The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (46 page)

Gifts from the gods are poisoned, stamped with the ill-omened sign of the invisible become palpable. Passing from hand to hand, they ooze poison. Aphrodite’s necklace and Athena’s golden tunic, both given to Harmony on the occasion of her marriage to Cadmus, lead to a slaughter of heroes that will go on for two generations, from the expedition of the Seven against Thebes to the revenge killings of the Epigoni. It was the same with the sacred purple tunic Dionysus fell asleep in, his head resting on Ariadne’s fair breasts. The purple was bright on the sands of Naxos. But one day that fabric, drenched with happiness as it was, would become the banner of desertion, betrayal, murder. Yet the fragrance of Dionysus never left it, and the “sweet desire” to touch and stare at that tunic would never fade. The Charites had woven it for Dionysus; Dionysus had wrapped himself in it with Ariadne. Then he gave it to his son Thoas. Thoas gave it to his daughter Hypsipyle, who gave it to her lover Jason before he abandoned her. And the purple tunic of Dionysus was the gift Jason and Medea chose for Apsyrtus, Medea’s brother, when they decided to kill him.

It all happened without witnesses, on the dark little island in the Danube estuary where the Brygi had raised a temple
to Artemis. There was no other trace of a human presence. Medea waited for her brother on the temple porch. Jason crouched in the darkness. Medea looked away and covered her eyes with a white veil as Jason struck Apsyrtus with the gesture of a butcher dispatching cattle. Apsyrtus fell to his knees like a huge-headed bull. Before dying, he scooped up some black blood in his hands and managed to smear it on his sister’s white veil. Jason went around the corpse, cutting off the hands, feet, and ears. The first fruits. Three times he licked the dead man’s blood and spat it into his mouth. Medea raised a torch, the sign agreed on with her lover’s friends.

Granddaughters of the sun, it was immediately obvious that Ariadne and Medea were related. They both had a sort of golden light spreading outward from the eyes. They were born far apart, in the far south and the far north of the earth. Both helped a foreigner, were carried off by him, by him abandoned. They never met. But they touched each other through a fabric. Each had fingered that purple tunic, woven for a god and still fragrant with his vanished body.

Oistrus, the gadfly who torments the cattle, is the most elusive and at the same time the most omnipresent of the powers that governed the Greeks. Ate, that infatuation that includes its own punishment, is the equivalent figure among the women of destiny, the Fates. But Oistrus is a boy and rarely shows himself. In the sultry mythological heat their seminude bodies inhabited, gods, heroes, and the sons and daughters of gods moved about with moist, bright eyes, until a buzzing approached them from the invisible. A sting pricked them to their very souls, and thus were events unleashed. In the beginning it was difficult to tell erotic and murderous frenzies apart. Both arose from that intermittent buzzing, the incursions of that small, malicious creature. Only once, on the wonderful Canosa wine bowl, now in Munich,
does Oistrus appear in all his majesty. It is a synchronic vision of the last convulsion of the tragedy of Medea. The characters are arranged on three levels. Above, as always, are a few distracted divinities: the Dioscuri are looking at each other, maybe talking quietly. Athena is seated, one arm resting on her shield, the other holding her helmet. Heracles, naked and armed, is watching her. The next level shows Creon’s palace. Creontea is lying across the throne, on her head the poisoned crown, gift of the sorceress Medea, crazed with jealousy: “
coronam ex venenis fecit auream
.” Her brother, Hippotes, is running to snatch the murderous crown from her head, while Creon, her father, clutches his hair in desperation. Other people are running to help too, even an old man with a stick. And they all know there’s nothing they can do. On the lowest level we find Medea, Oriental granddaughter of the Sun. She is wearing the most sumptuous, ornate clothes, which hide everything but her beautiful, staring face and her hands, the right gripping a big sword while with the left she grabs the hair over her son’s forehead from behind. He is on tiptoe, as though dancing, on an altar stone. Another second and the sword will plunge into his naked chest. Jason bursts into the picture from the right, Jason the betrayer, the hero who has been overwhelmed. His body is tense and powerful, more so than Heracles’, an expression of furious impotence on his face. Farther to the right, and motionless, stands another Oriental figure, solemn this time. The painter of the bowl has written around his head: “phantom of Aeetes.”

