The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

VIII

(photo credit 8.1)

ZEUS WAS SITTING ON A STOOL. HE stared into the distance. A breeze twitched his beard, which was streaked with gray. Something was going on inside his head, bringing on a drunken weariness. When Zeus had swallowed his wife Metis, on the advice of Ge and Uranus, who told him she would one day give birth to a god even stronger than himself and capable of usurping his power, Metis was already pregnant with Athena. The baby girl had flowed into Zeus’s body, and there, in that recess hidden even from the gods, Zeus had passed on to her his weapon of old, the aegis, the flayed skin of Aegis, the monster with fiery breath. Now Zeus felt the crown of his skull being scraped by Athena’s sharp javelin. Everything about that little girl was sharp: her eyes, her mind — now living in the mind of her father — the point of her helmet. Every female concavity was hidden away, like the reverse side of her shield.

Zeus saw two women coming toward him: the Ilithyias, experts in midwifery. Without a word, their hands reached toward his head, gingerly, not daring to touch. Then Hephaestus arrived with a bronze ax. Before Zeus could utter a word, Hephaestus brought the ax down on his head and ran off, followed by the Ilithyias. Why did he run? Zeus still hadn’t said a word. He heard a desperately shrill scream inside his head, like the sound of a Tyrrhenian trumpet.

And all at once he realized he wasn’t alone: with silent steps the other gods had converged on him from all directions. He saw Hera and Hebe, Demeter and Persephone sitting on their baskets, Dionysus lying on a panther skin, thyrsus in hand. And to his other side, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Eros, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, and the three Moirai, the last apparently confabulating together. All of them were looking at him, but not so as to meet his eyes. They were looking at a point slightly above. Athena had appeared in the crack in his skull, her weapons sparkling, while Nike fluttered around her with a crown in her hand.

Now he could see her too: she had climbed down to the ground and was walking away from her father. Turning her head in silent greeting, she was the only one who looked him in the eyes. Was it his daughter he saw, or his own image gazing back at him? Then Zeus turned to look at the other gods. From the solemn expressions on their faces, it was clear that a new era had begun on Olympus.

Athena was the only being who, at birth, did not grab at something but took something off. Helios’s chariot had stopped in the sky when the goddess emerged from Zeus’s head. The air on Olympus was tense, breathless, as Athena slowly began to strip off her weapons. She put down her shield, her helmet, her javelin; she undid the aegis, and then, just before she slipped off the tunic that hung down to her ankles, a group of Libyan Heroines, clad in red-dyed goatskins thickly decorated with fringes, crowded around to hide her.

Unseen among them, she set off toward Lake Tritonis, in Libya. There she immersed herself in the water, as if to renew a virginity she would never lose. But she had a far deeper intimacy to break away from: the fact that she had been mingled with the body of her father. Athena came out of the water into the dry African air, her body glistening and strong. The Heroines handed her her clothes and weapons one by one. Now Athena could begin her life.

During her African childhood, Athena played at war with Pallas. The two little girls looked almost exactly the same, Pallas’s complexion being just a shade darker. Athena was a guest who had come down from the heavens. Zeus had entrusted her to Triton to bring up. And Triton left her with his daughter Pallas all day. Shut away in their playground, they saw no one else. Violent and brazen, they often came to blows. And they already had their own weapons, child-sized but lethal.

One day they found themselves face to face, spears quivering in their hands. It would have been hard to say who was the mirror of whom. Zeus saw the danger: he threw down his aegis from the sky to form a screen between them. Pallas was dazzled, spear in hand. And a moment later Athena’s spear plunged into her. It was Athena’s first and perhaps her greatest bereavement. Back in Olympus, she decided to fashion a wooden statuette of her dead friend and set it beside Zeus. The image was four cubits high, about the same height as Pallas, with its feet together. When it was finished, Athena covered its breast with the aegis, as though dressing a doll. Then she looked at the statue and recognized herself.

Athena was to slay many a man and monster after this episode, but always knowing exactly what she was doing. One of these victims was a giant who was also called Pallas and who, like other giants, was partly covered by scales and feathers. He claimed to be Athena’s father. He attempted to rape her. So Athena killed him and, with the skill of a woodsman, skinned him from top to toe. She was always on the lookout for scales and feathers: they would go to improve her aegis. But the little girl Pallas, her warrior friend, had prompted the one involuntary action of her life: the action with which she had done to death her own image. What happened that day in Africa was to be Athena’s secret. Few would get to know this story of her childhood.

The Palladium, celestial model for all the statues of antiquity, was conceived as an evocation of a girl who was dead and as the double of a being who was immortal. It carried the mark of uniqueness, partly because it wasn’t fashioned by human hand and partly because Zeus decided to make it the unique guardian of the unique city of Troy. Yet it partook of duplicity from its very conception, and that duplicity would soon begin to work. The primordial image of Athena did not represent Athena, but two other women: Pallas with her spear, and Medusa at the center of the aegis — the friend and the enemy. In each case she was the other, the unique other, separated from Athena thanks only to the screen of the aegis.

For the aegis had been important in Medusa’s story too. On the floor of one of Athena’s temples, Poseidon was licking Medusa’s pearly body, white in the shadows, with his marine saliva. Athena stood before them, a statue in her cell, obliged to watch those two writhing bodies twining together in the silence of her temple. She felt horror at this outrage, and at the same time a deep disquiet, because she knew that Medusa looked very much like herself. So she raised the aegis to annihilate them, to detach herself from them. It was a gesture that rose from Athena’s deepest self, like Artemis’s gesture of drawing her bow. And as, once again, Athena separated herself from everything else behind this screen of scaly skin, the soft filaments of Medusa’s hair, spread out on the floor, began to swell, and already you could see that the tips were turning into so many snakes’ heads.

Ever since the young Ate crashed into the ground there, hurled down by Zeus’s whirling hand, Troy had been the hill of infatuation. But the wooden statuette of Pallas, henceforth to be known as the Palladium, also crash-landed there. Zeus tossed it down in front of Ilus’s tent, so that he would found his city on the hill. Infatuation and the image now lived together in the same place: a city prone to phantoms. And it was to Troy that Helen would come: body or phantom image? That doubt would be drawn out for ten years, then to echo on and on for centuries. Yet the doubt emanated from the statue hidden in Athena’s temple, from the Palladium itself. All the complicated adventures of the Palladium are bound up with the question of the original and the copy.

Long before Plato, there were two disturbing things about the statue: that it might not have been fashioned by human hand, and that it might be only a copy. These two extremes came together in the Palladium. When the Achaeans began their siege of Troy, the Trojans immediately decided to make an identical copy of the Palladium. Thus, if the Greeks managed to steal it, Troy would not fall. Odysseus and Diomedes did break into Athena’s temple and ran off with the Palladium. But, as with every audacious exploit, there are a host of different versions. Was it the real Palladium? Or did they steal two, one real and one false? Or were there, as some suggested, any number of Palladiums, the real one being the smallest? Or were the two Palladiums the two heroes stole both false, the only real one being the one Cassandra clutched in her hand the night Troy was sacked and Ajax dragged her across the floor of Athena’s temple like an old sack? The Athenian version was that, after it had been fought over by all and sundry, it was Theseus’s son, Demophon, who managed to get hold of the statue by pretending to defend a false Palladium from Agamemnon and finally letting him have it, whereas in fact he had already given the real one to Buzyge so that it could be protected in Eleusis.

Once you have a double on the scene, it’s like entering a hall of mirrors; everything is elusive, stretching away into a perspective where nothing is ever final. There was a place in Athens known as the Palladium: it was the courthouse where involuntary homicides were judged. The first defendant was Demophon himself, but behind him, and in the same guilty role, homage was being paid to Athena, who had killed Pallas without meaning to. That was the beginning, the first crack in the double, the danger that is Athena, the fact that her consciousness is hostile to the shadow — it brings forth the double but then ends up by wounding it. And the double takes its revenge by reproducing itself as an image, first in the one true Palladium, whose eyes would glow and wooden body exude a salty sweat whenever the goddess descended into it, but likewise in the endless other Palladiums to be found all over the world, all false.

The capacity for control (sophrosýnē), the ability to dominate oneself, to govern things, the sharpness of the eye, the sober choice of the means to achieve an end — all these things detach the mind from those powers that came before Athena, give us the impression of using them without being used by them. It is an effective illusion, and one that frequently finds confirmation. The eye becomes cold and clear-sighted toward all it sees, ready to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. But for all this 360-degree field of vision, there remains a black speck, a point that the eye cannot see: itself. The eye cannot see the eye. It does not appreciate that it is itself a power, like the powers it claims to dominate. The cold eye looking out on the world modifies that world no less than the fiery breath of Aegis, which shriveled up a vast expanse of earth from Phrygia to Libya.

Athena is the power that helps the eye to see itself. So intimate is she with those she protects that she installs herself in their minds and communicates with the very mind of the mind. Which is why Ajax’s father says to his son: “In battle, fight to win, but to win together with a god.” To which Ajax replies: “Father, with a god on his side, even a nobody can win; but I am sure I can achieve glory even without them.” So Athena intervenes and destroys the hero’s mind, like one of those cities she loves to sack. She is ruthless with those who use her tokens — the sharp eye, the quick mind, deftness of hand, the intelligence that snatches victory — only to forget where they came from. It is here that the difference between Odysseus and an ingenuous, insolent hero like Ajax becomes gapingly obvious. For Odysseus, Athena’s presence is that of a secret and incessant dialogue: he finds her in the cry of a heron, the bronzed timbre of a voice, the wings of a swallow perched on a beam, and any number of other manifestations, because, as he says to the goddess on one occasion, “you mimic all manner of people.” So the hero knows he can see her everywhere. He knows he need not always be waiting for the dazzling splendor of epiphany. Athena may be a beggar or an old friend. She is the protecting presence.

The relationship between Athena and “the male,” which the goddess loves “with all her heart,” is conditioned by an age-old misunderstanding. Athena gives men the weapons they need to escape the oppression of all kinds of sovereigns, and above all of the sky and earth, who had trembled that day they heard the shrill, high-pitched cry with which the goddess emerged from Zeus’s head — and trembled because they recognized that this young girl was their new enemy. But Athena does not give men the weapon they need to escape herself. Whenever man celebrates his autonomy with preposterous claims and fatal deeds, Athena is insulted. Her punishment is never long in coming, and it is extreme. Today, those who do not recognize her are not insolent heroes such as Ajax but the many numerous “nobodies” Ajax despised. It is they who advance, haughty and blind, polluting the earth they tread. While the heirs of Odysseus continue their silent dialogue with Athena.

The Olympians visited one another in their huge palaces. They’d get together for banquets of an evening. Or they might assemble like a group of curious onlookers to watch some unusual event: Athena emerging from Zeus’s head; Aphrodite and Ares caught in Hephaestus’s golden web.

But even Olympus had its forbidden room, its sealed, inviolable place where no one could go. The gods would pass by, knowing they could never cross the threshold. It was a square, empty, windowless room. On the floor, the darkness was pierced by a bar that was as if fringed with light, a light that simmered in the stillness: Zeus’s lightning bolt. For anyone daring to approach, the luminous fringes would take on the soft shape of lotus petals. In the lightning blossomed “the flower of fire.”

Zeus once asked Athena to lend him a powerful weapon she often flaunted: the flayed skin of a monster, the aegis. In return, and because he was irresistibly partial to his daughter, he offered her occasional access to his lightning. It was the privilege Athena was most proud of. Even in the presence of the Athenians, when called on to decide the fate of Orestes, Athena reminded the accused that “I alone among the gods have the keys to the room where the lightning is sealed.”

