meaning to, Phidias had illustrated that Zeus cannot live alone: without meaning to, he had represented the essence of polytheism.

Olympia was happiness itself for the Greeks, who were experts in unhappiness. The dense green in the Peloponnese has a hallucinatory glow to it, a glow the more intense for being so rare, with something final about it. All the different species of green gather around Olympia, as once the athletes of every Greek-speaking settlement would come here to compete. The acid phosphorescence of the Aleppo pines, the darkly etched cypresses, the glassy streaked leaves of the lemon trees, the primordial bamboo — see them all against a background of gently contoured hills modeled by Poseidon’s thumb, the earthquake. The place was the gift of a man who became a river, Alpheus. Having forced a path between the bare, scorching peaks of Arcadia, having washed the slopes of Lykaion — mountain of wolves and cannibals on whose summit the sun casts never a shadow — the Alpheus finally astonishes when, emerging from the gorges of Cerynite, it broadens into the rolling slopes of a valley as dear to Zeus as the archaic Lykaion had once been hateful. The Greeks were not in the habit of mentioning nature to no end, but Pausanias extols the Alpheus on three separate occasions: “the greatest of rivers for the volume of water passing through it, and the most pleasing to the eye”; a river “legendary to lovers,” thanks to its origin; and finally, to Zeus’s mind, “the most exquisite of all rivers.”

But who was Alpheus? A hunter. He saw the goddess-huntress Artemis, fell in love with her, and with vain mortal brashness began to follow her. All over Greece, the goddess heard those footsteps behind her and laughed. One night, in Letrinoi, not far from Olympia, she decided to celebrate a feast with her Nymphs. Before Alpheus caught up with them, goddess and Nymphs smeared their faces with clay. Alpheus saw whitish faces looming in the dark. Which was the goddess? He couldn’t say. So the hunter who had “mustered up the courage to attempt to rape” the goddess was forced to give up and “went away without having achieved his goal,” his ears smarting with the sound of shrill, mocking laughter. Yet never had Artemis, that most cruel of goddesses, been so kind to an admirer, nor would she be again. Instead of having him torn to pieces by his dogs, like Actaeon, who hadn’t even come near her, she let Alpheus walk off unharmed, and initiated. In Greek stories, smearing one’s face foreshadows a momentous and terrible event. The Titans smeared chalk on their faces before tearing Zagreus to pieces. But here, instead of being the prelude to carnage, the smearing serves to stave off the dire event. The virgin goddess avoids being abused precisely by making herself similar to her Nymphs. She does the opposite of what her initiates do: dress up and wear masks to look like the goddess. Artemis’s gesture dissolves an impending horror in laughter.

Alpheus encounters the goddess and her Nymphs as a group of people wearing masks, or dead. And it is difficult to get your bearings among the masked and the dead; even goddesses can no longer be recognized with confidence, because here one has crossed the threshold of another world. The laughter that rang in the retreating Alpheus’s ears was, for the goddess, the greatest possible token of affection, an act of kindness. After all, she had demonstrated to this rash and ignorant man the elusive and insurmountable distance between woman and goddess: and all it had taken was a bit of clay. The huntress-goddess escapes all the more irretrievably when disguised as a woman.

But Artemis wanted to protect the hunter. She couldn’t give him her body, so she chose a Nymph, Arethusa, as her substitute. And Alpheus began a second passionate chase. In the fury of flight, Arethusa crossed the sea and transformed herself into a freshwater spring near Syracuse. This time Alpheus could not renounce his love. The hunter became the river Alpheus, flowed out into the sea just before Pyrgos, and traveled, for hundreds of miles, right across the Ionian Sea as an underwater current. When he surfaced again with his frothy crown, he was in Sicily, near Arethusa. Where he mingled his own waters with the Nymph’s.

Hence Olympia came into being thanks to Alpheus. Hence the Master of Olympia placed a slim, muscular young man with prominent rib cage in a corner of the eastern pediment of the temple to Zeus, making Alpheus the first river to appear in a Greek temple. Hence in Olympia people sacrificed to Artemis and Alpheus on the same altar. Hence in the Middle Ages the waters of Alpheus shifted their course so as to submerge the stones and offerings of Olympia and protect it in their silt.

Alpheus was not a part of nature eager to become an affable allegorical figure, an old actor to be recycled one day in the lunettes of some Renaissance villa. No, Alpheus was that young man with the short hair and nervous spine depicted by the Master of Olympia, a man who would one day “transform himself into a river for love.” He was a hunter who one day decided to become nature. He was the only lover who, when his beloved turned to water, agreed to become water himself, without wanting to be held back by the boundaries of an identity. Thus he achieved a union no other man or woman had ever achieved, the union of two freshwater streams soon to plunge together into the sea. One eminent guarantor for the truth of the story of Alpheus was the oracle of Delphi, who celebrated the metamorphosis in some of her finest lines: “Somewhere, in the fog-bound plain of the sea, / Where Ortygia is, near Thrinakia, / Alpheus’s foaming mouth mingles / with the gushing spring of Arethusa.”

