The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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