The Athenians claimed to have two main reasons for feeling proud of themselves: first, they were autochthonous, actually born, that is, of the earth of Attica, rather than immigrants from other lands; and, second, Athena was their protectress. But, even to be born of the earth, one needed a seed, and a womb — yet the Athenians always avoided mentioning this. Why?

Of all the styles of virginity on Olympus, none was so enigmatic and provocative as Athena’s. No woman was ever so profoundly intimate with men as she. None of Odysseus’s women ever felt the hero’s voice as close to them as she did. Yet Athena denied her body to gods and men, even to those men she helped with such impassioned intelligence. Though in punishing them, she wasn’t as ferocious as Artemis. When Tiresias spied her bathing, Athena blinded him, out of divine duty, but then chose to grant him the gift of clairvoyance.

One day Athena approached Hephaestus, the ugliest of the Olympians but also the one who would find Aphrodite in his bed every night. She asked him to make a piece of armor for her. And in her solemn way she added that she didn’t really know how to pay him for it. “I’ll do it for love,” Hephaestus said. Athena nodded. Athena was the only woman who could make Hephaestus forget Aphrodite. During her visit, she hadn’t noticed the glint in his eye, because that wasn’t the kind of thing she was in the habit of noticing. Time passed. When Athena came back to Hephaestus’s forge to pick up her armor, the divine craftsman began hobbling around her in the dark. The goddess felt long, sinewy fingers squeezing her and thin, muscled legs forcing her back against the wall. As the goddess was wriggling free from his clutches, Hephaestus’s sperm squirted out against her thigh, just above the knee. None of this prompted the slightest comment from the goddess. Athena was merely concerned to grab the first rag that came to hand in the forge. She cleaned her thigh and, never wanting to see it again, tossed away the wet cloth from on high. The rag fell on Attica. As it happened, Ge, mother earth, a figure not unused to acts of primordial generation, was passing by. Sodden with Hephaestus’s sperm, the cloth fell into her womb, and she conceived. When Ge gave birth and didn’t know what to do with the newborn child, Athena decided to adopt this creature nobody wanted, decided with the same swiftness and confidence with which she had wiped away Hephaestus’s sperm. She picked up this little child who ended in a coiled snake’s tail and called him Erichthonius.

Even though they tend to avoid speaking of his birth, the Athenians are devoted to Erichthonius. They see themselves in him, fruit of a craftsman’s not-to-be-satisfied desire for a goddess. Neither peasants, warriors, or priests, they know they spring from the seed of a craftsman, whether it be the talkative artisan with his workshop in the agora or the solitary cosmic artificer. Their desire for Athena is greater than that of any other people. And this brings them closer than others to the unnatural gods of Olympus, the gods of detachment, the gods who cannot be satisfied with nature and its cycles but seek a form hard as crystal, as crystal closed in on itself, autonomous, autochthonous of the spirit.

Callimachus, who never spoke an unsound word, described the sperm Hephaestus spilt in his vain desire for Athena as “dew.” On penetrating the earth, Ge’s womb, that dew generated the snake-child. Athena lifted him up from the earth in her virgin arms. But she couldn’t embrace him as any other mother would. Athena was more than a mother. Her first gesture on the child’s behalf was to hang a golden chain around his neck with a locket containing two drops of Medusa’s blood: one was lethal, the other healing. Then she put Erichthonius in a wicker basket and tied the lid closed. She gave the basket to the three daughters of Cecrops, king of Athens, telling them not to open it for any reason whatsoever. The three girls didn’t know that Athena, in her love for Attica, wanted to make Erichthonius immortal without the other gods finding out.

But whenever a god, or someone who partakes of the divine, wants to make a child immortal, something always goes wrong. As when Thetis tried with Achilles, Demeter with Demophon, Medea with her children. There is always someone who turns up, disturbs the delicate process, and ruins everything. Whether because distracted or curious. Distraction and curiosity are the two ultimate sins, outward signs of that impatience which has always prevented man from rediscovering the gate of Paradise. Cecrops’s three daughters all had dewy names: Aglauros means “sparkling”; Pandrosos, “all dew”; and Herse, “dew.” With the same impatience with which Hephaestus had grabbed Athena, squirting his sperm over the goddess’s thigh, two of Cecrops’s daughters opened the basket and saw the snake-child come out, protected by two other snakes, his “bodyguards.” There was nothing shocking about this for Cecrops’s daughters. Indeed, they might well have seen Erichthonius as a baby brother: after all, their own father’s body also ended in a coiled snake’s tail. Yet they sensed an incipient terror, because they knew they had committed what for the Greeks was the worst of all crimes: they had opened the secret basket at the wrong moment.

Athena was on her way back from Pallene at the time. She had been there to look for a bulwark for her city and was walking along with an enormous rock in her arms. Her plan was to place it on the Acropolis, thus making Athens impregnable. A crow, bearer of ill tidings, came flying toward her and told her what had happened. In her rage Athena dropped the huge rock, which buried itself in the ground opposite the Acropolis, never to be moved again. It was the Lycabettus, and it still dominates Athens today, but without defending it. Then Athena appeared to the daughters of Cecrops, who fled terrified. They guessed a tough punishment was in store for them, and, even as the thought formulated in their minds, they were seized by a mad frenzy. They rushed to the steepest rocks of the Acropolis, stared into the void, and jumped. As they were dashed to pieces, their blood squirted out over the rocks.

Athena recovered the snake-child. Once again what she did was destined to remain shut away in herself. She bent the skin of the aegis to form a sort of marsupial pocket and slipped Erichthonius inside. Now the snake-child looked down on the world from on high, intrigued, his head peeping out from Athena’s breast beside Medusa’s face, which, with the passing years, had taken on an austere beauty, not unlike that of the goddess herself. You could see why she had wanted to vie with her in beauty. Erichthonius propped himself up on the abundance of Athena’s magnificent breasts. He looked down into their cleavage to see Medusa with her hair of snakes, and he felt the fringes of the aegis, which again were snakes, stirring round about him. The child immediately took a liking to Medusa. He didn’t realize as yet that she was his sister, born, like him, from Ge’s womb. Erichthonius felt happy, at home, a snake among snakes. Through the dried pelt of the aegis, he sensed the hidden warmth of his adoptive mother.

The more he looked at the world, the more he was convinced that the only person he bore any resemblance to was Athena, this strong, radiant woman, seething with snakes. She hadn’t born him in her womb, she had spurned the seed from which he was born, yet they were closer than any mother and son. No one else would ever lie on those perfect white breasts, no one else would ever see them, except perhaps in the heat of action, when a breast might sometimes slither out of the aegis. And wasn’t the aegis, Erichthonius’s home, almost part of Athena’s body? More than a weapon, it was a second skin. Erichthonius spent his youth dreading the moment when he would be separated from the body of his adoptive mother, separated from that little pouch inside the aegis, that warrior pregnancy, exposed to sun and wind. But one day Athena did set him down on the ground, inside the Acropolis compound. And there she raised him. The place was to become sacred. Then, sadly, they separated. For Erichthonius it marked the end of the divine period of his life. He became a king, one of the many kings of Athens. He married a Naiad, inaugurated the Panathenaea, invented the quadriga and money. At his death he wanted to return to his adoptive mother. He was buried in the compound where Athena had raised him, which was now the home of a snake.

The Athenians were aware of their original sin, what the daughters of Cecrops did. They worshiped Athena, despite knowing that the goddess had chosen not to make them invincible. The spirit of the city was a nameless snake, living in the Erechtheum. Every month they offered it a cake with honey, which the Greeks thought of as a type of dew. One day, when the Persians were marching on Athens, the snake for the first time left its cake untouched. Upon which the Athenians decided to flee the city, because the goddess had abandoned the Acropolis.

Seven centuries later, when Athens was no longer under threat, having already lost everything except its statues, the traveler Pausanias was amazed to come across a ceremony not many people knew much about. Every year two girls from seven to eleven years old were chosen by the king-archon from among the most ancient families of Athens and made to live for a certain period of time near the sanctuaries of Athena Polias and Pandrosos. Pandrosos was the only one of Cecrops’s daughters who had obeyed the goddess. The girls were given a small enclosure where they could play ball, and in the middle of the enclosure was a statue of a boy on a horse. They were called the Arrhephoroi or the Hersephoroi, the name being taken to mean “bearers of the unspeakable” (árrēta) or “bearers of the dew” (hérsē). In fact they were both. One night, the priestess of Athena comes to the girls: “They carry on their heads what the priestess of Athena gives them to carry; she who gives knows not what she gives, nor do those who carry know what they carry.” The two girls then walk along an underground tunnel that skirts the sanctuary of Aphrodite in the Gardens, going down the steep northern slope of the Acropolis. At the bottom of the passage, “they lay down what they have carried and pick up another thing, all wrapped up, which they bring back to where they began.”

A swapping of bundles, an underground walk in the night, two little girls on their own: it was the enacting of a religious mystery. Thus the Athenians demonstrated under Athena’s glaucous gaze that they had not forgotten their sin. No one ever revealed what it was the Arrhephoroi carried and brought back on their heads. But more important than what was in the bundles was the fact that they should remain unopened, and that the two girls should move them in darkness.

After the ceremony, the girls were sent home. The following year two others would take their place. And one day they would all feel moved when they remembered the “splendid education” Athens had given them. The companions of Lysistrata recalled their girlhood thus: “At seven I was an Arrhephoros; at ten I was an aletrís, I ground the holy cakes in the service of our protectress; then I put on the saffron tunic and danced the bear dance at the Brauronia; and when I’d grown up to be a fine girl I was a basket bearer and wore a necklace of dried figs.” These girls had been through mystery the way other children cross a playground, and now, barricaded up on the Acropolis, they refused to let their coarse, lustful husbands so much as touch them.

Whatever happens in Athens, “splendor,” lamprótēs, always has a part to play. It was not because the tyranny of the sons of Pisistratus was unbearable that Harmodius and Aristogiton rebelled and thus became the model for all later reflections on conspiracies and tyrannicides. No, it was because Harmodius’s body was “in the splendor of youth,” and Hippias, Pisistratus’s son, desired him. But Aristogiton, an average citizen and Harmodius’s lover, also desired the boy. Their assassination attempt was motivated by “the pangs of love.”

And when the Athenians began flocking down to Piraeus at dawn on what they didn’t realize would be their last day of shared exhilaration albeit mixed with fear, when, that is, Alcibiades’ fleet set sail for Sicily — even on this occasion, in a scene colored by boldness, conquest, and death, the eye came to rest on “the splendor of the view” of those ships laden with ornaments, until the herald blew on his trumpet, silence fell, and the soldiers and commanders lifted their gold and silver cups to make a libation. So recounts Thucydides, most sober among Athenians.

Phye was a beautiful country girl, four cubits tall. She lived in the district of Paeania. When Pisistratus decided to return from exile and reestablish his tyranny, they went to find her. They dressed her in lavish armor and showed her how to stand and move so as to seem even more impressive. Then they got her to climb on a chariot and set off to Athens, preceded by a number of heralds. The heralds announced around the town that Pisistratus was returning and that the goddess Athena, who had always favored him, was leading him back to the Acropolis. “And convinced she was the goddess in person, the citizens worshiped a human creature and welcomed Pisistratus back.”

Herodotus claims that this piece of deception was “by far the most naive since the Hellenic race split off from the barbarians in ancient times, being shrewder and less prone to childish naïveté than they.” But, as always, it is the deception that reveals a truth which might otherwise escape us. This second return of Pisistratus happened in 541 B.C., just a few decades before Heraclitus began to write. And for all the extraordinary shrewdness they showed in their political struggles, the people of Athens were still willing to accept the possibility that one day the goddess Athena might ride into their city on a chariot.