The ghost of Medea’s father, who had always been against her passion for Jason, thus watches the denouement he had foreseen. Then there are two objects as well, strewn like toys on a dark background: an open box in which Medea had put the poisoned crown; a nuptial basin, knocked over, forgotten. And in the center of it all, firm and erect between Medea and Jason, a young man with long hair and a smooth chest holds a torch in each hand. He is standing on a light-wheeled chariot, driven by two long snakes, which rise in flowing spirals, turning their forked tongues toward Medea.
That young man on the chariot is Oistrus, and it is he who is directing events; he is the prompter, the archon who just this once shows himself in the splendor of his person. But elsewhere, even in the element where he resides, the invisible, Oistrus is the companion of all excesses, all cravings, all the passions with which for centuries the Greeks wove their stories.

One of the most charming enigmas of the ancient world is the life of Nonnus. Almost nothing is known about him with any certainty, except his place of birth: Panopolis, in Egypt. As to the date of that birth, scholars have varied embarrassingly, but it now seems generally accepted that it must have been in the fifth century
A.D.
The enigma, however, has to do with the order in which he wrote his works: Nonnus left us the
Dionysiaca
in forty-eight books (a number equal to the sum of the books in the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
) and a
Paraphrase
of St. John’s Gospel.

This great writer, who has often been disparagingly dubbed “baroque,” but in the same spirit could equally well be described as rococo, encrusted his poetry with voluptuous idylls and cosmological secrets. The
Dionysiaca
are an overflowing summa of the pagan world, a world that should have been on the brink of extinction but that here opens up before our eyes like a meadow of narcissi. What bothers people, though, is the fact that the only other work by Nonnus, his
Paraphrase
of St. John’s Gospel, presupposes a Christian author. Yet there is nothing that would allow us to claim that the
Paraphrase
was written after the
Dionysiaca
. This raises the following questions: did Nonnus celebrate the last, and truly dazzling, lights of the pagan world with his poem on Dionysus, then convert to the new and already dominant faith and write the
Paraphrase
? Or was it the other way around: Nonnus, a Christian, was quite suddenly struck by the pagan vision, as though by lightning, and thus went from the
Paraphrase
to the tidal wave of the
Dionysiaca
? Or could one offer a third hypothesis: that
Nonnus wrote the
Dionysiaca
and the
Paraphrase
at the same time. With one hand he described the adventures of Dionysus while the other evoked the trial of Jesus. His mind was moved by both these divine beings. And perhaps he didn’t even need to ask himself whether he believed in both, because he was writing them.

There are no demonstrable facts to help us solve the enigma. All we have are the texts, the style. And here the rhetorical ploy that most immediately strikes us in all Nonnus’s writing is his redundancy. The
Dionysiaca
are the most sumptuous celebration imaginable of the redundant variant and the rampantly superfluous. But behind Nonnus the poet lurks Nonnus the theologian. This churning variegation, vain as nature itself, in fact alludes to the ultimate truth of the tale he is telling: that it is precisely those endlessly and meaninglessly shifting colors that lie at the heart of the divine. Nor does the vision change when Nonnus abandons the many gods to tell the story of the only son of the one God. The form he chooses this time is not the epic poem broken into a multitude of idylls but the paraphrase, which is to say redundancy reduced to its essence, so that each of the bare phrases of the Gospel is blown up and up as though by the action of an irrepressible breath and a good dose of yeast.

It is in this choice of style that we may glimpse something of Nonnus’s faith: before being either pagan or Christian, it is a faith in redundancy as the way in which the cosmos makes itself manifest. And if we go on to examine the details of the narrative, there is at least one that would lead us to plump for the most improbable of our hypotheses: that Nonnus wrote the
Dionysiaca
and the
Paraphrase
at the same time, or at least without seeing any discrepancy between them. The
Dionysiaca
are dominated by Oistrus. Time and time again we see him at work, and some of the most torrid erotic scenes begin with the buzzing of that gadfly. But now let’s turn to Palestine, according to Nonnus. The Jews accuse Jesus. And where St. John’s Gospel says: “Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan and hast a devil [
óti daimónion
écheis
]?” Nonnus paraphrases: “and now the wandering and vengeful gadfly [
alástoros oîstros
] of the demon Lyssa [Madness] goads you on.” It is a delicate and precise pointer to Nonnus’s consistency: impartial to Dionysus and Christ alike, he constantly finds the same demonic gadfly in both their stories, goading them on to intoxication, frenzy, delirium, illumination.

