The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (24 page)
In the first battle at Thermopylae, the Greeks once again managed to hold out, while many of the Celts were swallowed up by the marshes: how many we shall never know. At this Brennus decided to attack the Greek flank to draw forces away from the center. Forty thousand infantry and
a few hundred cavalry stormed into Aetolia. They massacred all the males they could find, including newborn babies. “They raped the dying and the dead.” But less than half of the Gauls who had set off on the expedition returned to the main camp at Thermopylae. Brennus was undeterred: this time he went around the Greeks under cover of fog. Just before they could be completely encircled, the Greeks withdrew toward their hometowns. Brennus didn’t even wait for his own men to regroup before ordering the march on Delphi. Perhaps that was the last time the god of the tripod made his power known. In reply to the terrorized people of Delphi, the oracle told them it would look after itself.
Brennus’s men arrived to find Delphi protected only by the Phocians and a few Aetolians, the rest being busy in their own lands. Also waiting for them, however, was a divine and invisible coalition. Apollo had gone for help to Poseidon and Pan, the earlier divinities of the place, whom he himself had eclipsed. The ground the Gauls advanced across quaked every day, shaken deep below by Poseidon. And, fighting beside the Greeks, their enemies would see the shades of the Hyperborean heroes, Hyperocus and Laodocus, together with the White Virgins. Thus the mythical North of Apollo took on the historical North of biology. Even Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, whom Apollo had killed in his temple in Delphi, as years before in another temple he had killed Achilles, fought among the lightning bolts that consumed the wicker shields of the Gauls.
Delphi’s entire past, a long saga of murders and treachery, an arcane and seething history, rallied around that day to offer an impregnable front of gods, ghosts, and soldiers. And if the day brought horror to the Gauls, that horror only grew when night fell. Pan came down from the Corycian Cave and sowed terror among the barbarian troops, for “they say that terror without reason is the work of Pan.” No sooner had twilight faded than the Gauls heard a drumming of hooves. They split into two ranks and faced each other. “So delirious with panic were they, that each of the
ranks imagined they were facing Greeks, wearing Greek armor and speaking Greek, and this madness brought upon them by the god led to a huge massacre of Gauls.” More of Brennus’s soldiers were slain by one another that night than had died during the battle. Brennus himself was wounded, without hope, and chose to die, drinking wine unmixed with water.
There was a drought that year in Delphi. Followed by famine. The people knew they couldn’t survive with the food they had left, so they decided to go, all of them, with their women and children, to the gates of the king’s palace to beg for food. The king appeared and looked at them. Next to him his servants had a few meager baskets. The king scooped out barley and vegetables and handed them out to the people. He began with the local worthies. As he drew closer to the poorer people, his servants dug deeper and deeper into the baskets, pulling out smaller and smaller portions. Finally the baskets were empty, and there were still many poor people waiting. One of them, an orphan girl, Charila, who was there on her own with no one to look after her, stepped forward to ask the king for food. Grim faced, the king took off a sandal and flung it in Charila’s face. The orphan went back to stand in line with the poor. Then everybody went home, hungry.
Charila left Delphi. Walking across the slopes of the Phaedriades, she found a place that fell away into the dark green of a ravine. Beside a tall tree, Charila undid her virgin’s girdle and tied it in a noose around her neck. Then she hung herself from a branch. In Delphi the famine showed no sign of abating. Epidemics were raging now too, making an easy prey of wasted bodies. The king went to consult the Pythia. “Appease Charila, the virgin suicide” came the response. But the king didn’t know who Charila was. He went down to Delphi and called an assembly of the people. Who was Charila? No one knew. Could she be some mythical figure everybody had forgotten about? Or was this “virgin suicide”
a riddle, hardly a novelty for the oracle? Everybody in Delphi was obsessed by the name Charila until one of the Thyiads, the priestesses of Dionysus, remembered the king’s angry gesture, the thrown sandal, and connected it with the fact that the girl hadn’t been seen since. The priestess knew Charila because she was soon to have become one of them. She would have followed them up Parnassus, in the December frosts, and perhaps one day the people of Delphi would have found her in the thick of the blizzard, her cloak “stiff as a board, so that it broke when you opened it.” But wrapped in that cloak would be the body of a Thyiad, resisting the icy cold with her torrid excitement. The priestess left Delphi with other Thyiads. In an inaccessible place, amid the dark green foliage, she saw Charila’s body, still hanging from a branch, swinging in the wind. The name Thyiads means “the rustling ones.” Some call them the Brides of the Wind. With loving care, they took the girl’s body down from the tree. Then they laid it on the ground and buried it. Back in Delphi, the Thyiads explained how they had found Charila. Now she would have to be appeased, through expiation. But how?
