The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (50 page)

Why did Zeus decide to wipe out the heroes? A thousand tribes trod the soil and, “seeing this, Zeus felt pity in the depths of his thoughts.” So says the poet of the
Kypria
. But
why did Zeus, who wasn’t easily stirred to pity, feel concerned for the vast body of the earth, on which, when seen from on high, the race of heroes, however numerous, couldn’t have looked very different from all the other clinging parasites?

The crime of the heroes, perhaps, lay not so much in their treading the earth but in their detaching themselves from it. The heroes were the first to look at the earth before them as an object. And seeing it as an object, they struck out at it. Their model was Apollo, who loosed his arrows at Python’s scales, mottled as the slopes of Delphi were mottled with shrubs. He who strikes the snake strikes the earth on which it slithers and the water that springs from the earth. Now the heroes were imitating Apollo, and Apollo had imitated Zeus. Imitation is the most dangerous of activities for world order, because it tends to break down boundaries. Just as Plato wanted to banish the poets, whom he loved, from the city, Zeus wanted to see the heroes, whom he loved, wiped off the face of the earth. They had to go, before they began to tread that earth with the same heedlessness with which the Olympians had trodden it before them.

But Zeus didn’t just want the heroes dead: “he forced the land of the Greeks and the hapless Phrygians to go to war so that Mother Earth might be lightened of the mass of mortals and so that the strongest of the Greeks might be made famous.” Here Zeus’s plan seems appalling. The extermination of a whole race turns out to be a necessary step in exalting the glory of a single person, Achilles—and this in a world that had still to discover what glory was, in the sense of a power that goes beyond the race. To bestow glory on a hero means to bestow it on all the heroes. It means to evoke glory itself, something unknown to the peoples of the golden, silver, and bronze ages. Glory is a pact with time. Thanks to the death of the heroes, men would win themselves a bond with time. The most arduous of bonds and metaphysically superior to all others. Zeus wanted the death of the heroes to be a new death. What had death meant until now? Being covered once again by the earth. But, with the
heroes, death coincided with the evocation of glory. Glory was something you could breathe now. The men of the iron age would not be composed in body and mind as the heroes had been, but they moved in an air that was drenched with glory, as their predecessors had lived among the “mist-clad”
daímones
, the thirty thousand invisible “guardians of men” into whom the beings of the golden age had been transformed.

How did the heroes explain this plan of Zeus that condemned them to extinction? They didn’t explain it, they submitted to it. But there were two people living among them who dared to posit the motives behind that plan: Helen and Alcinous. Just a few words, almost the same in each case. Speaking to Hector and having twice referred to herself as a “slut,” Helen concludes: “Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us so that in the future we might be sung of by the bards.” Alcinous, king of an intermediate realm, of a race of ferrymen who go back and forth more through time than on the water, catches Odysseus trying to hide his tears on hearing the story of the sack of Troy and says: “This is the work of the gods: they brought about the ruin of men so that others might have song in the future.” Alcinous, like his people, loves parties, seafaring, and song. He loves “frequent changes of clothes, warm baths and beds.” Nothing else. And his near-perfect, marginal world is at a good safe distance from all the others. Helen is the opposite: the center of the exterminating storm that swirls around her body. But does her body exist in the same way other bodies do? And what is going on in Helen’s mind, that mind that nobody pays any attention to?

The immense scandal of Homer lies first and foremost in his allowing Helen to survive the fall of Troy. Telemachus reached Sparta to find Helen sitting beside Menelaus on an inlaid seat, her feet resting on a stool. She had a golden spindle in her hand and looked like Artemis. Many years before, another guest—Paris—had found her in the same pose. The
only difference seemed to be this: that now there were stories to tell, stories that demanded to be told. Even before Helen came into the room, Menelaus had begun to talk to the two strangers about the long and tortuous return from Troy.

Helen had barely sat down, and already she was looking straight at Telemachus. She recognized him immediately: he must be Odysseus’s son. A few moments later they were all crying, Helen included. They had been seized, all at the same time, by “the desire to sob.” Each of them had his or her dead to mourn. And all those dead belonged to the same story, which had begun in that very room, when another stranger and guest had been shown hospitality and Paris had looked at Helen. The first to dry his tears was the young Peisistratus, offspring of the happy stock of Nestor, who was traveling with Telemachus. He hadn’t been at Troy, but he had lost a beloved brother there. With the mollifying good nature typical of his family, he suggested that they postpone their tears till the following morning. Menelaus approved. And they went back to enjoying their party.

