The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (21 page)
In Eratosthenes’ version, Nemesis’s long flight came to an end in the sea off Rhamnus in Attica, when Zeus the swan settled on the wild duck. That was the only time Nemesis would ever play a passive role. From then on, and for hundreds, thousands of years, she would appear as a young woman, of calm and grave expression, roaming all over the earth, treading, as often as not, on lifeless corpses. That remote animal scene in a wilderness of sea, unwatched by any eye, is the only episode of her life we know about. It was also the greatest exploit of Zeus’s reign: that of having forced necessity to bring forth beauty.
When the inhabitants of Rhamnus decided to consecrate a sanctuary to Nemesis, they commissioned Phidias to sculpt a giant statue of the goddess. Some claim that the Rhamnus Nemesis was in fact an Aphrodite sculpted by Agoracritus, Phidias’s pupil and lover. Others say that Phidias allowed the sculpture to be passed off as the work of his lover. Either way, the statue would be famous for centuries. Varro preferred it above all others. A fragment of the head has been discovered; the rest we must reconstruct from descriptions and coins. So the base of the statue showed Leda leading a reluctant Helen toward her real mother, Nemesis. But what was the relationship between mother and daughter? We
know a great deal about Helen, whereas only a few details have come down to us about the divine figure of Nemesis, and even these are often enigmatic. This goddess of the offense that boomerangs back on its perpetrator must have been very beautiful if people could mistake her for Aphrodite. Herself the great enemy of hubris, she gave birth to a daughter whose very body was an offense and in doing so provoked the most magnificent unfolding of hubris in all of Greek history: the Trojan War.
In one hand Nemesis held a designer’s square, or a pair of reins, or an apple branch. The wheel of destiny stood beside her and could become the wheel of her griffin-drawn chariot. She also held the urn of destiny. “Queen of motives and arbitress of all things,” she had always possessed the power to bind men in the “never-to-be-loosened net of necessity” (
necessitatis insolubili retinaculo vinciens
). Often Nemesis would lift a hand to her shoulder, as if to adjust her tunic. And often she bowed her head, eyes on her breast, as though deep in thought. Some of the ancients said that when she did this she was spitting into her tunic to ward off bad luck. Phidias (or Agoracritus) sculpted a handsome crown on her head with representations of stags and of Nike, goddess of victory. She held a decorated goblet in her hand showing figures of Negroes. When Pausanias saw the statue, he was puzzled by this goblet. He wasn’t convinced by the explanations people gave him, that it showed a group of Ethiopians, because Nemesis’s father was Oceanus and the Ethiopians lived near Oceanus. In a doggedly determined digression on the Ethiopians, he demonstrates that such a supposition was baseless. But he didn’t dare to suggest an alternative and moved on. Other classical authors found it equally difficult to account for all Nemesis’s attributes. The designer’s square stood for the notion of measure, the cosmic rule that punishes every excess, but what was that aphrodisian apple branch about? And the impressive stags around her forehead? And why that frequently repeated gesture of raising a hand to one shoulder, where she had a buckle in the shape of a griffin, her favorite animal? Was it to cover herself better, or to undo the buckle?
Nemesis came from Asia Minor. Before arriving in Rhamnus, she was worshiped in Smyrna. Above the cult’s statues were hung the three golden Charites, by Bupalus. And in Smyrna we find that Nemesis was not just one figure. Here the faithful worshiped two identical Nemeses. One day Alexander the Great went hunting on Mount Pagus. On his way back, he stopped to rest under a large plane tree near the sanctuary of the two Nemeses. And two identical women appeared to him in a dream. They were looking at each other, and each had a hand on her tunic buckle, one the left hand, the other the right, as though in a mirror. They told him to found a new Smyrna beyond the Meles, the river “with the finest water of all, rising in a cavern where it is said Homer composed his poems.” Alexander obeyed.
But why should Nemesis, this guardian of the cosmic law, which is intrinsically indivisible, appear as two figures? Perhaps here we have found our way back to the place where the phantom began its long journey. Helen was born with the Dioscuri twins. She was the unique one; she brought together in a single body all the beauty that in the normal way of things would have been shared out equally among everybody in obedience to the
némein
that many of the ancients had even then linked to Nemesis. But right from the egg she hatched out of, Helen was also pursued by duplication, which reigns within the phantom. And it wasn’t just a question of her twin brothers; her mother was also split into two figures. Now, as her mother, Leda, took her toward her other mother, her real mother, Helen realized that Nemesis too had a double. Not only beauty itself, but likewise the destiny of being double, the realm of the phantom, all these things can be traced back to that Asiatic mother with the mysterious gesture, the woman Zeus chose to generate his only daughter to live among men.
H
EROPHILE, DEMOPHILE, SABBE: SUCH are the names of the Sibyls that have come down to us. From Palestine to the Troad they left a few scattered remains, and sometimes verses. One day, converging from every corner of the Mediterranean, they all climbed toward Delphi, which was “difficult to get to even for a strong man.” Herophile prophesied the coming of Helen, “how she would grow up in Sparta to be the ruination of Asia and Europe.” In her verses she sometimes calls herself Artemis, and she also claimed to be Apollo’s sister, or his daughter. Some permanent bond linked her to Apollo Smintheus, the Apollo of the Rat, harbinger of the plague. You can still find Herophile’s tomb in the Troad, among the trees of the wood sacred to Apollo Smintheus, and the epitaph says: “I lie close to the Nymphs and to Hermes. / I have not lost my sovereignty.”