It is easy to imagine the fate historians have reserved for what Gaetano De Sanctis refers to as “the absurd story of the shapely woman who, dressed up as Pallas, is supposed to have escorted Pisistratus into the city.” As we know, scholars have long been in the habit of pointing out the “childish naïveté” of Herodotus, just as he had pointed out the “childish naïveté” of the barbarians.

The fact remains, however, that Aristotle, who was to become the model of rational thought for every scholar of the classical world, tells the story of Pisistratus’s second return in exactly the same terms as Herodotus. Indeed, he even adds a few extra details about Phye, thus irritating Gaetano De Sanctis even more with this “worthless claptrap that demonstrates nothing but the poor historical sense of the author who collected it.” Aristotle writes: “Eleven years later, having been put in a difficult position by his own faction, Megacles opened negotiations with Pisistratus and, on the understanding that the latter would marry his daughter, had him return in a manner at once worthy of ancient times and extremely simple. He spread a rumor that Athena was leading Pisistratus back and, having found a tall and beautiful woman from the district of Paeania, as Herodotus says, or from the district of Collytus, as others claim, a flower seller of Thracian origin who went by the name of Phye, and having dressed her up to look like the goddess, he had her ride into the city at the tyrant’s side — thus Pisistratus entered the city on a chariot with the woman beside him, and the citizens bowed down in amazement and welcomed him.”

The most interesting thing about Aristotle’s account is his own comment on Pisistratus’s return, that it was “worthy of ancient times and extremely simple.” A century before him, Herodotus was still having to make an effort to exercise that marvelous new Greek quality, that shrewdness “alien to childish naïveté.” Hence he was obliged to present Pisistratus’s return as an almost unbelievable event.

The more sober Aristotle, by contrast, already had an entirely modern vision of events. Which is precisely why he was not in the least surprised by what happened, recognizing in this return led by the flower girl — goddess a last apparition of a lost world in which the line separating gods and men was constantly shifting, and thus hazardous. Pisistratus’s return could thus truly be considered “worthy of ancient times,” of the times when the power of metamorphosis was still such that a flower seller could be mistaken for a goddess in the streets of Athens.

Right from the beginning, Greek elegance is opposed to Asiatic sumptuousness with its prodigal mix of solemnity and abundance. As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity. Glaphyrós, “concave,” the word Homer used to describe ships and caves, gradually came to refer to that polish and brightness typical of a carved and honed surface. The spare incision of a sign, or the compact, vibrant surface: these were the desirable goals, and each must be achieved by planing away and streamlining one’s material.

The epidermis of the Greek statue is so sharply separated from all that surrounds it because it is carved out of the air, whereas Mesopotamian or Egyptian statues seem to have grown up from the ground. The intensity that resides in a line of Homer is such above all because the word stands out against the emptiness of all the many details the poet denies us, the splinters hacked away from the word. Later, turning aside from the realm of palpable surfaces, the glaphyría opens up a passage toward the interior, toward the sharpness of the mind. Until finally it installs itself in a surface bereft of any foothold when Iamblicus uses the word glaphyría to define the elegance of mathematical demonstrations.

On the one hand, long, pleated skirts with long, thin feet poking out beneath, corsets squeezing the ample breasts of Minoan women; on the other, seamless tunics held by a buckle at the shoulder to create an alternation of soft, ruffled drapery, through which the body could be sensed, and smooth, bright surfaces which prevented it from actually being seen, so that “what must be kept hidden is kept hidden, while much blows in the wind.” There could be no greater incompatibility than that revealed by this change in the way women dressed. Between the one style and the other lies the forever obscure process that was the evolution of Greek uniqueness. What happened in that interval? The Dorians, always a riddle for archaeologists, left nothing that could be attributed to them with any certainty, except perhaps a simple form of clothing, a rectangular drape pinned at the shoulder.

The first enemy of the aesthetic was meaning. The symbol appears as an image that is also something else. The aesthetic appears in a figure that is like many others. The god is a boy; he appears on the scene like any Athenian boy, naked as they are, face creased in a light smile. Often he has no attributes that might allow us to recognize him. He relies entirely on presence. Scholars are still puzzled by the kórai: are they dead girls? or the goddess’s maids? or the goddess herself? or the figurative representation of thoughts on the tomb of a boy or man, with whom these women had nothing at all to do? Here meaning seems to melt away, doesn’t impose itself. What does impose itself is a presence, as if of someone we don’t know. And one doesn’t think immediately of any meaning, but of what appears to the eye.

In contrast, the smallest Mesopotamian seal challenges us to decipher it: it is a memory condensed into a few stiff notches. It presupposes a scene, an order of events and figures. The statue defies such interpretation. At most it will hold a piece of fruit in one hand. But we sense that, before conveying any meaning, it wishes only to attract our eye — and install itself there.

The Greek god imposes no commandments. How could he forbid anything, when he has already done it all himself, good deeds and bad? The Greeks did have maxims that aspired to the same universality as commandments. But they were not rules descended from heaven. If we look closely at these maxims, at their insistence on sōphroneîn, on control, on the dangers of any kind of excess, we discover that they are of an entirely different nature: they are maxims elaborated by man to defend himself from the gods. The Greeks had no inclination for temperance. They knew that excess is divine, and that the divine overwhelms life. But the more they found themselves immersed in the divine, the more they wished to keep it at arm’s length, like slaves running their fingers over their scars. Western sobriety, which two thousand years later would become everyman’s common sense, was at first no more than a mirage glimpsed through the tempest of the elements.

So what did these Greek gods want of men? What they certainly did not require was that we behave one way rather than another. They were as ready to defend the unjust actions of a favorite as to condemn the just actions of someone they disliked. So what did they want? To be recognized. Every recognition is an awareness of form. Hence in our enfeebled modern vocabulary we might say that the way they imposed themselves was first and foremost aesthetic. But in a sense of the word which, with time, has been lost: the aesthetic of a mesh of powers concentrated in a figure, a body, a voice.

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from the ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. Life as mere vegetative protraction, glazed eyes looking out on the world, the certainty of being oneself, without knowing what one is: such a life has no need of a god. It is the realm of the spontaneous atheism of the homme naturel.

But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed.

Looking at Athena, her breast fringed with snakes, her clear-cut monochrome face, we get a sense of what the classical is: a hybrid between the barbaric and the neoclassical.

At a certain point in their history, when the palaces had been burned down, writing lost, gold become unobtainable — at a certain point in their history, about which we know very little, since it left us neither words nor monuments, the Greeks chose perfection as opposed to power. Power dreams of indefinite expansion, perfection cannot. The perfect is only one of the innumerable points in the process that is ceaselessly transforming existence. But this point has a hidden flaw, which terrifies the Greeks: the point of perfection is the moment that closes the circle, that brings death. Only in the experience of Eleusis did this huge obstacle appear to melt away. That was why the Greeks respected Eleusis more than anything else.

What was celebrated at Eleusis was not just one of the everyday and extremely tedious agrarian rituals. It was the simultaneous presence of perfection and death. Eleusis was not for peasants worried about their crops. Eleusis was for those languishing for perfection, and it was meant to heal their sickness. There, and only there, could one find a perfection that did not die. People coming back from Eleusis would laugh and cry like everybody else. But only they could claim to be really laughing and crying. Because their laughter and tears came after perfection, and not as its feeble precursors.

“Pure light of midsummer.” Such, according to Pindar, is Dionysus. He is the opra: the fifty days that follow the rising of Sirius, after the first half of July. When the opra was over, the Eleusinian procession set off from Athens. The festival began with an extremely high-pitched cry and ended with the appearance of a “sacred youth.” For the Athenians he was a “beautiful god,” the god of that moment. The cry and the youth had the same name: Iacchus. The cry was the youth.

At the beginning of the procession, when on a September afternoon, the day of the battle of Salamis, the people left the Dipylon and headed off down the Sacred Way, the presence of Iacchus, in the role of “traveling companion,” roused the young dancers for a dance that was to last twelve and a half miles and would take them as far as Eleusis. The crowd of boys, women, and old men would let themselves be ruled by this “tireless god.” Iacchus was a sound and a torch, one amid the many flickering on the flowery plain, even though it was September and the fields scorched by the summer heat.

What are the mysteries? “The saying of many ridiculous things and many serious things” is the definition Aristophanes offers, and no one has ever bettered it. In the midst of “the laughter and the jokes,” as the procession proceeds, the sidelong glance of a dancer comes to rest “on a very attractive young girl, an old playmate, one small breast poking through a tear in her tunic.” The air is full of the smell of resin and roast pig. The dust is strewn with sandals and torn clothes, which would be even more torn before the dance was through, because “he who celebrated the mysteries would not take off the tunic he wore at the festival until it was reduced to rags.”

They were a group of small states, enemies for the most part, or halfhearted friends. But they felt they had something in common to defend: tò Hellēnikón, the “Greek thing.” They didn’t bother to define it, because they knew perfectly well what it was. Not high-ceilinged palaces, or guards lined up in ranks, or deferent ministers, or gold. But a certain spareness of expression, as though among athletes who compete in physical speed and beauty, and in nothing else. Perhaps this partly explains why, unlike the barbarians, even the imperial barbarians, the Greeks would go around naked. And there was something else the Greeks, and only the Greeks, were interested in: an empty space, sun-drenched and dusty, where they could exchange goods and words. A market, a square.

When Cyrus the Great, first ideological opponent of the Greeks, received a threatening Spartan herald, he sat up on his throne for a moment to ask what on earth this unknown city called Sparta might be, and how many men they could muster. One of his Greek advisers explained. At which Cyrus answered with an expression that would clear up once and for all the question of why Asian power could not tolerate the “Greek thing”: “I’ve never been afraid of men who have a special place to meet in the middle of their city, where they swear to this and that and cheat one another.”

Among the most significant of epithets applied to Zeus is Phanaîos, “he who appears.” The same name is also used for Apollo, “because through him the things that are [tà ónta] are made manifest, and the cosmos is illuminated.” The supremacy of appearance begins with Zeus, and from it derive the tensions that galvanize Greek culture. The fact that Plato launched a devastating attack on appearance shows that appearance was still dominant and oppressive to him. The messenger of the realm of appearance is the statue. No other ancient language had such a rich vocabulary for referring to different kinds of images as Greek. And this markedly visual vocabulary contrasted sharply with that of the Greeks’ enemies par excellence: the Persians. Behind the long historic rivalry, one glimpses an insuperable metaphysical divide, which Herodotus describes thus: “[The Persians] do not raise statues, or build temples and altars. On the contrary, they reproach those who do so for their folly, I think because they don’t believe as the Greeks do that the gods have a human form. Their practice is to make sacrifices to Zeus from the top of the highest mountains, and they think of Zeus as the whole blue sky.”

Unlike the Greeks, who adored stones and pieces of wood, and the Egyptians too, who prostrated themselves before ibis and ichneumons, the first Persians would bow down only before “fire and water, like philosophers.” Breaking away in very early times from those philosopher-priests, the Magi, the Greeks generated a new race of philosophers, who were not priests and did not always dispense with images to then climb up on the highest mountains and worship the sky. Some would dispense with images and find nothing at all to worship. But, before that could happen, appearance had to impose itself as a hitherto unknown force, a challenge.

Nowhere so much as in Athens was sovereignty in both its guises, regal and priestly, so scornfully written off. Basileús, “king,” became the name of a kind of priest who was entrusted with limited duties only at certain of the annual festivals, such as the Anthesteria. For the rest of the year the basileús was an Athenian like any other. And priests in general were respectable, physically whole members of the community, but they were not granted any power beyond the roles they played in their cults. They were priests without books, without an all-embracing secret doctrine.