But let us leave the men for a moment and look into the mind of Helen, the most inscrutable of them all. A thought crossed that mind. She picked up a bowl for mixing wine and poured in a drug. It was opium, dried lymph of poppies grown from an earth rich with enchantments. Queen Polydamna had given it to her when she was in Egypt. Helen knew that the drug would prevent a person from crying for a whole day, even if “he were to see a brother or beloved son put to the sword before his very eyes.” She waited for the men to drink the drugged wine. Then she invited them to abandon themselves to “the pleasure of talk” (
mýthois térpesthe
). And she decided to start the ball rolling herself. With something “suitable,” she added. Odysseus, said Helen, loved to dress up as a beggar. And on one occasion he tried the trick on the streets of Troy. No one recognized him, except Helen. They had an argument because Odysseus didn’t trust her. Then he decided to follow her. Helen washed Odysseus, dressed him again, and assured him he
could count on her loyalty as a traitor. Upon which, Odysseus drew out a long blade and set about massacring Trojans. Later, when she heard the women mourning over the bleeding bodies, Helen exulted. Aphrodite’s
átē
, that infatuation which had dominated her life, seemed to have subsided. “Her heart turned and longed for home.”

That night, Odysseus managed to get hold of the Palladium in the temple of Athena. Helen knew, being herself a phantom, an idol, that the life of a city resides in an image and that, when the image deserts it, the city is lost. Helen had told the story to celebrate one of the many deeds of their young guest’s father. Menelaus gave her a happy, misty look. He approved of the story, he told her, and called her “dear,” as if they were having an evening together after a day’s hunting and everybody were waiting his or her turn to recount some highlight of the day’s doings.

But if it was stories about Odysseus they wanted, there were plenty of others. For example, Menelaus said, what the hero did the night Troy was sacked. When the Phaeacian court bard, Demodocus, evoked that night in verse, Odysseus hadn’t been able to hold back his tears. And for Demodocus it was mere literature and recent history. But now Menelaus wanted to tell the story of that night, a story both he and Helen had been personally involved in. He told it so as to recall, before the hero’s son, the great deeds of a lost friend.

The heroes were all crouched down in the smooth belly of the horse. Throughout the day, in the stale dark, with only a breath of air filtering down from an opening in the beast’s mouth, they had heard a constant din of voices. The horse had been drawn right up to the walls of Troy, like a big toy on wheels. Then, heaving away, they had pulled it as far as the Acropolis. And meanwhile the argument went on and on. Some were for disemboweling it, some for burning it, some for guarding it as a sacred statue. Seen from the outside, the horse inspired feelings of “terror and beauty.” Its mane was golden, its eyes flamed with beryl and amethyst. The Trojans wreathed the animal’s neck with garlands
of fresh flowers. On the ground before it they had laid a carpet of roses. Children screamed and shouted round about.

All of a sudden Cassandra’s shrill voice rose above the others. She spoke of Athena, scourge of cities, and said the goddess had prepared this trick. She saw blood. She told the truth. But then they heard old Priam’s voice, and he spoke of dances, of honey, of freedom. And he told his daughter to go away. Night fell, and hidden in the horse the warriors no longer heard the sound of voices arguing. Instead there was the hubbub of a party. Then the hubbub faded. The party was coming to an end. Shuffling footsteps, voices growing fainter. It was then that Helen arrived, escorted by Deiphobus, her new husband.