Alpheus and Arethusa: water with water, the spring that gushes from the earth, the current that rises from the depths of the sea, the meeting of two lymphs that have traveled far, the ultimate erotic convergence, perennial happiness, no bastions against the world, gurgling speech. Between the waves of the Ionian and those of the Alpheus, the difference lies in the taste, and perhaps a slight variation of color. Between the water of Arethusa and the water of Alpheus, the only difference is in the foam on Alpheus’s crest as he rises from the sea. But the taste is much the same: both come from Olympia.

The Greek activity par excellence was the shaping of molds. That’s why Plato was so intrigued by the modest craftsmen (dēmiourgoí) who plied this trade in Athens; that’s why he gave the name of their guild to the artificer of the whole world. In whatever walk of life, the Greeks were chiefly interested in shaping molds. They knew that, once made, those molds could be applied to an extremely wide range of materials. We think of the bourgeoisie as of something peculiarly modern, but when we describe it we are applying the mold of the mesótēs, which Aristotle developed in his Politics. When a company tries to impose a brand name, they are responding to a perception of the hierarchical supremacy of the týpos, the mold, over every other power.

The image that comes closest to the ideas of Plato is to be seen in the molds for fragments of the drapery of Phidias’s Zeus found in the sculptor’s studio in Olympia: the material is neutral and the same throughout, only the curves of the folds vary. In the end it is what is cast that survives. We live in a warehouse of casts that have lost their molds. In the beginning was the mold.

Mythical stories always lie at the foundation of something. But what they found can be either order or disorder. Greece split those stories up geographically with a sharp dividing line along the Gulf of Corinth. To the north, if we go back to the beginning, we find the slayers of monsters. Apollo for Delphi, Cadmus for Thebes, Theseus for Athens. And just as Apollo, model for all monster slayers, was also a musician and leader of the Muses, so Cadmus introduced the Phoenician alphabet into Greece, and Theseus brought together a few modest villages into a new entity, which from then on would be known as Athens. Common to all of them is the civilizing seal that stamps itself on an animal material.

South of the Gulf of Corinth that seal is nowhere to be found. The area was known as the Peloponnese, “the Isle of Pelops,” because many of its kingdoms dated back to a single man, Pelops. Some of those kingdoms, such as Mycenae, Argos, and Tiryns, could boast an ancient past and considerable power. Yet the story of Pelops and the Pelopides has nothing civilizing about it at all, except perhaps by accident. On the contrary, it lays the basis for an incurable disorder, a sequence of family vendettas, of curses that echo for generations, of actions that are repeated compulsively, of murderous treachery. It is the very karman between men and gods that surfaces here in all its tangled complexity. And it all began when a mortal invited the Olympians to dine at his table.

Pelops was son to a king of the immensely rich country of Lydia. The king’s name was Tantalus, and he often visited the gods. Tantalus talked a great deal, too much in fact. In his palace he would tell people about the nectar and ambrosia he had tasted on Olympus. Sometimes it seems he would steal a small amount and offer it around. He would also talk about the divine secrets he’d learned. When he was up in the heavens, he would say the wildest things, things that didn’t always please the Olympians. But Zeus went on being kind to him and inviting him. Some believe that Tantalus was his son.

One day Tantalus decided that he would like to invite the Olympians to his place. Pelops was scarcely more than a boy then. He watched a big bronze pot being prepared and put on the fire. Then he remembered hands tearing him limb from limb, but he didn’t lose consciousness. Now the gods were sitting around the bronze pot where the dismembered little Pelops was simmering away. Tantalus offered the gods the delicious food he had prepared for them. They all fell silent; the meat stayed where it was on their plates. Only Demeter, wrapped in thought, dazed and distracted as she had been ever since her daughter Kore disappeared, picked up a piece of meat and ate it. It was Pelops’s shoulder blade. Immediately afterward, Zeus unleashes his fury. All the kindnesses he had hitherto heaped on Tantalus were transformed into atrocious punishments. The other gods still sat silently in front of their plates. Zeus ordered Hermes to collect all the pieces of Pelops’s body. He must put them in the pot and bring them to the boil again. Then Clotho, one of the Moirai, the Fates, took them out one by one and began to sew them together as if she were mending a doll. But there was still the big hole in his back. So Demeter fashioned a shoulder blade of ivory. Rhea breathed life into Pelops. Now the boy was alive, whole and radiant. Pan was so happy he danced around him. Poseidon was dazzled by Pelops’s beauty and promptly decided to abduct him. On a chariot drawn by golden horses, he fled to Olympus with the boy. He wanted Pelops to be his lover and his cupbearer.