The highest ranking Delphic theologians, the five Hosioi, the college of the Thyiads, the king: all mulled the problem over. They must find the right formula to respond to the Pythia’s command. In the end, they decided to combine a sacrifice with an act of purification. But how could they make a sacrifice in a time of famine? The Delphic theologians knew that a sacrifice was a sign of imbalance in life with respect to the necessary: imbalance in terms of surplus but also in terms of deficiency. In both cases, whether it be dissipation or renunciation, there was a part of life that had to be expelled before one could achieve a balanced distribution, that state, as the Apollonian precept put it, of “nothing too much.” By leaving out the poor when he distributed the food, the king had expelled them from life. Striking Charila, he had made a sacrifice without ceremony. Charila had raised that gesture to consciousness by hanging herself. But still her sacrifice had passed unnoticed. Decimated by
starvation and epidemics, the people of Delphi didn’t register her disappearance, hadn’t realized that Charila was not just another victim of the famine but a sacrifice. They had forgotten her because she was too perfect a victim: a virgin, an orphan, overlooked by everyone, insulted by the king. And victims who are too perfect scare people, because they illuminate an unbearable truth. The Delphic theologians were profound inquirers into the art of dialectics and hypothetical syllogisms, if only because they were faithful to the god “who loves the truth above all things.” The ultimate goal for them was not mindless devotion but knowledge. To expiate a crime didn’t mean to do something that was the opposite of that crime but to repeat the same crime with slight variations in order to immerse oneself in guilt and bring it to consciousness. The crime lay not so much in having done certain things but in having done them without realizing what one was doing. The crime lay in not having realized that Charila had disappeared.
So the people of Delphi organized their ceremony. The citizens came to the king to ask for food, as they had done the day Charila was with them. The king distributed the food, but this time gave a portion to everybody, even the foreigners. Then an effigy of Charila was brought out from the crowd. The king took off his sandal and flung it in the effigy’s face. The head priestess of the Thyiads then took the effigy, tied a rope around its neck, and carried it to where Charila had been found. She hung the effigy from the branches of the tree, letting it swing in the wind. Then the effigy was buried next to Charila’s body. That ceremony marked the end of the famine. From then on the ritual would be repeated every eight years. But, just as the people of Delphi hadn’t realized that Charila was gone until the lone voice of the Pythia reminded them, history would soon forget Charila and the ceremonies that were held for centuries in her name, until another lone voice, that of Plutarch, priest of Delphi, mentioned her again.
By now she had become one of the many “Greek Questions,” one of the hundreds of fragments of the past whose
meaning and origin no one could remember. Patient and erudite, Plutarch answered the question that he himself had put: “Who was Charila in Delphi?” His answer is the only trace of the little orphan’s life that now remains to us.
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INCE OLYMPIA IS THE IMAGE OF HAPPINESS, it could only have appeared in the Golden Age. The men who lived at that time built a temple to Kronos in Olympia. Zeus hadn’t even been born. In fact the first to run races in Olympia were the guardians Rhea gave the baby Zeus to when she wanted to hide him. The five Curetes, Heracles among them, came to Olympia from Crete, and Heracles was the first to crown a winning athlete with a chaplet of wild olive. He had brought the plant from the extreme North, beyond the source of the Danube, brought it back for the sole purpose of providing shade for the winning post in Olympia. The shade and the winning post, that was Olympia forever: the supreme exposure and the most profound withdrawal, the perfect pendulum. But the generations passed, and between the reigns of Oxylus and Iphitus the Olympic games were abandoned, forgotten. “When Iphitus restored the games, people still couldn’t remember how they had been in ancient times; gradually they did remember, and each time they remembered something, they added it.” It is the very image of the Platonic process of learning: nothing is new, remembering is all. What is new is the most ancient thing we have. With admirable candor, Pausanias adds: “This can be demonstrated.” And he tells us when each memory surfaced: “At the eighteenth Olympiad, they remembered the pentathlon and wrestling.”
Climbing the spiral staircase inside the temple took you to the upper galleries, where you could get a closer view of Phidias’s Zeus. To Quintilianus’s mind, this statue had “added something to the religion of men.” Its gold and ivory surfaces were broken only by gems, except on the throne, which also had some ebony. The drapery was strewn with animals and lilies. Zeus wore a crown of olive twigs and in his right hand held a Nike, goddess of victory, with a ribbon and a crown. Beneath each of the throne’s four feet were other small Nikes, like dancing elves. But something else was going on among those feet: winged Sphinxes carried off Theban youths in their claws, and Apollo and Artemis loosed their arrows at Niobe’s children again. And as it grew accustomed to the teeming dark, the eye would make out one new scene after another, sculpted on the cross-struts of the throne. The farther down you looked, the more figures you saw. Twenty-nine in all on the cross-struts: the Amazons, Heracles with his escort, Theseus. A boy is adjusting a ribbon on his forehead: is it Pantarckes, Phidias’s young lover? You can’t go right up to the throne, because of the painted barriers, which again show Theseus and Heracles, and then Peirithous, Ajax, Cassandra, Hippodamia, Sterope, Prometheus, Penthesilea, Achilles, two Hesperides. Other beings sprout from the top of the throne: three Charites and three Hours. Then the eye moves back down to Zeus’s footstool and finds still more figures: Theseus yet again, and again the Amazons and golden lions. As one looks down even farther, at the base that supports the huge Zeus and his parasites, other scenes become apparent: Helios climbs onto his chariot, Hermes advances as Hestia follows, Eros greets Aphrodite as she rises from the waves and Peitho crowns her. Nor has the sculptor forgotten Apollo and Artemis, Athena and Heracles, Amphitryon and Poseidon, and Selene on a horse. A seated giant encrusted with creatures, Zeus was reflected in a floor of shiny black stone where oil flowed in abundance to preserve the ivory.
No other statue was so admired by the Greeks, nor even by Zeus himself, who hurled an approving thunderbolt
down on the black paving when Phidias finished the job and asked the god for a sign. Olympia’s chryselephantine Zeus was destroyed in a palace fire in Byzantium in the fifth century. All that remains are some Elean coins showing the statue, and the words of those who, like Callimachus and Pausanias, saw it and were impressed. Paulus Aemilius claimed that Phidias had given form to Homer’s Zeus.