There could be nothing more Greek than Herodotus’s amazement on discovering that in Persia no one could make a sacrifice unless a Magus was there to oversee the ceremony. In Greece, anyone could offer a sacrifice. And no one checked up on him. But the image of the Magus, of that cold eye watching, checking, keeping guard, would make itself felt through occult paths, building up the image of an unassailable power that exercised total control over reality. The Guardians were the peculiar image of such a power that was to develop in Greece. In two forms: practical and authoritarian in Sparta’s ephors; theoretical, always ruthless, but linked to the heaven of ideas, in Plato.

Greece cherished two secrets: that of Eleusis and that of Sparta. Jacob Burckhardt came close to the secret of Sparta. With typical sobriety he comments: “Power can have a great mission on earth; for perhaps it is only on power, on a world protected by power, that superior civilizations can develop. But the power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”

As an end unto itself: how often we hear that expression, and always with a shiver, as when drawn to something dangerous: hoarding of money, dandyism, experimental research. But the first end unto itself was laconic, Spartan: the grim reticence of a power that devoured all, that saw nothing else, needed nothing else. The first self-sufficiency, first indifference toward everything that was not part of its own mechanism, the divine machine designed by a craftsman who has a name but no face: Lycurgus. The Spartan state subjected every form to itself, subordinated every usage to its own existence. This was the ancient and thoroughly modern philosophy that the Spartans tried so determinedly to hide by passing themselves off as ignorant warmongers. Otherwise their enemies might also have been seduced by this power-enhancing mechanism, which the Equals felt was invincible. And a sad contradiction that would be … The philosophy turned out to be the most effective weapon of war and self-preservation. And it was not discovered by the Athenians, as always too garrulous, vain, and distracted for that kind of thing. No, this philosophy was the Spartan discovery, one that rendered any other discovery, and above all any other philosophy, superfluous.

This explains the yawning depths of Socrates’ irony as he puts together an argument to counter Protagoras: “The greatest and most ancient of Greek philosophies is that of Crete and Sparta, and it is there that most of the earth’s sophists reside: but they deny it and pretend to be ignorant, so as not to stand out among the Greeks for their wisdom, but to appear to excel only in battle and courage, fearing that the others, were they to know what they are really good at, might set themselves the same goal: knowledge. Their sham takes in the admirers of Sparta in other cities, who thus butcher their ears to imitate them, put leather bands around their legs, go to gymnasiums and wear short tunics, imagining that these are the keys to Sparta’s supremacy among the Greeks. For their part, the Spartans, when they want to talk freely with their sophists and are tired of concealing their true selves, expel all the Spartophiles and other foreigners in the land, so as to be able to spend time with their sophists without any foreigners knowing; what’s more, they, like the Cretans, don’t let any of their young men travel to other cities, so that the teaching they have received cannot be spoiled.”

The old Plato of the Laws was still thinking of Sparta with obscure regret: “When I saw the organization we were discussing, I found it most beautiful. If the Greeks had had it, it would, as I said, have been a marvelous possession, if someone had been able to use it in an attractive way.” What comes through these words is the dawning fallacy of the technical, the illusion that one might set up a perfect mechanism and deploy it for the Good. The point is that the Spartan mechanism was based on the exclusion of every Good that was not part of its own operations.

Everything repeats itself, everything comes back again, but always with some slight twist in its meaning: in the modern age the group of initiates becomes the police force. And there is always some tiny territory untouched by the anthropologists’ fine-tooth comb that survives, like an archaic island, in the modern world: thus it is that in antiquity we come across the emissaries of a reality that was to unfold more than two thousand years later.

Part of a Spartan’s training was the exercise known as the krypteía: “It was organized as follows. The commanders of the young men would from time to time send off into the country, some in one direction, some in another, those young men who seemed smartest. They would be armed with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else. During the day they would fan out into uncharted territory, find a place to hide and rest there; at night they came down onto the roads and, if they found a helot, would cut his throat. Often they would organize forays into the fields and kill the biggest and strongest helots.”

The usefulness of history and historians lies in the presentation and narration of events that can then reveal their meaning hundreds, even thousands of years after they happened. Burckhardt writes: “In Thucydides there may be facts of primary importance that will only be understood in a hundred years’ time.” He doesn’t offer any examples. But we can find one ourselves that Burckhardt couldn’t have found, because history hadn’t as yet revealed it, for Burckhardt hadn’t lived through the age of Stalin: “Likewise concerned about the ill-feeling among the helots and by their huge numbers [the Spartans’ relationship with the helots having always been based on the need to defend themselves], they went so far as to do as follows: they announced that if any of the helots considered that during past wars they had given the best possible service to Sparta, they should come forward with their evidence. Once this had been examined it could lead to their being set free. But really this was a test, for those who, out of pride, considered themselves most deserving, were also those who would be most likely to rebel. About two thousand were selected. Crowned with garlands they went around from temple to temple under the impression they had been freed. Not long afterward the Spartans did away with them and no one ever knew how they were all killed.”

“When the Spartans kill, they do so at night. They never kill anybody in daylight.” Thus writes Herodotus, dwelling on the fact for no apparent reason.

Initiation involves a physiological metamorphosis: the circulating blood and thought patterns of the mind absorb a new substance, the flavor of a secret wisdom. That flavor is the flavor of totality: but, in the Spartan version, it is the flavor of the society as totality. Thus we pass from the old to the new regime.

Equality only comes into being through initiation. It does not exist in nature, and society wouldn’t be able to conceive of the idea if it weren’t structured and articulated by initiation. Later, there comes a moment when equality is geared into history and thence marches on and on until the unsuspecting theorists of democracy imagine they have discovered it — and set it against initiation, as though it were its opposite.

That moment is Sparta. The Spartans were above all hómoioi, “equals,” insofar as they had all been initiated into the same group. But that group was the entire society. Sparta: the only place in Greece, and in all European history since, where the whole citizenry constituted an initiatory sect.

Having drunk deep the liquor of power, though more the idea than the reality, they soon ignored and scorned all immortality’s other drinks: they had no time for the sciences of the heavens (“they can’t bear talk about the stars or the celestial motions,” observed the irritated Hippias) and cared nothing for poetry. Indeed, despite the fact that in years past Alcman had produced enchanting lyrics to sing the beauty of the Leucippides running like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “the Spartans are, of all men, those who admire poetry and poetic glory least.” Their attitude to every form, every art, every desire can be summed up in their approach to music: they wished to make it “first innocuous, then useful.”

They were the first to train naked and grease their bodies, men and women alike. Their clothes became ever more simple and practical. They were the grim forebears of every utilitarianism. They kept their helots in a state of terror — yet were compelled to live in terror of their helots. They carried their spears with them everywhere, for death might be lurking at every turn. Not at the hands of their “equals” but at those of the endless mutes who served them, before being mocked and decimated.

Sparta is surrounded by the erotic aura of the boarding school, the garrison, the gymnasium, the jail. Everywhere there are Mädchen in Uniform, even if that uniform is a taut and glistening skin.

Sparta understood, with a clarity that set it apart from every other society of the ancient world, that the real enemy was the excess that is part of life. Lycurgus’s two ominous rules that forestall and frustrate any possible law merely dictate that no laws be written down and no luxury permitted. It is perhaps the most glaring demonstration of laconism the Spartans offer, always assuming we leave aside the grim moral precepts tradition has handed down to us. One can almost smell the malignant breath of the oracle in those dictates: forbidding writing and luxury was in itself enough to do away with everything that escaped the state’s control.

“When it came to reading and writing they learned only the bare minimum.” In every corner of their lives, like an ever-wakeful jailer, Lycurgus had hunted down the superfluous and strangled it before it could grow. There was only one moment when the Spartans had a sense of the overflowing abundance of life: when the flautists played Castor’s march, the paean sounded in reply, and the compact ranks advanced, their long hair hanging down.

“A majestic and terrifying sight,” war. That was the moment when god resided in both State and individual, the one moment when the rules allowed the young men “to comb out their hair and dress up in cloaks and weaponry” until they looked like “horses treading proudly and neighing to be in the race.” When the march stopped, the Spartan “stands with his legs apart, feet firmly planted on the ground, and bites his lip.”

“Just as Plato says that god rejoiced that the universe was born and had begun to move, so Lycurgus, pleased and contented with the beauty and loftiness of his now complete and already implemented legislation, wanted to make it immortal and immutable for the future, or at least so far as human foresight was capable.” The divine craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus composed the world and brought it into harmony; Lycurgus was the first to compose a world that excluded the world: Spartan society. He was the first person to conduct experiments on the body social, the true forefather all modern rulers, even if they don’t have the impact of a Lenin or a Hitler, try to imitate.

The Athenians knew there was a surplus of beauty in relation to power in their city. They could already see the ruins of Athens, whereas, to Thucydides’ eyes, “if the Spartans were to abandon their city, so that only the foundations of the buildings survived, with the passing of time posterity simply would not believe the town had ever been so powerful as it was said to be.”

What distinguishes Sparta from Athens is their different responses to the practice of exchange. In Sparta it provokes terror, in Athens it arouses fascination. Thus the wholeness of the sacred is split into two chemically pure halves. Gold is taken into Sparta but never comes out: “for generation after generation gold has been flowing into Sparta from every people in Greece, and often from barbarian countries too, and it never flows out.” Coins are so heavy and burdensome they can’t even be moved. In Athens, “friendly to speech,” words run spontaneously from the lips in a stream that sluices every culvert of the city. In Sparta the word is always kept tightly in rein.

Spartans’ morality was not based on the weighty precepts that made up the wisdom of the people but on the decision to treat the word as an enemy, foremost exponent of the superfluous. Sparta was an invention for freezing exchange and stabilizing power as far as is humanly possible, which explains the attraction Plato always felt toward Sparta, right up to the late Laws: that order of theirs seemed capable of putting a stop to the proliferation of images.

But here is Sparta in a nutshell, courtesy of a Plato at once laconic and vicious: “These men … will be greedy for wealth, fiercely devoted behind the scenes to gold and silver; they will possess storehouses and domestic treasuries where they can hide that wealth, and well-fenced villas, veritable nests of privacy, where they can spend money on women and whomever else they want and enjoy being thoroughly dissolute.… And they will be miserly with their wealth too, earning and honoring it in secret, prodigal only with other people’s, which they covet, and they will take their pleasures behind closed doors, snubbing the law the way a child snubs his father, and they will not respond to persuasion, but only to violence, because they will have ignored the real Muse of reasoning and philosophy and esteemed physical exercise more praiseworthy than music.” One can never be too sure where Plato’s sentiments lie.

It was to the Spartans’ credit that they were the first to appreciate the extent to which the social order is based on hatred — and can survive only so long as that base is maintained. They accepted the consequences of this discovery: equal and interchangeable among themselves, they formed a rock-solid front against the outside world. And in the outside world were the masses (tò plêthos), whom, unlike the Athenians, the Spartans had no illusions about winning over and manipulating. “The best Spartan thinkers do not believe it would be safe to live together with those they have so seriously wronged. Their way of doing things is quite different: among themselves they have established equality and that democracy necessary to guarantee a constant unity of intent. The common people, on the other hand, they keep out in the surrounding countryside, thus enslaving their own spirits no less than those of their slaves.”

The Spartans were perfectly aware of the atrocious suffering they were inflicting and never imagined their victims could forget it. The solution was to establish terror as a normal condition of life — and that was Sparta’s great invention: to create a situation in which terror was seen as something normal. The pure Athenian Isocrates was outraged: “But what would be the point of describing all the sufferings inflicted on the masses? If I just mention the worst enormity, leaving aside all the others, it will be quite enough. From among those who have constantly been subjected to horrible wrongs, and who are nevertheless still useful in present circumstances, the ephors are free to choose whomsoever they want and have them put to death without trial; while for all the other Greeks, even the killing of the most reprobate slave is a crime that must be paid for.” The ephors were powerful bureaucrats; they were not remarkable for their “bold thinking” (méga phroneîn), as were the eminent and feared men of Athens. To make up for that, they could at any moment, and without a word of justification, kill anybody they wanted to from the nameless mass of the helots.