Having lived — we don’t know how long — with Poseidon, Pelops found himself king of his father’s lands. Soon the neighboring peoples were harassing him with their attacks. Pelops decided to cross the sea with his men and his treasure in search of a woman. He would go and present himself to a distant princess, in the part of Greece that looked westward: the girl was Hippodameia, daughter of Oenomaus.

Around the gateway to Oenomaus’s palace on Kronos hill in Olympia, thirteen human heads had been nailed. Pelops crossed the threshold as a foreigner and the fourteenth suitor to Hippodameia. He was told that Oenomaus planned to collect a few more heads before bringing them all together in a temple dedicated to his father, Ares. The king of Olympia was obsessed by two violent passions: his horses and his daughter, Hippodameia. Both were protected by a law. No mules must be born in Elis. Whoever mated an ass with a mare would be put to death. Hippodameia’s suitors had to try to beat the magic horses of Oenomaus, a gift from Ares. Oenomaus thought of these foreign kings as inferior beasts who wanted to defile his magnificent mare Hippodameia by generating a bastard child on her. His horses and his daughter, “subduer of horses,” formed a ring. One half circle was continued in the other. In bed sometimes, he would see a white mare’s head pop up from under the covers, and it was his daughter.

Pelops looked about him and decided to defeat trickery with trickery. Oenomaus’s horses were a gift from Ares, but who had the best horses in the world, if not Poseidon? And hadn’t Poseidon been his first lover? Alone on the beach, Pelops called on the god, reminding him of their past love. Did Poseidon want to see him run through by the lance of a cruel king? Did he want his head to wind up next to the others like a hunting trophy? Long ago the god had snatched him away in his flying chariot: those same horses were now needed to snatch him from death. Poseidon agreed. Pelops looked at the wonderful horses and thought that Ares was, yes, a powerful god, but not on a par with Poseidon, who split open rocks to clear a path for his horses and had them gallop up from the foam of the waves. But even that wasn’t enough. Pelops felt that three tricks were safer than just the one. And he decided to win over Hippodameia before the race had even started. Hippodameia had long been used to going to bed with her father. She even helped and defended him. She had seen thirteen foreigners arrive; she had climbed on their chariots and disturbed or distracted them during the race just as her father had asked. Knowing full well where their corpses would end up. But this time she was dazzled by the new stranger with the ivory sparkling on his back. For the first time she felt she wanted to share a different bed. And she decided to destroy her father. Oenomaus’s charioteer was a boy called Myrtilus, who was crazy about Hippodameia. The evening before the race, Hippodameia promised him her body if he would put wax instead of iron linchpins in the wheels of her father’s chariot. Myrtilus was obsessed by Hippodameia’s body and accepted. Pelops and Hippodameia agreed that they would eliminate Myrtilus as soon as possible after winning the race.

The morning of the race there was a moment of frightening stillness. Everybody was there and almost ready. In their midst, taller and invisible, stood Zeus. He held the lightning in his left hand while his right fell empty on his hip but radiated tension. His chest was a wall. Everybody seemed to be concentrating on his or her own fate, not realizing that the fate of the whole land, and of many others hidden beyond the green rim of the horizon, was about to be decided. The bloody scenario Oenomaus had planned, and around which his life had revolved for years now, was as follows: first the suitor would carry off Hippodameia on his chariot; as a head start Oenomaus would then give him the time it took to sacrifice a black ram. After which he would climb on his own chariot, alongside Myrtilus and set off after the fugitives.

A slave girl was tying Hippodameia’s sandals. This was the moment when, thirteen times before, father and daughter had exchanged glances of complicity. Hippodameia looked at her father. Oenomaus’s body had the assurance of age, and of the many dead impaled on his lance. Naked but for a drape over his shoulders, he pulled his helmet right down over his forehead, so that between beard and helmet only his eyes stood out, his steady eyes. Tonight we sleep together again, those eyes were saying. Hippodameia was wearing the complicated Doric tunic, hardly suitable for a race. Her curly hair fell on her forehead in perfect little ringlets, and her heart was suddenly cold, as though it were all over even before it had started, as though father, palace, and heaped corpses had already gone up in smoke. Pelops was completely naked, leaning on his lance. The ivory on his shoulder blade gleamed. Shaking with excitement, Myrtilus crouched, awaiting orders, a lean, skillful hand fidgeting with his big toe. Sterope, Oenomaus’s wife, looked on, motionless and expressionless. Born from the love of a god for a star, she had long been treated as no more than a servant of Oenomaus’s passion for Hippodameia, a gravedigger for her daughter’s suitors. She had learned to live without hope: whatever the outcome of the race, for her it would be just one more horror. But duty required her, as a queen, to look on. Only an old priest, standing away to one side, dug his fingers into his beard and noticed something. He was one of the Iamids, a race brought up on violets and fed honey by snakes. Apollo had granted him the gift of understanding nature’s voices and likewise of realizing when speech was pointless.