In the latter days of Delphi, the Pythia was selected the same way a priest’s housekeeper is: that is, she had to be over fifty. But originally she had been a young girl chosen from among all the girls of Delphi, and she had worn a simple girl’s tunic without a gold hem. One day Echecrates, the Thessalian, saw the virgin prophesying, was seized by passion, carried the girl off, and raped her. After which the people of Delphi introduced the age limit for the prophetess, although she continued to dress as a little girl. But the situation
had been very different in more ancient times. Then the Sibyls came from far away and chanted their prophesies from a rock, later to be hemmed in between the Bouleuterion and the Portico of the Athenians.
In a state of divine possession, they spoke in impeccable verse. In fact, it was only now that men realized what perfect speech could be, since the hexameter was Apollo’s gift to Phemonoe, his daughter, his mountain Nymph, his first Pythia. The god knew that power came from possession, from the snake coiled around the water spring. But that wasn’t enough for Apollo: his women, his soothsaying daughters, must reveal not only the enigmas of the future but verse itself. Poetry thus arrived on the scene as the form structuring those ambiguous words that people came to hear to help them make decisions about their lives, words whose meaning they often appreciated only when it was too late. And Apollo didn’t want slovenly shamans but young virgins from the grottoes of Parnassus, girls still close to the Nymphs, and speaking in well-turned verse.
The moderns have often imagined the operation of the oracle as some kind of collaboration between a team of Madame Sosostris and cold Parnassian priests who polished up the metrics of the Pythia’s groans (and of course derailed her meaning to suit their own dark designs). But the Sibyls, the first women ever to prophesy at Delphi, had no need of prompters. The notion—seemingly self-evident to the moderns—that possession and formal excellence are incompatible would never have occurred to them. Into the impervious history of Delphi, Orpheus and Musaeus arrive almost as parvenus, at least when compared with the Sibyls: “They say that Orpheus put on such airs about his mysteries and was generally so presumptuous that both he and Musaeus, who imitated him in everything, refused to submit themselves to the test and take part in any musical competition.” This was when they were in Delphi. And perhaps Orpheus and Musaeus weren’t avoiding that competition out of arrogance, nor for fear of being beaten, but because right there for all to see, as it still is today, was the rock where Phemonoe pronounced the very first hexameters.
Apollo and Dionysus are false friends, and likewise false enemies. Behind the charade of their clashes, their encounters, their overlapping, there is something that forever unites them, forever distinguishes them from their divine peers: possession. Both Apollo and Dionysus know that possession is the highest form of knowledge, the greatest power. And this is the knowledge, this the power they seek. Zeus too, of course, is practiced in the art of possession, in fact he need only listen to the rustling oaks of Dodona to generate it. But Zeus is everything and hence gives pride of place to nothing. Apollo and Dionysus, in contrast, choose possession as their peculiar weapon and are loath to let others mess with it. For Dionysus, possession is an immediate, unassailable reality; it is with him in all his wanderings, whether in the houses of the city or out on the rugged mountains. If someone refuses to acknowledge it, Dionysus is ready to unleash that possession like a terrifying beast. And it is then that the Proetides, the weaver sisters who were reluctant to follow the call of the god, dash off and race furiously about the mountains. Soon they are killing people, sometimes innocent travelers. This is how Dionysus punishes those who don’t accept
his
possession, which is like a perennial spring gushing from his body, or the dark liquid that he revealed to men.
For Apollo, possession is a conquest. And, like every conquest, it must be defended by an imperious hand. Like every conquest, it also tends to obliterate whatever power came before it. But the possession that attracted Apollo was very different from the possession that had always been the territory of Dionysus. Apollo wants his possession to be articulated by meter; he wants to stamp the seal of form on the flow of enthusiasm, at the very moment it occurs. Apollo is responsible for imposing logic too: a restraining meter in the flux of thought. When faced with the darting, disordered, furtive intelligence of Hermes, Apollo drew a dividing line; on the one side Hermes could preside over divination by dice and bones, could even have the Thriai, the honey maidens, despite his elder brother’s once having loved them, but the
supreme, the invincible oracle of the word, Apollo kept for himself.
In the thick of the stones, marble, and metal at Delphi, the visitor would think of other ghosts, of the first temples to Apollo, now no more. The first, a hut of laurel branches broken from trees in the valley of Tempe; the second, made of wax and feathers; the third, built in bronze by Hephaestus and Athena. Pindar could still wonder: “Oh Muses, with what patterns did the able hands of Hephaestus and Athena decorate the temple?” We shall never know, but Pindar thought he could recall fragments of an image: “Bronze the walls and bronze too rose the columns; golden above the pediment chanted six Enchantresses.” These words were already sounding obscure by the time Pausanias heard them. At most, he supposed, the Enchantresses might have been an “imitation of Homer’s Sirens.” Yet they held the secret to a long story, the story of the origins of possession.
Iynx was a girl sorceress. She made up love potions. Not for herself, but because she wanted love to make the rounds. One day she offered a drink to Zeus. The god drank it, and the first girl he saw was Io, wandering about in the grounds of Hera’s sanctuary in Argos. Zeus was possessed by love for Io. And so began history on earth, a history of flight, persecution, metamorphosis. The first victim was the sorceress herself. In revenge, Hera turned her into a bird known as the wryneck, because of the way it twists its neck with a sudden jerking movement. When Jason reached Colchis, he knew that if he wanted to get the Golden Fleece he would have to win over the young sorceress Medea. Aphrodite looked down from heaven and decided to help him. A sorceress can only be overcome by a more potent sorcery. So Aphrodite took the wryneck, the “delirious, multicolored bird,” and fixed it with bonds that could not be untied to a little wheel with four spokes. Now the circular motion of the wheel would forever accompany the jerky twisting of the bird’s neck. That small object, that plaything, becomes the
mechanism, the artifice of possession. It imposes an obsessive circular motion on the mind, a motion that uproots it from its inertia and hooks it onto the divine wheel, which turns incessantly like the spheres. Even the thoughts of the gods get caught on that wheel.