Athens never achieved the full horror of Sparta, but then it was never far behind. The city had barely discovered liberty, that experience no one in Persia or Egypt had ever dreamed of, before it was also discovering new methods of persecution, methods more subtle than those practiced by the great kings and the pharaohs. An army of informers invaded city square and market. They were no longer the secret agents of a police force but a freely formed collective of citizens intent on the public good. Thus in the very same instant that it discovered the excellence of the individual, Athens also developed a fierce resentment against that excellence. None of the great men of the fifth century B.C. was able to live in Athens without the constant fear of being expelled from the city and condemned to death. Ostracism and the sycophants formed the two prongs of a pincer that held society tightly together. As Jacob Burckhardt was first to recognize, Jacobin pettiness became a powerful force in the pólis. The public good was able to claim its victims with the arrogant and peremptory authority that had once been the reserve of the gods. And where a god would speak through soothsayers or a Pythia, chanting in hexameters and using obscure images, the pólis could get by with a less solemn apparatus: public opinion, the voice of the people, mutable and murderous as it sped, day after day, through the agoré.

Athens left posterity not only the Propylaea, but political chatter too. The anecdote passed on to us by Plutarch is exemplary: an illiterate man went up to Aristides, who he had never seen before, and asked him to write the name Aristides on a potsherd. So he could vote for his ostracism. Aristides asked him: “What harm has Aristides done you?” The illiterate man answered: “None. And I don’t know him, but it bothers me hearing everybody call him Aristides the Just.” Without more ado, Aristides wrote his own name on the potsherd.

It is a grim irony of history that Sparta continues to be associated with the idea of virtue, in its most rigid and hateful form. It is as if the Equals had placed the hard rule of law above everything else and thus gained themselves a reputation for being tough and cold, yet at the same time noble.

But the truth is that the Spartans had come up with a very different and far more effective way of doing things. They created the image of a virtuous, law-abiding society as a powerful propaganda weapon for external consumption, while the reality inside Sparta was that they cared less for such things than anyone else. They left eloquence to the Athenians, and with a smirk on their faces too, because they knew that that eloquent, indeed talkative nation would be the first to feel nostalgic for the sober virtue of the Spartans, not appreciating that such virtue was nothing more than a useful ploy for confusing and unnerving their enemies. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Spartans refused to allow strangers to enter their city and were so secretive about what happened within its territories. An accurate report would have exposed their smug insensibility to the very idea of law, which had such a powerful hold over the minds of their neighbors. For the most disturbing examples of indifference toward injustice came not from those animals of passion, the tyrants, but from the cold ephors, supreme guardians of the secret of Sparta. The sad story of Skedasus reveals them to us in all their esoteric ruthlessness.

Skedasus was a poor man who lived in Leuctra. He had two daughters, Hippos and Miletia. He loved to have guests, even though he had little to offer in the way of hospitality. One day he put up two young Spartans. They were both taken by the beauty of the virgin daughters, but because the girls’ father was there they restrained themselves and proceeded with their journey to Delphi. On the way back they stopped at Skedasus’s house again. But this time he was away. The two daughters took the foreigners in. When the Spartans realized they were alone, they raped the girls. Then, seeing them disfigured by distress, they killed them and threw them down a well. When Skedasus got home all he found was the dog, yelping and running back and forth between his master and the well. Skedasus guessed the truth and pulled out the corpses. His neighbors told him the two Spartans had stopped at his house, and Skedasus realized what had happened, remembering that the two “had admired the girls and spoken warmly of the happiness of their future husbands.”

So Skedasus set off for Sparta. He wanted to report the crime to the ephors. One night he was in an inn. Next to him was an old man from Oreos who was complaining bitterly about the Spartans. Skedasus asked him what they had done to him. The old man explained that the Spartans had appointed a man called Aristodemus as governor of Oreos. He had fallen in love with the old man’s son and had immediately attempted to abduct the boy from the gymnasium, but the gym teacher had stopped him. The following day he managed to get the boy just the same. He put him on a ship and sailed over to the opposite shore. He tried to rape him. The boy put up a fight. So he cut his throat. That evening, he went back to Oreos and gave a banquet. The old father organized his son’s funeral and set off for Sparta. He asked for an audience with the ephors. The ephors didn’t even listen to him. Then Skedasus told his own story. When he had finished, the old man told him there was no point in going to Sparta. But Skedasus took no notice. He spoke to the ephors. They didn’t even listen to him. So he went to the king, he pleaded with people in the street. It did no good. Finally he killed himself. But history would one day set its seal on the story. Spartan power was broken once and for all at the battle of Leuctra. The fighting took place not far from the tombs of Skedasus’s daughters.

For years the wooden image of Taurian Artemis lay hidden in a clump of reeds not far from the river Eurotas. Orestes had stolen it from the sanctuary. He traveled for weeks, holding it tightly in his hands for as long as he felt the madness upon him. Then one day he thought he would try to live without it, and he hid the statue in this wild place. Two young Spartans of royal blood, Astrabacus and Alopecus, came across it by chance when they pushed the reeds aside. Upright and swathed in rushes, the statue stared at them. Not knowing what they were seeing, the two Spartans were seized by madness. Such is the power of the image: it heals only those who know what it is. For everybody else, it is an illness.

Around the small, light statue of Artemis, the Spartans built a temple. They dedicated it to Artemis Orthia and Lygodesma, upright and bound with rushes. People would offer masks to it, horrifying usually, images of the night and the underworld. As once before among the Tauri, when Iphigenia took care of it and washed it, the statue required that young blood be shed. But even the Spartans could sometimes ease up on a harsh custom. They decided they wouldn’t kill young people for the statue anymore but just whip them till the blood flowed before the goddess. So now one would see the most insolent of the Spartans, the ones who used to make raids into the countryside to kill helots for fun, for a laugh, agreeing to have themselves thoroughly whipped by other boys. Some of those doing the whipping might hold back a bit, especially when the youth being whipped was very handsome, or belonged to one of the more illustrious families. The statue didn’t like this. The priestess held it up beside the boys being whipped. But if the strokes eased off, the statue would begin to weigh more and more, like a meteorite trying to sink into the ground, and the wood would protest: “You’re pulling me down, you’re pulling me down.”

What Plato learned from Sparta was how to get a group of initiates to take over a town’s political life without anybody being scandalized. Éphoroi and phýlakes are very close even from a linguistic point of view: both mean “guardians,” “observers from above.” “Of a flock,” says Plato; “of a territory,” says Sophocles; “of children,” says Plato again; “of a slaughter,” says Euripides. But what do you have to do to become a guardian? Subject yourself to the initiatory torture. The aspirant must be “tried [basanizómenon] like gold in the fire.” Yet basanízein, when removed from the context of noble and inanimate materials such as gold, means “to torture.”

The bloody whippings Artemis Orthia demanded of the young Spartans, the hómoioi, are only a hint, a small hint, of those “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions” that Plato wanted to impose on his future guardians. And here he reveals his most daring plan: to secularize initiation, to have it pass for something like a good school, a bit tough, along the lines of an English boarding school, but as justifiable as any other kind of training, of soldiers, for example, or artists. While in reality it was far more ambitious, its purpose being to select, once and for all, a group which, purely thanks to its initiatory quality, would be able to run the whole city. “You know I hesitated earlier on to say the rash things I have now said,” Plato adds with fake caution, as though his most audacious step had been saying that “truly impeccable guardians must be philosophers.” And even as he covers his tracks like this, he is insinuating the real departure: that in order to be “impeccable guardians,” the philosophers must be initiated, and hence subjected to those excessive passions that Plato himself had condemned.

But who is an initiate? A person who has experienced a knowledge invisible from without and incommunicable except through the same process of initiation. Inevitably, Plato explains, there can be but “few” initiates. And in fact when compared with the Spartan version, Plato’s initiation process is more subtle and more arduous. There are a greater number of trials to overcome and, having survived the last, the initiate may find he is “the only one.” Then there may not be enough time for him to pass on his initiation. And there may not be anyone to follow him, with the result that the chain is broken.

So one day Plato began to write the Republic. And he wrote the text in the form it is in so that anyone who wanted to understand it might be subjected to that initiatory process of “sufferings and pleasures … labors, fears, and convulsions.” The many who did not understand, and were not supposed to understand, imagined they were reading a treatise on the perfect State.

Newly born, the boys were washed in wine to see how tough they were. The weaker ones were thrown into the “so-called Dump, a ravine on the slopes of the Taygetus.” They used no swaddling clothes and left the babies to cry in the dark. Those boys were “the common property of the city,” and hence must be made useful to the city as soon as possible. All their lives they would eat with other males, black broth more often than not. The older men loved practical jokes and war stories. The boys had to learn how to put up with both. They learned to read and write, but nothing more. The notion of anything more was abhorred, in everything. Getting married meant leaving the boys’ dormitory some nights to see your wife. Sex was furtive and quick, and the couple didn’t sleep together. “Some had children without ever seeing their wives in daylight.”

Unlike the many fools throughout Greece, they knew right from the start that “all of them, for their whole lives, must wage perpetual war against every city.” But the first city they were at war with was their own. They watched the helots, too many of them, working in the fields, and knew that one day they would have to kill one. They also knew that they must always be on the lookout, always carry a weapon. They knew they must close their doors with special keys. They could sense the hatred of the helots. The Equals took pleasure not so much in pleonexía, the original sin of lusting for power but, and they were unique in this, in playing police. For it was a more subtle and lasting pleasure: they could feel that other people’s lives depended on their decisions, while at the same time remaining anonymous, part of a corps, a wolf pack. We have very little hard information about Lycurgus. But we do know what his name means: “he who carries out the works (or celebrates the orgies) of the wolf.”

Sodomized before marriage (“prior to their weddings the rule is that girls should couple in the manner of boys”), visited hurriedly by their husbands at night so that they could conceive and retain “some spark of desire and grace,” relieved of the task of bringing up their children, not even interested in weaving, what did the Spartan women do? It is a question that has no answer, like the one the sophists would ask each other over banquets: “What song the Syrens sang?”

Plato himself regretted that the lives of the Spartan women were not organized in the same minute detail as those of their men, because this left an opportunity for “license.” Athenian malice chose to remember little more of the Spartan women than their naked thighs, which could be glimpsed through a slit down the sides of their tunics. The poet Ibycus calls the Spartan women “thigh flashers.” But the Athenians were able to appreciate their strappingly healthy beauty. Lysistrata greets the Spartan woman Lampito thus: “How your beauty shines, my precious. How fleshly and firm your body is. You could strangle a bull.” And Lampito answers: “By the Dioscuri, I swear I could. I exercise in the gym and kick my arse with my feet.” To which, Cleonice: “What great tits you’ve got.” And Lampito again: “The way you’re feeling me up I might be a beast for the sacrifice.”

During exercises and games, the Spartan girls went nude beside the nude boys, brought together “out of erotic, not geometric necessity,” Plato remarks. If the women speak in public it is only to pontificate in the best civic spirit. Indeed it is to them that we owe the invention of that saddest of figures, the Positive Hero. “We alone generate men,” thunders the proud Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, speaking to a foreign woman. She thus does the spadework for Napoleon’s quip on his first meeting with Madame de Staël: “Who do you consider the best of all women?” she asks. And he: “The one who bears the most children, madame.” But what we would like to know is something quite different: what did these descendants of the Leucippides say to each other amid the clouds of dust they raised as they ran like colts along the banks of the Eurotas, “their hair tossing in the wind like Bacchants waving their thyrsuses.” But the Spartan Sirens keep their silence too.