What followed, the race, was over in a flash. The spectators glimpsed the wheels of Oenomaus’s chariot shooting out into the sunlight, saw the horses tear the king’s body apart, heard his voice cursing Myrtilus. But that was only the beginning of it: for four generations the race, the dust, the blood, the splintering wheels would never stop. Until there were few who remembered how it had all started at that moment when Oenomaus lifted his knife over the black ram and Poseidon’s horses shot off, spiriting away Pelops and Hippodameia in a cloud, where the two conspirators in crime and victory exchanged their looks of complicity.

Pelops is not unique, the way Theseus is, or Cadmus. Nor is he a great warrior, or a hero, or an inventor. He is merely the bearer of a talisman. The uniqueness he does not have by birth has been inserted in his body. His ivory shoulder blade forms an artificial connection with the divine, covering for what man lacks. The artifact that fills this empty space and meshes with Pelops’s body possesses an immense and concentrated power, a power that goes far beyond that of its bearer, a power that will be transmitted as a surplus from one generation to another, gradually losing its influence in the process.

The talisman set in Pelops’s flesh becomes the golden fleece of the lamb that Pelops’s sons, Atreus and Thyestes, fight over, and that Atreus keeps locked away in a chest as if it were a bag of coins. Before being individuals with individual destinies, Pelops and the Pelopids, right down to Orestes and beyond, and as late even as Penthilus, are ripples in the history of a noble house, and of the talisman that destroys it. Generation after generation, the lineage runs through the Peloponnese like the gray nerve of an ancient fortification along a mountain ridge.

The evening after the race was a sad one because everything happened as foreseen and agreed. In the heat of the chase, Poseidon’s horses opened their wings and carried off the victorious three as far as the island of Euboea. “I’m thirsty,” Hippodameia announced, and Pelops went off to get some water in his helmet. The young Myrtilus looked at Hippodameia and tried to put his arms around her. Hippodameia quickly wriggled free. “Later,” she said. When Pelops got back with the water, her nod was so slight it was almost imperceptible. The two lovers were aware of the first law of criminal life: as soon as you’ve seen off the enemy, kill the traitor who made it possible. After a while they reined in their horses on the southernmost tip of Euboea, where the cliffs fall sheer to the sea. Myrtilus looked down at the rocks. Pelops pushed him from behind. Distant, but distinct, the lovers heard the curse that the dying Myrtilus cast on the house of Pelops.

Pelops was a powerful king, but nothing more than that. He conquered lands north, south, east, and west, and he called his kingdom the Peloponnese. His deeds are not remembered for their courage, although one was memorable for its baseness and treachery. Unable to beat him on the battlefield, Pelops invited Stymphalus, king of Arcadia, to take part in friendly discussions. When the king arrived, unarmed, Pelops had him cut to pieces, just as, long ago, his father had had Pelops cut to pieces. Then he ordered the king’s bloody limbs to be scattered across the countryside. A famine followed throughout Greece.

Pelops had twenty-two children by Hippodameia. They became kings, heralds, bandits. But Pelops’s favorite child was his twenty-third, the bastard, Chrysippus, whom he had by Axioche, a Nymph. Chrysippus was extremely handsome, and Pelops was not at all surprised when a guest of his, the noble Laius of Thebes, who had a weakness for young boys, abducted him. After all, Pelops’s own life had begun the same way, and his abduction had brought him luck. No, the person nursing a silent hatred was Hippodameia. She had given birth to twenty-two children on Pelops’s bed, and now she was obsessed by the awful suspicion that the twenty-third, the bastard, had been chosen as the heir. She felt the blood of her father, Oenomaus, rising in her, his loathing for every bastard breed. She began to pester her favorite sons, Atreus and Thyestes, nagging them to kill Chrysippus. But in the end it was she herself who buried Laius’s sword in the boy’s soft body as he lay sleeping beside his lover. Pelops cursed Hippodameia, Atreus, and Thyestes, and threw them out of his palace. Hippodameia killed herself in exile. Atreus and Thyestes went to Mycenae because the town’s throne was vacant and the oracle had prophesied that one day it would belong to one of Pelops’s sons. There was one throne available in Mycenae, and two sons turned up to claim it.

The glory of Pelops was Olympia. In the history of the gods, the games were founded in the Golden Age, when the Curetes ran. In human history, the games began their glorious period under Pelops. The most rigged and bloody of races had thus breathed new life into that place that enshrined the notion of Hellenic peace, a place where those who cheated were punished. Between the temples of Zeus and Hera, a sacred burial mound with polygonal perimeter, trees and statues was given over to Pelops. “In Olympia, the Eleans venerate Pelops above all other heroes, just as they venerate Zeus above all other gods.” In the area dedicated to Pelops, the Eleans sacrificed a black ram every year, making the same gesture Oenomaus had made before his last race. Nobody who wanted to enter the temple of Zeus could taste the meat of that sacrifice.