She stopped in front of the horse. Complete silence now. She went around it, slowly. Then, with her hand, she began to touch that belly packed with warriors. And all of a sudden, as Helen’s hand slid over the wooden planks, knocking softly as though at a lover’s door, they heard her voice. She was calling names. She called Menelaus, Diomedes, Odysseus, Anticlus. For each name she found a different voice. In the darkness, careful not to bang their shin guards together, some of the heroes began to get excited. There was a chorus of suffocated groans. It was the least appropriate time and place for nostalgia and desire. Yet Menelaus and Diomedes were on the point of getting to their feet. Anticlus couldn’t help himself and opened his mouth to answer Helen’s voice. But Odysseus stopped his mouth and tightened strong hands around his neck. Helen’s voice went on calling names as Anticlus slowly expired, strangled. There was a last convulsion; then, moving carefully, the other heroes laid him down on the wood and stretched a blanket over him.

Menelaus fell silent, still absorbed in the pleasure of telling the story. Telemachus looked at him and said a few sober words. Yes, it was true, his father, Odysseus, had “a heart of iron.” Yet he too had come to a wretched end, heaven knew where. It was time to go to bed, he said. They
deserved “to enjoy their sweet sleep.” Helen had already told the servants to prepare beds for the guests in the porch. Then she went off in her long tunic toward the rooms deep inside the house where Menelaus would lie down beside her.

Menelaus didn’t tell Telemachus how that night in Troy had ended. When Helen had gone, the Acropolis was shrouded in a silence unbroken even by a dog’s bark. The heroes got ready to swarm to the ground, “like bees from the trunk of an oak.” Then the voiceless slaughter began in the Trojan bedrooms. Menelaus and Odysseus didn’t even watch their backs. They rushed into Deiphobus’s house. They found him on his bed, still warm from Helen’s embrace. Menelaus was determined to perform a systematic mutilation on the man. He hacked off his hands and ears, split his temples, and cut his head in two along the line of the nose. Then he went deeper into the huge house. And at the back of the last room he found Helen. He advanced without a word, his sword, bespattered with blood and gore, pointing at her belly. Helen looked at him and bared her breast. Menelaus let his sword drop.

According to Stesichorus and Euripides, Helen was
a
phantom. According to Homer, Helen was
the
phantom,
eídōlon
. The Homeric vision is by far the more thorny and frightening. Dealing with a phantom while knowing that there is a reality to counter it doesn’t involve the same kind of tension as dealing with a phantom and knowing that it is also a reality. Helen is as gold to other merchandise: gold too is merchandise, but of such a kind that it can represent all the others. The phantom, or image, is precisely that act of representation. While Troy burned, Menelaus found himself confronted by Helen’s bared breast. He could have smothered it in blood, repeated what he had just done to Deiphobus. But how can one kill gold? Helen would have gone on breathing in some niche of her murderer’s mind, and likewise
in the minds of all the other warriors who had wanted to respond to the lure of her voice when they were shut up in the horse’s belly. Helen was a reflection on water. How can you kill a reflection without killing the water? And how can you kill water? Menelaus didn’t actually think any of this as he let his sword drop, but it was this that made him drop it.

Meanwhile, he was thinking of something completely different. He was thinking of Agamemnon. He was afraid his brother would take him for a coward or a weakling once again. So he decided to get smart, the way the others had. He gripped Helen’s wrist and dragged her along as though to the slaughter. And at last Agamemnon turned up. Menelaus had to pretend to have his brother convince him not to kill Helen. Agamemnon unwittingly played the part he was supposed to. Words that had once been Priam’s sprang to his lips: “Helen isn’t the cause of this.” Menelaus wasted no time agreeing. Now there was one last problem: the army of warriors. Once again, Menelaus decided he would have to present himself in the role of the avenging husband. He approached the Achaean camp holding Helen tightly by the wrist, his face grim. The crowd parted before them. They all had stones in their hands. They had chosen them carefully to stone Helen. Menelaus pressed on, dragging his faithless wife, and, as the warriors formed a semicircle around them, he heard the dull thud of stones falling thick and fast to the ground, already forgotten.

In the deep calm of the opium, Menelaus managed to recall, without so much as a quiver of resentment, how Helen had tried to the very last to bring ruin upon the Greeks. It was thanks to her that Anticlus had been strangled. But if Odysseus hadn’t strangled him, if one of the heroes had answered her alluring voice, they might all have been burned alive in the belly of the horse. Or the Trojans would have thought up some other horrible death for them. Yet Menelaus recounted the episode, in front of Helen and their guests, as
though it were an image of glory, to be savored with pleasure.