That happiness is an early symptom of misfortune, that “inherent” within happiness is the power to bring on misfortune, above all through the agency of resentment (phthónos), whether of men or gods, is a vision that was to persist among the Greeks when almost all others had faded. Yet they did want to be happy. One can appreciate now why it was that the Spartans cut themselves off from the other Greeks, transformed themselves into an unapproachable island. Just as they had perceived the dangers of exchange, so they saw the dangers of happiness. When they weren’t sure they could handle something, they preferred to cut loose, to abolish rather than lose control. Thus they chose to put into practice what would later earn them Aristotle’s most damning criticism: “they have lost the happiness of living.”

Under Lycurgus, Sparta underwent a transformation that condensed into just a few years the whole of political history from sacred kingship right through to the regimes of the present day. Sovereignty passed from a pair of kings, an archaic and obscure institution, to five ephors, a highly innovative expression of absolute power disguised as a judiciary, which in turn was a cover for what was originally a priesthood. The long transition from sacred king to Politburo was thus achieved in one foul swoop. And the fact that this was done while pretending to leave the old institutions intact only added to the audacious modernity of the development. There was no need to cut off the two kings’ heads. They could stay where they were, but bereft of power. If they caused trouble, however, the ephors might decide to “kill them without trial.” Alternatively, the ephors could take their decision to kill the kings on a starry, moonless night, while silently watching the sky. If a shooting star crossed that sky, it meant that one of the kings had “offended against divinity.” Originally no more than observers who kept their eyes on the heavens, the ephors had become supreme supervisors and “guardians,” watchful eyes looking down from above. That was how they exploited their priestly past. It offered a sparkling cloak that protected the secret of politics.

On the one hand, a divine king who upholds through his body the attributes of cosmic sovereignty; on the other, a group of mostly faceless, nameless, all-seeing inquisitors: the whole of political history is contained between these two extremes. It is the story of how liturgical power was transformed into invisible power. And that transformation, which was to go on for centuries right down to the present day, was achieved in Sparta in almost no time at all, and with very little effort. The only difficult thing was making sure that nobody outside realized what had happened. Everybody had to go on believing in those innocuous anecdotes about the discipline, courage, and frugality of the Spartans. But there were one or two people who couldn’t so easily be hoodwinked. Thucydides was one. But most perceptive of all was Plato.

All Plato’s political thought is obsessed by one figure: the guardian, or guardians. Whether they are philosophers, as proposed in the Republic, or men concerned with the Good, as he likes to pretend in the Laws, ultimate power is concentrated in the hands of the guardians. But Plato did not think of them as hypothetical figures: on the contrary, the guardians already existed, in the wealthy Peloponnese. They were the great sophists Socrates had mentioned in Protagoras, those who used their sophistry not to show off their glory but to hide it. They were the ephors, first example of a wholly godless power. But they didn’t let people see that side of them either; on the contrary, not content with all the existing cults, they brought in a new one, to which they were deeply devoted. They built a temple to Fear, close to the communal dining hall. “They didn’t honor her as a dark demon to be kept at bay, but because they believed that the State was held together mainly thanks to fear.”

The great societies of ancient times were images of something that encompassed them, isomorphs of the cosmos. The Son of the Sky was the axis of the world before becoming the axis of the city. It was only with the hubris of the Greeks that society claimed to be self-sufficient. So the Great Animal, as Plato describes him, was born. From that hubris sprang all the other repudiations: it was the sign of man’s first move to cut loose from the rest, the human race closed in on itself, in an attacking formation.

It was Athens: the searing word, cruelty, a play of color. And it was Sparta: slow, circumspect, murderous, seeking to turn everything to its own account. The Spartans even produced a lawmaker, Lycurgus, who committed suicide because he felt it might be useful for Sparta. “So he starved himself to death, reasoning that even the deaths of politicians should be of some value to society, that the end of their lives should not be without its use, but ought to have something virtuous and efficacious about it.”

Perhaps Alcibiades penetrated deeper than anyone else into “the secret of the regime” that was Sparta. As an exile, he sought asylum in Sparta, being a descendant of the Eupatrids, who for generations had had links with the family of the ephor Endius. “He shaved his head, washed in cold water, and accustomed himself to eating dry bread and drinking black broth.” Although the king of Sparta at the time was not, for once, a puppet of the ephors but a great general, Agis, Alcibiades “seduced his wife Timea and got her pregnant.” Thanks to him, even the archaic and somewhat ridiculous regality that remained in Sparta was thus raised to illegitimacy in the person of the bastard child Leotychides, “whose mother, at home, speaking softly before servants and friends, would call Alcibiades, so great was the passion that obsessed her.”

Alcibiades left us none of his insights into Sparta, but he did talk to Thucydides. And reading Thucydides one has the impression that the mirage of a virtuous Sparta has entirely dissolved. Thucydides sees and judges the Spartans’ actions as though from within, as though the mechanism were there before his eyes, driven by two powerful levers: deceit and brute force. Before being wiped out by the Athenians down to the last man capable of bearing arms, the Melians had hoped for assistance from Sparta. The Athenian ambassadors tried in vain to convince them that such hopes were treacherous, because they depended on those who “more blatantly than any other nation we know of believe that what they like doing is honorable and that what suits their interests is just.”

Located on the Asiatic side of the Hellespont, at its narrowest point, Abydos was included in Athens’s list of depraved cities. It was here that Alcibiades chose to go for his grand tour. “As soon as you came of age and had got the approval of your tutors, you took your inheritance from them and set sail for Abydos, not in order to recover payment for anything, nor in any consular role, but because you wanted to learn from the Abydian women the sorts of habits congenial to your spirit of illegality and debauchery, so as then to be able to pursue those habits in later life.” So says Antiphon in oratorial rage.

But Alcibiades’ departure could also claim the right to be recognized by the sophists as one of those passions that flare up at a distance on the basis of a single name, or some story heard from someone else, or some image seen in a dream. The fact is that Alcibiades had heard tell of a legendary courtesan called Medontis, and it was to find her that he left Athens in the company of his uncle and lover, Axiochus. Here Lysias takes over from Antiphon in the assault on Alcibiades, concentrating every possible transgression in a single anecdote: “So Axiochus and Alcibiades sailed to the Hellespont, landing in Abydos, where they both married the Abydian woman Medontis and cohabited with her. She gave birth to a daughter, but neither could be sure who was the father. And when the girl was of marriageable age, they both cohabited with her, and whenever Alcibiades was having his way with her, he would say she was Axiochus’s daughter; and when it was Axiochus’s turn, he would say she was Alcibiades’.”

It is true that Alcibiades would later find occasion to return to Abydos as a military leader, victorious on both land and sea, flaunting his purple sail. But there is nothing to prove that the story of Medontis and her daughter wasn’t just an exemplary tale of vice invented by Lysias. All we can say for certain is that right from the beginning Alcibiades’ destiny seems to have been marked out by an overriding predilection for prostitution of one form or another. It is as if for Alcibiades prostituting oneself were the secret sign by which strength and excellence are recognized. “Leaving the women of Sparta and Athens behind, he would burst in at the doors of the hetaerae in high spirits.” And when, at Plato’s symposium, he appeared, “wearing a sort of garland woven of ivy and violets with many ribbons around his head,” those flowers were “the first invitation to an encounter and a demonstration of desire … for the lure of fresh flowers and fruit demands in exchange the first fruits of the body of the person who picks them.” Thus it was a prostitute, Timandra, who recovered Alcibiades’ body, riddled by the arrows and javelins of his Spartan assassins. “She wrapped him up in her robes to hide him, then gave him a glorious and honorable burial, using what she could find round about.” Shortly before this, in a premonition of death, Alcibiades had dreamt that Timandra was wrapping him in her clothes and making up his face like a woman’s.

Almost everything we know about Sparta was written by outsiders. The city’s only two poets, Alcman and Tyrtaeus, were probably not Spartans by birth, and in any case they lived before the reforms of the sixth century, which conjured up and froze for all time the mirage that was Sparta. No Spartan ever spoke out, as no priest of Eleusis ever spoke out. Their real legacy was not a concise, sententious morality but silence.

What happened in ancient Greece that had never happened before? A lightening of our load. The mind shrugged off the world with a brusque gesture that was to last a few centuries. When, in the geometric patterns of the vases, we begin to find rectangles inhabited by black figures, those figures already have an empty space behind them, a clearing, an area at last free from meaning. It was perhaps out of gratitude toward this insolent gesture that Greece celebrated in its tragedies the attempt, admittedly vain and doomed to be short-lived, to rid themselves of the consequences of gesture and action.

Then, little by little, the Erinyes darkened the sky ever more rarely, until the most pressing concern became to find a way to control action, as if such control would be sufficient to empty action of its insidious nature, as if control did not itself imply a further action, just as insidious as the first. Anaximander’s fragment on díkē, the Platonic vision of the meadow, on each side of which yawned four chasms, celestial and terrestrial, with swarms of souls meeting there: these were rare appeals to a rigorous sense of karman, appeals that the Hellenic spirit was impatiently stamping out. The Greeks would abandon them, without scruple, leaving them to the sects, the initiates, to Egypt. Like characters on a stage, the now cosmopolitan citizens would soon have no need of anything but jokes and tears. The cosmos was breaking up into Alexandrian chronicle.

Herodotus would have preferred to write about feats of engineering rather than religion, but in Egypt the cults invaded every nook and cranny. In a hasty observation, he pointed to the trait that most sharply divided Egypt from Greece: “The heroes have no place in Egyptian religion.” In Egypt the past, like the land, had no ups and downs to it. The only unevenness was that tiny scarp formed by the layers of silt the Nile deposited every year. But, for the Greeks, the progressive deterioration of successive ages, from gold to iron, had at least been interrupted by that hillock, the age of the heroes, to which everything still looked back, even if the period had been nothing more than a capricious wrinkle on the surface of time.

The whole of Greece was strewn with the tombs of heroes, as was Egypt with cat cemeteries. Heroes and animals opened up the path to the dead. And as in Greece the heroes would become confused with the gods, repeating their deeds and taking over their traits, in Egypt the animals that cluttered everyday life reappeared in the heads of those hawks, cats, ibis, and jackals that watched over the soul on its celestial journeys. But there was no call to be overly surprised by such differences. In the end, as Herodotus with his admirable good sense observed, religion is a reality that no one can help but recognize. Which was why, he wrote, “I see no point in reporting what I’ve been told about Egyptian religion, since I don’t believe any nation knows much more than any other when it comes to things like this.”

They put earrings on crocodiles. When they died they laid them out in huge subterranean vaults. Cities of the Crocodiles. When there was a fire, the only thing they worried about was saving the cats. And the cats, in turn, threw themselves into the fires. Everything was bigger, longer, and flatter than among other peoples. Numbers were seized by a silent fury of multiplication. Such were the Egyptians. It was a country where all creatures, men and beasts, had barely gasped their last breath before they were being sent to the embalmers — except for the women, that is, who were sent three days later, so that the embalmers wouldn’t rape them.

History for the Egyptians was a sequence of statues sitting on thrones. The first series in the sequence was made up of gods. The second series, of men. There wasn’t much to distinguish one from the other. Yet the gap between those two series of statues was unbridgeable. Hecataeus, deceitful like all the Greeks, once claimed that his family could be traced back sixteen generations to a god. The priests of Thebes in Egypt humiliated him with a simple gesture. They took him into the nave of the temple and showed him hundreds of wooden statues standing side by side: they were the chief priests to date. All very much the same. Men and sons of men, explained the priests with their measured sarcasm. From other priests Herodotus would hear the list of the three hundred and thirty sovereigns who had reigned over Egypt. None, they said, had been memorable, except the one queen Nitocris and the most recent king, Moeris, who had had a lake built with pyramids.