When Hippodameia’s bones were brought back to Olympia, she found herself beside Pelops once again, bones beside bones. By now they had become the guardians of the place. And, although the women’s games were no less old than the men’s, it had been Hippodameia who first got together sixteen virgins and had them race with their hair loose, their tunics over their knees, right shoulders and breasts uncovered. This had been her way of thanking Hera for her marriage to Pelops. Later she was responsible for a gift to the temple of Hera: a small ivory bed. It was still there when Pausanias visited Olympia and commented: “They say it was Hippodameia’s toy.”

There are two strands to the story of the Pelopids: the tale of a king’s descendants, a succession of atrocities, each worse than the one before; and the tale of a series of talismans, each taking over from another in silence, each deciding the fate of men. In the beginning we have Pelops’s ivory shoulder, but later there is his scepter too, the scepter he intended for his son Atreus; then we have the golden lamb that Atreus and Thyestes fought over; then Pelops’s lance, which his great-granddaughter Iphigenia would keep in her bedroom; then the ancient wooden statue of Artemis that Orestes brings to Greece from the land of the Tauri.

Pelops was long dead and the Trojan War dragging on interminably when the sages prophesied that the city could only be taken with the help of Heracles’ bow and Pelops’s shoulder blade. So Pelops’s bones were sent off to Troy. On the return trip, the ship carrying the bones sank off the island of Euboea, not far from the place where Myrtilus had long lain at the bottom of the sea. “And many years after the sacking of Troy, an Eretrian fisherman called Damarmenus cast his nets into the sea and pulled up the shoulder blade. He was amazed how big it was and kept it hidden in the sand, but in the end he went to Delphi to ask the oracle whose bone it was and what he should do with it. Thanks to some stroke of divine providence, a delegation of Eleans had come to Delphi at exactly the same time to ask advice about how to cure the plague, so the Pythia told them they must recover Pelops’s bones, and told Damarmenus to give the Eleans what he had found. He did as the Pythia said and, among other acts of gratitude, the Eleans named him and his descendants guardians of the bone. When I visited, the shoulder blade of Pelops was no longer there, I suppose because it had been on the seabed for so long and the salt water together with the passage of time had reduced it to dust.” So writes Pausanias. The talisman had outlived Pelops’s descendants, but in the end it too succumbed. Only the guardians of the bone remained.

The tension we find in Pelops, dismembered and dismembering, splits apart into two poles, two sons: Atreus and Thyestes. They are brothers and enemies, like so many one comes across in myths, in history, in the street. But in comparison with those of all other analogous pairs, their quarrel is a little more cruel, more comic, more abstract, if by comedy and abstraction we mean an algebraic elevation of horror to a far higher power. Every story of two is always a story of three: two pairs of hands grab the same thing at the same time and tug in opposite directions. In this case the third thing is the golden lamb, the talisman of sovereignty. Times have changed: Pelops’s shoulder blade is no longer something given by a god and thrust inside a body but an external body that hands must grasp and offer to a god, in this case, Artemis. Atreus tightens his grip on the lamb to strangle it, then hides it away in his house, attempting to transform the talisman into a treasure. Until Thyestes manages to steal it from him, with the help of Atreus’s wife, the Cretan Aërope, whom he has been busy seducing.

This should be the first link in the chain of wrongs. But we immediately realize that it isn’t: before Thyestes proved treacherous to Atreus, Atreus had already deceived Artemis, by refusing her the beast promised as a sacrifice. Up to this point, the brothers were exactly equal in terms of their crimes. Both had helped their mother murder their bastard brother, Chrysippus. And both had been afflicted by the curse of their father, Pelops, which echoed and renewed the curses of Myrtilus on Pelops, of Oenomaus on Myrtilus, and, at the beginning of it all, of Zeus on Tantalus, ancestral founder of the family. Henceforth, the struggle between the two brothers will be admirably balanced, in the sense that it would be quite hopeless to attempt to establish which of the two is more unjust. Both strive for the worst. Any difference lies in style and in divine whim, which initially favors Atreus. In fact, in order to trick Thyestes, as Thyestes tricked Atreus, and so have Atreus win the struggle for sovereignty over Mycenae, Zeus goes so far as to invert the courses of the sun and stars. This intervention is equivalent to his gesture of turning over the table in anger at Lycaon’s cannibalism: it is an allusion to the tilting of the earth’s axis, to the new world that comes into being with the obliquity of the ecliptic. But Zeus’s intervention is only one small episode in the thrilling struggle between two brothers who have now discovered that man is autonomous and proceed to try out the mechanics of that autonomy to the full.