Fifteen centuries have passed, and the number of readers who have understood Nonnus could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Giovan Battista Marino, who read Nonnus in Eilhard Lubin’s Latin translation (Hanau, 1605), had no doubt about it: Nonnus was the only one who could compete with Homer, the only poet who could empty his work of all heroic sobriety and encourage every possible twirl and caprice while still preserving a quite vast frame all around. This was just what Marino needed for his own
Adonis
: an ancient authority for at last departing from all those liberations of the Holy Sepulcher and other such bold and noble deeds. With Nonnus behind him, the poet could abandon himself to a project that until now had seemed blasphemous: the weaving together in a massive epic of garland upon garland of erotic verse.

Thus Marino frequently pays Nonnus the supreme homage that one writer can pay to another: theft—and the sweetest of thefts at that, the kind that remains a secret, shared in complicity by the two authors, because no one else notices. With a note of defiance Marino wrote to Achillini: “they [other literati] do not ply the sea where I fish and trade, nor will they ever catch me with my prey, unless I reveal it to them myself.”

As early as 1817, in his essay
Nonnos der Dichter
, dedicated to Goethe, the learned young Ouvaroff of St. Petersburg, friend of the Senator, i.e., Joseph de Maistre, could justly complain that: “The flowery field of Greek poetry has been so thoroughly tilled that it would be hard indeed to find a poet who has not been appreciated and studied with
care, not to say love; Nonnus alone pays for the sins of his age; for centuries his poem has been condemned to being a lumber room invaded by dust and corrosion where only the most zealous mythographer might penetrate. It would be hard to name but a few who have read him for the quality of his poetry, and harder still to name any who have been sufficiently bold to declare that Nonnus was truly a poet, in the full sense of the word.” Another hundred and fifty years would have to pass before Giorgio de Santillana, speaking at a conference, would point to Nonnus’s
Dionysiaca
as the “blossoming” of that “Japanese flower” that was for him “the archaic myth.”

Jason would have preferred to live a bourgeois life at home, just as Nietzsche would have preferred to be a professor in Basel, rather than God. “I would be happy enough living in my home country, if Pelias would give his consent. May the gods see fit to free me from my labors,” says Jason to Hypsipyle. And his voice is at once that of the ever hypocritical lover trying to soften the cruelty of his desertion and that of the hero who looks, weary and detached, over the scene where he is obliged to kill, cheat, travel, desert, and finally be killed, with any luck by a rotten timber while sleeping in the shade of his ship. The fable’s happy ending is not an option for the hero. His part was written before he was born; his labors predate him: they are never chosen but come to meet him, like a towering wave.

Jason never managed, not even for the briefest of moments, to go beyond his role as hero. He soon realized this and clammed up in gloomy silence. He worked at his adventures: but that was precisely the point, he worked. Even the women he came across, who usually fell in love with him, were part of that work. He abandoned Hypsipyle because he had to press on with his expedition. He promised Medea he would marry her because he had to get hold of the Golden
Fleece and needed her help. Then he did marry her, because King Alcinous forced him to; the Golden Fleece was their shining nuptial pallet in the cave of Macris. Then he abandoned Medea, because he had to unite his family with that of the reigning house of Thebes. Everything he did was done to achieve something else, and always in obedience to orders from above. There were days when this made the memory of his cruelest deeds easier to bear: he had done them because they were his destiny. He had traveled far and wide, visited the remotest of peoples, yet had always lived like a donkey plodding around the same well.

Right from the start, beautiful as she was, Jason felt a strange repulsion for Medea. She was a woman who knew only two states: either hopeless unhappiness, desertion, lonely misery, helpless rejection; or dazzling, lightning-swift power. It was conceivable that one might go through all kinds of adventures with such a woman (and she could be pretty useful too, more so than many a hero); but could you live with her day in day out? Jason was old now, shunned by everybody. People told his adventures to their children, with the result that he couldn’t find anyone to tell them to himself. He went back to Corinth, where he had witnessed horror upon horror, where he had even reigned as king. There, pulled up onto dry land, lay his ship, the Argo. It was his first, his last, his only true companion. And he couldn’t say it had been a silent companion either, because its main beam had a voice, a sound unlike any other and one Jason would always remember. Once it had frightened him; now it pricked him with nostalgia, like the voice of an old nurse. He looked at this ship, which he had loved more than any woman, and certainly more than Medea, that fake savage, who always seemed to be on the brink of disaster but at the end of the day did nothing but slip from one palace to the next, one kingdom to the next, sowing calamity everywhere she went and always saving herself, along with her chariot and her snakes. The charms of the Argo were rarer and nobler. Jason thought the Argo might grant him a last favor: he would hang himself from the
wooden bowsprit. Then he lapsed back into his thoughtful brooding, his back resting against the keel. A rotten timber fell from the deck, struck him on the head, and killed him.