The Greeks who dropped anchor at Naucratis, at the mouth of the Nile, were mainly merchants, tourists, or mercenaries. They would go to the market, which, like Corinth, was famous for its prostitutes (“unusually beautiful,” remarks Herodotus). These Greeks were the first people to settle in Egypt and go on speaking a foreign tongue. Seven mercenaries from small towns in Ionia carved a few words with their names on the left leg of a huge statue of Ramses II, near the second waterfall of Abu Simbel. There were many such mercenaries: in the reign of Amasis, they formed a Foreign Legion of thirty thousand men.

Charaxus came to Naucratis to seek his fortune, bringing a ship laden with wine from Lesbos. He was Sappho’s brother. But, instead of making a fortune, he squandered one on his love for Doricha, also known as Rhodopis, a most beautiful courtesan. Rhodopis came from Thrace as slave of a rich man from Samos. One of her fellow slaves was the storyteller Aesop. Charaxus paid a ransom for Rhodopis and gave himself over to his passion for her. Back on Lesbos, Sappho wrote some furious poetry, invoking Aphrodite to bring her brother back, “unharmed” and with at least some shreds of his wealth.

Herodotus was shocked when it was suggested that the Micerine pyramid had been built for Rhodopis. How could a building “that had cost countless thousands of talents” belong to a hetaera? But centuries later, when Strabo was traveling the Mediterranean and saw the heads of the Sphinxes barely poking up from the desert sand, his guides pointed out the Micerine pyramid, referring to it as the Courtesan’s Pyramid. They said it had been built by “Rhodopis’s lovers.” And they told this story. One day Rhodopis was out bathing. An eagle snatched one of her sandals from a maid’s hands. The bird flew to Memphis, where it dropped the sandal from high in the air onto the Pharaoh’s lap as he was judging people’s disputes out in the open. The Pharaoh saw that it was a beautiful sandal. He sent men all over Egypt to look for the woman it belonged to. They finally found her, in Naucratis. She became the Pharaoh’s wife. On her death, the pyramid was built in her honor.

Hermes was pining with love for Aphrodite, who paid no attention. Zeus took pity on him. While Aphrodite was bathing in the river Acheloüs, he sent an eagle to snatch one of her slippers (soccum). Holding the slipper in her beak, the eagle flew to Egypt to give it to Hermes. Aphrodite followed as far as the city of Amitarnia, where she found both the slipper and the pining god. In return for her slipper, Aphrodite let Hermes make love to her. Hermes showed his gratitude by setting the eagle in the sky, above Ganymede, who had once been carried off by an eagle.

In Plutarch’s time, guides in Delphi were still showing people the empty space where the long spears the courtesan Rhodopis had dedicated to the oracle used to be kept. Freed from slavery and having gained great wealth, she had used a tenth of her earnings to “build something the likes of which was never conceived of nor dedicated in any other temple.” She did it because she was “eager to leave some memento of herself in Greece.” Some said it was a scandal. But the answer to their objections was near at hand: looking up from the space outside the temple, one saw the golden statue of Phryne, which one stoic had disdainfully described as “a monument to Greek debauchery.” And, in the end, it was nothing more than Praxiteles’ homage to his mistress. Phryne had wanted to offer her golden body as a sort of first fruit, alongside all the other “first fruits and tithes of killings, wars, and pillage,” near “this temple bubbling over with all kinds of spoils and loot taken at the expense of other Greeks.” Now only the spoils remained. Greece had become just another place to visit, accompanied by a guide, who might just be Plutarch.

Such is the Greek version of events. But the Egyptians, who, as Herodotus remarks, are “the opposite” of the Greeks in all things and always trace everything back to ancient times, tell a different story. In his list of Egyptian rulers, Manetho mentions, as coming at the end of the sixth dynasty, a certain queen Nitocris, “the noblest and most beautiful woman of her time, fair of skin, who built the third pyramid,” known as the Micerine Pyramid. Nitocris was also a daring war leader. Her reign ended in upheaval. To avenge her brother’s death, she had all his enemies drowned in an underground chamber. Then she shut herself up in a room full of ashes. A surviving description speaks of her as “blond with pink cheeks.” And ródōpis means “pink-faced.”

There were about fifteen hundred years between the life of Nitocris and that of the courtesan Charaxus squandered his fortune on. And about six hundred years between the lives of Sappho and Strabo. That was how long it took for an Egyptian queen to become a blond prostitute arriving in Egypt as a Thracian slave, and for the Greek prostitute to go back to being an Egyptian queen. They are united now in a pyramid. And time has confirmed the truth of the few lines Posidippus wrote for Rhodopis: “Doricha, your bones are adorned by the ribbon tying your soft tresses / and by the perfumed shawl / in which once you wrapped the handsome Charaxus, / flesh against flesh, until the morning cup. / But the white, echoing pages of Sappho’s song / remain and will live on. / Most blessed is your name, and Naucratis will watch over it / so long as ships pass by on the still Nile, heading seaward.”

For the heroes fighting beneath the walls of Troy, life was not something that asked to be saved. They didn’t even have a word that meant “salvation,” unless perhaps pháos, “light.” Salvation was a temporary reassertion of something already there. It didn’t mean saving existence, or saving oneself from existence. Existence was beyond salvation. Life: something incurable, to be accepted for what it was, in all its malice and splendor. The most you could hope for was to keep yourself on the crest of the wave a few moments longer, before tumbling back down the steep slope into the darkness of the whirlpool. The word most often used to qualify death was aipýs, “steep.” Death meant plunging downward, no sooner than you had topped the crest of the world of appearance.

The most terrifying feature of the Homeric afterlife is its apathy, which comes across in the lack of any punishment. Why distinguish between virtue and vice if everybody in the afterlife is to partake of the same helplessness, the same insubstantiality, the same desire to drink blood so as to feed what shreds of soul the funeral pyres have not entirely burned up and stripped from the whitened bones? Such a vision could not last long in an age that was no longer that of the heroes but of the poets who told the stories of heroes past.

Homer’s poetry was still buzzing in everybody’s ears when the first disciples of a first sect of the Book, the Orphics, began to swarm across Greece. Everything was different now, or at least so the Orphics claimed. Every action, however trifling, set the wheels of cosmic accountancy in motion. All kinds of rewards could be obtained by reciting splendid words, venerating the names of pre-Olympian gods. They knocked on the doors of the rich. They arrived with strange objects — books, a babble of books — and hinted that they were in contact with the gods. If someone felt burdened by a sense of guilt, if another felt an urge to hurt an enemy, the Orphics were ready to help, at a modest price. Sacrifices, charms, purification ceremonies. Until finally they began to turn nasty: anybody who refused their services risked appalling punishments, down there in the bogs of Hades. The men of the sect, the men of the Book, the Orphics with their “bundles of books,” and likewise the Pythagoreans, so intent on listening for fractional variations in sound that they looked as though they were “trying to overhear a conversation next door,” were all met with suspicion and impatience. To the heirs of the strong Greece of the past, such as Plato and Aristophanes, there was something irritating and inelegant about their beliefs. Yet it was they, in the end, who won out, thanks, curiously enough, to Plato. For although his style of exposition through dialogue shifted the chiming of obscure poetry onto a stage where all was exaggeratedly clear and rippling with irony, the new doctrine crept in just the same. “To free oneself from that circle which causes weariness and crushing grief,” to escape from existence as from a burden, or a crime; this basic Orphic dogma was spread more by Plato’s style than by the precepts of the converted, until finally it would become inextricably bound up with the Gospel invitation to reject the Prince of this world.

Only those who have fled the world with pagan or Christian urgency, only those who have retreated into a fragment of soul whose origins lie elsewhere, in the beyond, only those who do not completely belong to this world are in a position to use the world and transform it with such efficiency and ruthlessness. And with that final transition to simply making use of the world we have arrived at an age that is neither pagan nor Christian, but that unknowingly continues to practice the same twin gesture of detachment and flight while sinking its claws into both earth and lunar dust.

One great fault of Homer, for which Plato never forgave the poet, was that he omitted any serious comment on the structure of the cosmos. The heavens were anonymous and superfluous. For the purposes of his narration, he used only three levels: Olympus, high in the ether; the earth, a multicolored disk, a supine body to whose back clung the invisible parasite of Hades; and, finally, the frozen Tartarus. But between Zeus’s palace and the earth, and between the earth and the ice of Tartarus, there was simply nothing Homer was interested in talking about.

That immense void yawning beneath the surface of the earth was testimony to a blasphemous euphoria. It was a way of omitting, even obliterating the celestial machinery, the mathematical works of the Artificer. It was a first cataclysm wrought by poetry: the cosmos was made oblivious of itself. But with the Orphics, followers of the Book, and later with Plato, Chaldaean wisdom took its revenge on Homer. The roving islands of celestial bodies, the frayed progress of the Milky Way, the soft sounds of the spheres all regained their privileges. The wonderful flatness of the Homeric vision was lost in the ordered chasms that once again opened up between one heaven and the next. Hades was winkled out from his moldy underworld to be catapulted up into the atmosphere and settled in the cone of shadow between earth and moon, as if the lining of the planet had been turned inside out and shaken skyward, dispatching the multitude of souls it housed out into a turbulent dark. Such was the immense, windblown waiting room of the dead.

There is a radical and shocking divergence between Homer and all later theologians, Hesiod included. Homer, as Plutarch remarks, refuses to distinguish between gods and daímones: “he seems to use the two words as equivalents and speaks of the gods as daímones.” This makes it impossible to blame the daímones for the murkier activities of the gods and precludes any idea of a ladder of being, on which, through a series of purificatory acts, one might ascend toward the divine, or alternatively the divine might descend in orderly fashion toward man. This idea, which forms the point of departure for every form of Platonism, is already implicit in Hesiod’s division of beings into four categories: men, heroes, daímones, gods.

But Homer ignores such mediation. For him the word “hero” can be substituted more generically with “man,” nor did he see any need to introduce a separate class of daímones. He thus brought the extremes into immediate contact, leaving nothing to soften the violence of the collision. Yet, as one reads once again in Plutarch, “those who refuse to admit the existence of a class of daímones alienate the things of men from the things of the gods, making it impossible for them to mix, and eliminating, as Plato said, ‘the interpretative and ministering role of nature,’ or alternatively they force us to make a general hotchpotch, introducing gods into our human passions and goings-on and dragging them down to our level whenever it suits us, the way the women of Thessaly are supposed to be able to pull down the moon.” Never perhaps as in this passage from the late and knowing Plutarch was the invincible scandal of Homer, the enemy of mediation, so clearly exposed. When the Christian Fathers railed against Homeric debasement, they were really doing no more than dusting off Plato’s sense of scandal, and likewise that of his followers, here so lucidly summed up by Plutarch. The course of Greek civilization thus reveals itself as a process in which its founding authority, Homer himself, becomes ever more unacceptable.

Timarchus was a young disciple of Socrates who wanted to “know the power of his master’s demon.” He was “courageous and had only recently had his first taste of philosophy.” So he decided to put himself to a fearful test: he would climb down into Trophonius’s cave in Lebadeia, where Kore had once gone to play with the Nymph Hercynia, who kept a goose. When the Nymph was distracted for a moment, the goose disappeared into a cave hidden behind a stone. So Kore went into the cave to look for the bird, caught it, and lifted the stone, upon which a flood of water came rushing from the darkness. Of all the variations of Kore’s adventures, this was the most remote and secret, so secret that no one knew about it: the only remaining record of the affair was the statue of a young girl with a goose in her arm in Hercynia’s temple.