Having recovered the talisman, and with it his power, and having thrown Thyestes out of Mycenae, Atreus, one would imagine, would be satisfied that the struggle had run its course, or at most would flare up again with Thyestes seeking revenge. Instead the conflict is raised to a higher power: it is the winner who wants to revenge himself on the loser, and what’s more wants his revenge to outdo all others. Giving the impression that he is eager to make up with his brother, Atreus invites him back to Mycenae. Thyestes returns and is welcomed with a sumptuous banquet. In a big bronze pot lashings of white meat are bubbling away in little chunks. Atreus chooses a few and offers them to his brother. So memorable is the stony stare on his face as he does so that ever afterward people will speak of making “Atreus eyes.” At the end of the banquet, Atreus has a servant come in. The servant carries a plate crammed with human hands and feet. Thyestes realizes he has been eating the flesh of his children. With a kick he turns over the table. And curses the house of Atreus.

From this point on the vendetta between the two brothers loses all touch with psychology, becomes pure virtuosity, traces out arabesques. Thyestes disappears again, a horrified fugitive. There’s just one thing on his mind: how to invent a revenge that will outdo his brother’s, who in turn had thought up his with the intention of making it unbeatable. Thyestes looks to future generations now. It would be too simple to kill Atreus. He will have to get his son too, and his son’s son. At this point the gods come to his aid. On a pilgrimage to Delphi, Thyestes asks for Apollo’s advice. With perfect sobriety, the god replies: “Rape your daughter.” The avenger would be born from that rape. Pelopia, Thyestes’ daughter, had taken refuge at the house of King Thesprotus in Sicyon. She was a priestess of Athena. One night she was sacrificing to the goddess along with some other girls. Thyestes watched from behind a hedge. The priestesses were dancing around a sheep that had had its throat cut when Pelopia slipped in a pool of blood, staining her tunic. Thyestes saw her leave the others to go to a stream. She slid off the bloodstained tunic. It was the first time the father had seen how beautiful his daughter was naked. He leaped on that white body, covering his head with his cloak (or did he have a mask?). Pelopia fought furiously. The two rolled over on the ground. Thyestes managed to penetrate and empty his sperm into her. When it was over, Pelopia found herself alone again, holding the sword she had grabbed from her unknown assailant. That night Aegisthus was conceived, the man Homer would call “the blameless one.”

Meanwhile, after Atreus had slaughtered Thyestes’ children, Mycenae had been afflicted by a terrible drought. An oracle claimed that the drought would only end when the fugitive Thyestes had returned. Atreus knew that Thyestes was staying with King Thesprotus. He went to Sicyon, but Thyestes had fled again after raping his daughter. At the court of Thesprotus, Atreus met a priestess of Athena and immediately fell in love with her. He asked the king for her hand, imagining that Pelopia was his daughter. Thesprotus chose not to enlighten him and granted him Pelopia’s hand. Atreus went back to Mycenae without his brother but with a new wife, who was carrying in her bags a sword that belonged to she knew not whom. Having been betrayed and made a fool of by Aërope, Atreus wanted a new family, a family without sin. Nine months later, Pelopia gave birth to Aegisthus. She gave him to some shepherds to have him grow up in the mountains, fed on goat’s milk. Atreus imagined that Pelopia must be suffering from a momentary and forgivable attack of insanity. He sent his men off to the mountains in search of the child. They brought him back. Of all his children, Atreus thought, this one alone had not been contaminated: so this one would be his heir.

In Mycenae nature was still refusing to budge, refusing to bear fruit until Thyestes came back. Eventually he was captured and thrown into prison. Atreus called Aegis thus and gave him his first man’s job: he must take the sword his mother always kept beside her and use it to run through their prisoner in his sleep. In the prison, Thyestes managed to elude his son and grab the sword from his hand. He looked at it. Then recognized it: it was the one he’d lost that night in Sicyon. He told Aegisthus to call his mother. On seeing the sword and Thyestes, Pelopia realized what had happened. She took hold of the sword and buried it in her body. Thyestes drew it out from Pelopia’s flesh and gave it, still dripping with his mother’s blood, to the little Aegisthus. He told the boy to go back to Atreus and show the sword to him as proof that his orders had been carried out. Euphoric to find himself at last rid of his brother, and hence of his obsession, Atreus decided that the first thing he must do was show his gratitude to the gods. A solemn sacrifice was prepared on the seashore. While it was being celebrated, the little Aegisthus approached and plunged Thyestes’ sword into Atreus’s body. Thyestes became king of Mycenae. A new golden lamb appeared in his flock.

