The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (35 page)

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.