Having reached Lebadeia, Timarchus spent a few days purifying himself in the house of Good Fortune and Good Spirit. He bathed in the freezing waters of the river Hercynia. He ate the meat of the animals offered up as sacrifices. And every time the priests sacrificed another victim, a seer would read the entrails to see if Trophonius was well-disposed toward the visitor and would receive him kindly. One night Timarchus was taken from the house and led to the river. Two youths washed him with the deference of slaves. Then they led him to some priests, near where the water rose. They told him to drink from two springs. The first they called the water of Forgetfulness. The other was the water of Memory. Then Timarchus set off toward the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic with ribbons. On his feet he wore the heavy local boots. Two bronze poles linked by a chain stood in front of the oracle. Behind was the cave: a narrow, artificial opening, like an oven for baking bread.

Timarchus was carrying a light ladder and some honey cakes for the snakes. He slipped into the opening feet first and immediately felt himself being sucked into the darkness — where the snakes were waiting for him. For a long time he lay in the dark. Then he realized that the plates of his skull were slowly coming apart. His spirit slipped out, breathing freely as though after long compression, and began to rise. It swelled and spread. It was a sail in the sky. The sea it plowed was dotted with “islands sparkling with delicate fire,” large islands, though of different sizes, and all round. High above, he saw the face of the moon approaching. Persephone was rushing across the sky with her dogs, the planets, behind her. From beneath, where the earth was, rose a murmur of groans, as though of a never-ending but remote tumult.

On climbing down into Trophonius’s cave, Timarchus had imagined he was going toward Hades. But now he realized that Hades had been turned inside out into the sky, become the shadowy cone between the moon and the earth, and the earth was nothing more than the continuation of Hades into the abyss. But then why should the two worlds be so different from each other after all, given that both were places of exile? As the spirit of Timarchus thus reflected, he saw the place, near the moon, where the cone of shadow narrowed to a point, and saw that it was here that the drifting souls were gathering. They were trying to land on that woman’s face, the moon, despite the fact that it grew more and more terrifying the nearer they got. The face seemed to be made up with an extremely fine powder, which the dead recognized as the substance of other souls. The moment they tried to grab hold of some wrinkle on the lunar surface, blinded by the white light, many would find themselves dragged back by an irresistible undertow, until they were falling through space again. Yet it was there that salvation lay, and they had come so close. Had they managed to set foot on this outpost of Persephone, they would one day have undergone a second death, more gradual and more delicate than the first. One day Persephone would have separated their minds, noûs, from their souls, the way Apollo could prize the armor from a warrior’s shoulders. Then, when the substance of their souls had been left behind on the white dust, and keeping only “husks and dreams of life,” they would have emerged on the other side of the moon, where the Elysian Fields stretch across a land terrestrial beings have never seen. When Timarchus came back, feet first, from the oracular oven, his body was glowing with light. Three months later he died in Athens.

Plato’s attitude toward the myths is one that the more lucid of the moderns sometimes achieve. The more obtuse, on the other hand, still argue around the notion of belief, a fatal word when it comes to mythology, as if the credence the ancients lent to the myths had anything to do with the superstitious conviction with which philologists of the age of Wilamowitz believed in the lighting of an electric bulb on their desks. No, Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul casts on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant [epádein] ourselves.” Epádein is the verb that designates the “enchanting song.” “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths.

In Greece, myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle. Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited: what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated? But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realize that they have taken on a life of their own. The Greeks were unique among the peoples of the Mediterranean in not passing on their stories via a priestly authority. They were rambling stories, which is partly why they so easily got mixed up. And the Greeks became so used to hearing the same stories told with different plots that it got to be a perfectly normal thing for them. Nor was there any final authority to turn to for a correct version. Homer was the ultimate name one could evoke: but Homer hadn’t told all the stories.

This flight of myth from ritual recalled Zeus’s constant adulterous adventures. Through those incursions, he who was father of Dike, and had her sit on the throne on his right hand as personification of Justice and Order, revealed himself to be “against justice” and to harbor “thoughts opposed to order.” The revelation that license was not perennially condemned but might be acceptable, at least if it came from above: that was the gift of the age of Zeus. Divine incursions were an unexpected overflowing of reality. Thus, in contrast to the harsh coercion of ritual, history was a constant overflowing, leaving, visible in its wake, those relics we call characters.

Much was implicit in the Greek myths that has been lost to us today. When we look at the night sky, our first impression is one of amazement before a random profusion scattered across a dark background. Plato could still recognize “the friezes in the sky.” And he maintained that those friezes were the “most beautiful and exact” images in the visible order. But when we see a sash of fraying white, the Milky Way, girdle of some giantess, we are incapable of perceiving any order, let alone a movement within that order. No, we immediately start to think of distances, of the inconceivable light-years. We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky. Yet, despite being reduced to just their fragrant rind of stories, we still feel the Greek myths are cohesive and interconnected, right down to the humblest variant, as if we knew why they were so. And we don’t know. A trait of Hermes, or Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Athena forms a part of the figure, as though the pattern of the original material were emerging in the random scatter of the surviving rags.

We shouldn’t be too concerned about having lost many of the secrets of the myths, although we must learn to sense their absence, the vastness of what remains undeciphered. To be nostalgic would be like wanting to see, on raising our eyes to the sky, seven Sirens, each intoning a different note around each of the seven heavens. Not only do we not see the Sirens but we can’t even make out the heavens anymore. And yet we can still draw that tattered cloth around us, still immerse ourselves in the mutilated stories of the gods. And in the world, as in our minds, the same cloth is still being woven.

For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.

Myths are made up of actions that include their opposites within themselves. The hero kills the monster, but even as he does so we perceive that the opposite is also true: the monster kills the hero. The hero carries off the princess, yet even as he does we perceive that the opposite is also true: the hero deserts the princess. How can we be sure? The variants tell us. They keep the mythical blood in circulation. But let’s imagine that all the variants of a certain myth have been lost, erased by some invisible hand. Would the myth still be the same? Here one arrives at the hairline distinction between myth and every other kind of narrative. Even without its variants, the myth includes its opposite. How do we know? The knowledge intrinsic in the novel tells us so. The novel, a narrative deprived of variants, attempts to recover them by making the single text to which it is entrusted more dense, more detailed. Thus the action of the novel tends, as though toward its paradise, to the inclusion of its opposite, something the myth possesses as of right.

The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. But while on the one table he puts generations and dynasties in order, like some old butler who knows the family history better than his masters, you can be sure that on another table the muddle is getting worse and the threads ever more entangled. No mythographer has ever managed to put his material together in a consistent sequence, yet all set out to impose order. In this, they have been faithful to the myth.

The mythical gesture is a wave which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them. But, as the wave withdraws, the unvanquished complications swell in the undertow, and likewise the muddle and the disorder from which the next mythical gesture will be formed. So myth allows of no system. Indeed, when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god’s cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo.

The Greek myths were stories passed on with variants. The writer — whether it was Pindar or Ovid — rewrote them, in a different way each time, omitting here, adding there. But new variants had to be rare, and unobtrusive. So each writer would build up and thin out the body of the stories. So the myth lived on in literature.

The sublime author of The Sublime traced literature back to megalophyía, a “greatness of nature,” which sometimes manages to light up a similar nature in the mind of the reader. But how can nature, which “loves to hide,” accept the cumbersome conspicuousness of the rhetorical machine? How escape the ostentatiousness of the téchnē? The chassé-croisé between Nature and Art, which was to generate comment for two millennia and would be condensed in seventeenth-century capitals, was executed in a single sentence way back at the height of classical decadence: “Only then is art perfect, when it looks like nature, while nature strikes home when it conceals art within itself.”

Perfection, any kind of perfection, always demands some kind of concealment. Without something hiding itself, or remaining hidden, there is no perfection. But how can the writer conceal the obviousness of the word and its figures of speech? With the light. The anonymous author writes: “And how did the rhetorician conceal the trope he was using? It’s clear that he hid it with light itself.” To conceal with light: the Greek specialty. Zeus never stopped using the light to conceal. Which is why the light that comes after the Greek light is of another kind, and much less intense. That other light aims to winkle out what has been hidden. While the Greek light protects it. Allows it to show itself as hidden even in the light of day. And even manages to hide what is evident, made black by the light, the way the rhetorical trope becomes unrecognizable when inundated by splendor and submerged by a “greatness that pours forth from every side.” Such was the conclusion the anonymous author’s literary analysis brought him to. So he rightly claimed that “judgment about literature is the perfect result of great experience.”

Old and blind, Homer spent the winter on Samos. When May came he went from door to door followed by a swarm of children. They each carried an eiresine, an olive branch with strips of white and purple wool attached and the first fruits of the season. Homer made his rounds submerged in a buzz of nursery rhymes. They spoke of the eiresine, of dry figs and plump bread rolls swinging back and forth, honey and wine. They carried them around, they said, so that the eiresine could “fall asleep, drunk.”

But why did they have to put this decorated branch to sleep? What kept it so obsessively awake? Followed by the children, Homer went to the houses of the rich Samians. He announced that their doors were about to open of their own accord, that where there was wealth, more wealth would enter, and with it “the blithe spirit and the gift of peace.” The bard sang, the wealthy owner appeared and gave something to the old man and his troop of children. And, even if he gave nothing, it didn’t matter. Homer would be back, like the swallows. But now it was time to leave the island, because he was a wanderer with no fixed home. One day he left and never returned, and on Apollo’s feast days the children of Samos went on acting out his beggar’s song outside the houses of the rich.

Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything and everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case: it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated it. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.

Isidore of Seville could still write, “Vittae dictae sunt, quod vinciant”: “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. Men wouldn’t be able to bear seeing that net in its entirety all the time: they would get caught in it at once and suffocate. But every time someone achieves or is subjected to — but every achievement is subjection, and every subjection achievement — something that uplifts him and generates intensity and meaning, then the woolen strips, the ties, come out. At one end they are bound tight to the body in a knot that may become a noose. At the other they flutter in the air, keeping us company, escorting us, protecting us. The victorious athlete has woolen strips tied to his arms, his torso, his thighs, and they follow him, waving in the air like a triumphant tangle of snakes. Nike, Victory, always carries a bunch of woolen ties to hand out to her chosen favorites. And the initiate keeps the strip of wool he wore on the day of his initiation and preserves it as a relic his whole life long. But woolen strips were also hung from the horns of sacrificial bulls. The girls tied them there carefully before the ceremony, the way the bride’s mother tied them around wedding torches of hawthorn wood, and relatives hung them from the dead man’s bed.

All these woolen strips, these vain, winged tassels, were nerves of the nexus rerum, the connection of everything with everything else, which alone gives meaning to life. We live every moment of our lives swathed in those ties, white because white is the color the Olympians like, or red because blood ties us to death, or purple, yellow, and green. But we can’t always see them, indeed we mustn’t, because then we would be paralyzed, trapped. We feel them blowing about us the minute something happens to dispel our apathy, and we become aware of being carried along on a stream that flows toward something unknown. And just sometimes, but very rarely, those ties twist and turn and weave around us, until one loose end becomes knotted to another. Then, very softly, they encompass us, they form a circle, which is the crown, perfection.

Heavy with nectar, Poros stretched out in Zeus’s garden. He slept, but in his mind thought was thinking: “What is a garden? The ornate splendor of wealth.” Then Aphrodite appeared among beings. She was the daughter of thought. Soon there would be many copies of Aphrodite everywhere. They were demons, each one accompanied by a different Eros, with his buzz of gadflies.