Thus, for the moment, the conflict between the two brothers came to an end. At least in the sense that one was dead and the other wasn’t. But the grindstone that had accelerated during their feud would go on crushing bones for one, two, three generations to come. The clash between the two hostile brothers had become a war between forms, a duel between two fanatics of form. If Thyestes achieved a momentary victory, it was because his formal inventiveness had gone far beyond his brother, who, in the end, had stopped at the cannibal’s banquet. Thyestes is the true modern: he sets up a dizzying equivocation and uses it to satisfy his ends. Thyestes’ triumph is alluded to in Euripides’ Cretans (and confirmed in Seneca’s Thyestes). Here, the Cretan woman Aërope, the traitor, who in most versions betrays Atreus with Thyestes in Mycenae, turns out to have already met Thyestes earlier on in Crete. He was on the run, a vagabond exiled by his brother. But he scored an immediate success with the princess, just the way Theseus did with Ariadne. King Catreus surprised the two of them in bed, upon which he took Aërope and her sister Clymene and handed them over to another king, Nauplius, to have them drowned or sold off as slaves. But Nauplius decided to marry Clymene himself and took her to Argos. There, Plisthenes, Atreus’s son, born a weakling as part of Artemis’s vendetta against his father, chose Aërope as his bride. Aërope, however, had already conceived Agamemnon and Menelaus by Thyestes.

So when, on his return from Troy, snared in a net, one foot still in the water of his bath, Agamemnon is slain by the avenger Aegisthus and by his wife, Clytemnestra, the blood flows from Thyestes at the hand of Thyestes, from a son of Thyestes at the hand of another son of Thyestes and of his own stepsister. In the house of Atreus, that is, there’s not a trace of Atreus left. There is only Thyestes’ curse, which Cassandra senses in the air, a curse that now circles back on itself, cut off from everything else, pure form, autistic glory.

While Agamemnon, Atreus’s son, was off fighting beneath the walls of Troy, everybody expected Aegisthus, Thyestes’ son, to take his place in Clytemnestra’s bed and hence on the throne of Mycenae. Yet the players were slow to make their moves. They wanted to savor the inevitable. Like a sales rep, King Nauplius was cruising up and down the coast of Attica and the Peloponnese. He tied up in the larger ports, visiting all the palaces where there was an empty throne. In the evenings he would talk about Troy, about how tough the war was, about there being no end in sight. He talked on into the small hours with lonely queens. And then proposed adultery. Not with himself, no no no, but with some ambitious fellow from a good family in the vicinity. It was his way of reminding those empty thrones how treacherously they had murdered his son Palamedes, beyond the sea, beneath the walls of Troy.

When, in Mycenae, he tried his spiel on Clytemnestra, he noticed that the queen couldn’t suppress a sardonic, distracted smile. Did she really need someone to come and suggest what she had long known she was going to do? And Agamemnon was wise to it too. He had left a tiresome court bard breathing down her neck with instructions to keep a close eye on her and write with any news. That man was the first State intellectual. But one day Aegisthus grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and had him bundled onto a boat. They dumped him on an island where only thistles grew. So the vultures could gorge themselves on his old flesh.

Thus Aegisthus at last entered the palace of Mycenae, wore Agamemnon’s sandals, soiled the king’s bed with his sweat, sat on his throne, possessed Clytemnestra, more in rage than pleasure. But that was exactly what Clytemnestra liked. There was a profound complicity between them, and they began to look like each other, the way some old couples will. Sometimes, in the evening, in front of the fire, they would talk about how they would kill Agamemnon, ironing out the details, weighing alternatives, relishing their anticipation. And even afterward, when from the summits of Athos and Arachne the beacons had announced the king’s return, when Agamemnon had trodden the purple with terror, when Aegisthus had stabbed him twice and Clytemnestra had beheaded him with her ax, even then, in the evenings, the two would pass the time together, thinking of Orestes now, of how they would kill him, how he would try to kill them. Finally the moment was upon them; Orestes tricked them into letting him into the palace and slew his mother and her lover: it was an easy murder, like a scene rehearsed over and over, year in, year out, with actors who are in a hurry to have done and get on home.

The grim mechanics of the Pelopids seems to break down with the noble debate on Orestes at the Areopagus, the Athenian Council. And when Athena’s vote absolves him, they all lift up their faces, as if waking from a nightmare. But Orestes’ trial did more good for the Athenians than for Orestes. It gave them the pride of placing themselves beyond crime, of understanding crime, and this was something that nobody hitherto had dared. As for Orestes, he was as wretched afterward as he had been before. The day he appeared in Athens and everybody shunned him, willing, yes, to give him something to drink, but only so long as he drank it alone, upon which they all, even the children, began to drink on their own from little jugs — that day Orestes realized that he was doomed to drinking at that table, alone, for the rest of his life, even if he was absolved, even if he was king, even if there were women beside him.

And who might these women be? His sisters, Electra and Iphigenia, whom he felt condemned to look for, to find again. And sisters meant family. Orestes’ greatest torment was this: that wherever he went, all his affairs were family affairs. Even Pylades, to whom he had given his friendship, was a relative in the end. And he’d had him marry one of his sisters. Outside his family, the world might as well not have existed. What other women then? Orestes sought out Hermione, another relative, cousin twice over. But then realized that his reason for seeking her out made matters even worse; it paralyzed him. Hermione had been betrothed to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son. When Neoptolemus was killed by Apollo in the god’s temple in Delphi, just as his father had been killed by Apollo, Orestes took the murdered man’s place next to Hermione. He was perfectly aware that he was not, as he did so, himself, Orestes; he was Agamemnon once again depriving Achilles of the beloved Briseis.

Orestes never was Orestes, except in the periods when the Erinyes goaded him to insanity. Or the brief moments of respite from madness, as when he rested his head on a stone on a small island off Gythion. Then he started: someone was telling him that Helen and Paris had spent their first night of love together right on this spot. And he immediately decided to set sail again. Or in that suffocating place in Arcadia where he realized that he could no longer bear the Erinyes, or rather not so much them, for he had lost all hope of being rid of them, but their color, that impenetrable black in the noonday brilliance, and in exasperation he bit off a finger of his left hand. Upon which the Erinyes turned white.

But this reprieve didn’t last long. Even when they were white they terrified him, more than before maybe, and they never stopped following him, despite falling asleep sometimes, despite taking wrong turns, slovenly but stubborn. He would see them plunging toward him, like bits of statues falling from the sky. And sometimes, as once along the gloomy bank of the Taurides, the terror was too much for him and he began to howl like a dog: a herd of white calves came toward him and Orestes thought they were all Erinyes, closing in around him.

But it was when he met Erigone that Orestes got the ultimate proof that his actions were not his own but part of something else, as alien to him as a stone set in his flesh. Erigone was the daughter of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his mirror image on Thyestes’ side of the family, and hence his number one enemy. She arrived in Athens with Clytemnestra’s father, Tyndareos, king of Sparta, to accuse him, Orestes, before the Areopagus. She had the wild pride of Artemis, whose favor the Atridae had never regained after Atreus had kept back the golden lamb he should have sacrificed to her. Orestes looked at Erigone and saw himself as a woman, and at the same time he saw the creature most alien to him in the whole world, and most invincible. She, he at last understood, was the only creature he could desire: to kill or to throw down on a bed.

During the trial, Orestes looked like a carcass animated by Delphic prompters. Some say that when he was absolved Erigone hung herself in rage. But Orestes’ life didn’t change much after his absolution. He still wandered about endlessly. Finally he came back from the land of the Tauri clutching a small wooden image of Artemis, the only remedy he had found against his madness. And now he gave Erigone yet another reason for hating him. Aletes, her brother, had usurped the throne of Mycenae. Orestes killed him. But Aletis, “wanderer” or “beggar,” was also one of Erigone’s names in her other existence as daughter of Icarius. After killing Aletes, Orestes in his fury tried to kill Erigone too. And it was like wanting to kill her twice over. But Artemis rescued her. So many were the corpses heaped up between Orestes and Erigone that the two couldn’t even see each other. One day Orestes realized that she was the only woman who attracted him. He managed to find her again and they had a son together: Penthilus. This illegitimate child reunited the descendants of Atreus and Thyestes, who had fought so long for the legitimacy, fought above all to deny the other that legitimacy. In his blood, the two houses were condemned to be mixed together forever. Unless we accept Euripides’ insinuation, that the blood of Penthilus was made up only of the purest blood of Thyestes and his children, in which case Orestes and Erigone were really brother and sister, and the house of Atreus only a phantom that had never existed in the flesh.

Whether by inheritance or conquest, Orestes was now ruler over a large kingdom stretching from Laconia to Arcadia. Yet he had a feeling that the whole thing must end with him — or would have to begin again far away as a totally different story. An oracle said he should set up a colony on Lesbos. Lesbos? The name meant nothing to him; it was one of the few places he had never set foot. Only one small detail linked him to Lesbos: it was said that the cruel king Oenomaus, who in the end was his great-grandfather, had lived there before coming to Olympia. Perhaps Lesbos meant a return, a buckle closing, beneath the water. But it was not to be Orestes who colonized Lesbos. Penthilus went there, taking the blood of the Pelopids over the sea, locked away in his body as though in a casket. What came next were years of provincial goings-on, of which little would be known. And finally silence. For the first time Orestes felt easier in his mind. He was nearly seventy now, and something prompted him to go back to the places where he had been most afflicted by his madness. He withdrew to Arcadia. For all his large kingdom, he wasn’t cut out to be a powerful sovereign. He would always be the one who drinks alone.

One day, not far from the place where he had bitten off a finger to make the Erinyes turn white, Orestes was bitten on the heel by a snake and died of poison, just as it was by poison, his only companion apart from Pylades, that he had always lived. And years later people came to look for his bones, for much the same reasons that had prompted other people to look for the bones of his grandfather Pelops. They were supposed to help bring down a city. Nothing as grandiose as Troy this time, but an important town all the same: Tegea. The Spartans had been trying and failing to take it for generations. The oracle said that Orestes’ bones would be found “there where blow follows blow, wrong lies over wrong.” Blow on blow, wrong on wrong: buried in a blacksmith’s shop, Orestes’ bones were still trembling at the blows of iron beating on iron.