The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

I have long observed that the reason why every effort to adapt The Iliad to film fails so spectacularly is because the gods—so integral to Homer’s epic—are somehow excluded from the big screen. It was not entirely his fault that beefcake Brad Pitt looked so ridiculous trying to channel Achilles in Oliver Stone’s 2004 dreadful attempt: Homer’s Achilles is himself half-divine, spawn of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal Peleus, and it is the intervention of the Olympian gods to palliate the rage of Achilles when he is wronged by Agamemnon that is the essential theme of The Iliad. Absent the gods, Achilles lacks all authenticity and the plot makes no sense.
In his unique and spectacular The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, show more Roberto Calasso reminds us that ancient Greek civilization also made no sense without its gods, which were as integral to the lives of the Hellenes as food, and sleep, and sex. For the Greeks—to borrow a line from an old Jethro Tull lyric—their gods were “not the kind that you wind up on Sundays.” In a remarkable achievement, Calasso has written his very own epic to rival those of the ancients, and in the process masterfully succeeds in restoring the gods to their essential role in the lives of the Greeks, a constant that ran through the Bronze Age and the Dark Age that followed, and all through the Archaic, the Classical, the Hellenistic and the Roman eras—until Christianity first crippled then crushed them forever. The Greeks of Homer asserted that the gods could never die, but then they never anticipated Augustine . . .
It is sometimes difficult for the modern mind (of the theist or the atheist) to wrap itself around the gods of the ancient Greeks. The violent and vengeful Yahweh of the Torah mellowed into a much nicer deity once appropriated by Christianity, but both versions came bundled with a certain set of laws and morality. The Hellenic gods were very different, much more akin to the mortals who worshiped them, warts and all, and rather than paragons of virtue they often showcased the worst traits of humanity. Cadmus and Harmony opens with the abduction of Europa by Zeus, disguised as a bull. On another occasion, Zeus rapes Leda, this time in the guise of a swan. The gods do as they please. Zeus, especially, takes his sexual pleasure at will—of both girls and boys—while his jealous Olympian wife Hera seethes at a distance. The mortals always get the worst of it, even when they stumble innocently, as when the hunter Actaeon happens upon the naked Artemis, bathing in a spring: in punishment the hapless Actaeon is turned into a stag whose fate is to be torn apart by his own dogs. The Greek gods are not to emulate, but rather to avoid whenever possible, for it is within their orbit that mere humans are to be tossed about on a rocky universe of pain and suffering. Absent the free-will of Judeo-Christianity, the Greek mortals have almost no responsibility for their own behavior; Homer tells us that all of the bloodshed on the plain of Ilium was simply due to fate and to the will of the gods. Men and gods are here inextricably entwined with one another, but that is dangerous business. Thus, the title of Calasso’s work becomes his thesis:

After that remote time when gods and men had been on familiar terms, to invite the gods to one’s house became the most dangerous thing one could do, a source of wrongs and curses, a sign of the now irretrievable malaise in relations between heaven and earth. At the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Aphrodite gives the bride a necklace which, passing from hand to hand, will generate one disaster after another right up to the massacre of the Epigoni beneath the walls of Thebes and beyond. [p387]
I came to Calasso with what I thought was a pretty strong background in ancient Greek literature and history. I have read The Iliad three times, in three different translations, and The Odyssey once; I have also read much of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. On the temporal side, I have read Herodotus, Thucydides, Diodorus and a good deal more, not to mention another dozen modern books about the ancients. But The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony humbled me almost from the first. It seems as if Calasso has read everything ever written by the ancient Greeks or about the ancient Greeks, especially of their gods, myths and epics. Not only read, though, but studied, analyzed, and memorized every detail. To praise the extent of his command of the subject as encyclopedic still seems to fall short somehow. While the twelve Olympians get most of the press in popular culture, there were many hundreds—perhaps thousands—of lesser deities in the Greek pantheon, and while Calasso doesn’t reference every single one, I have little doubt that if put to the test he could name them all. As much as I enjoyed the topic and the prose, my repeated reaction as I turned the pages was that I am not worthy!
One of the benefits of having a fine personal library, as I do, is that I can usually put my fingers on a powerful work of reference which—even in the age of Google—can still offer a fond comfort. I kept my hardcover copy of The Concise Dictionary of Classical Mythology, by Pierre Grimal, on my nightstand alongside Cadmus and Harmony for the duration. But after a while, I stopped looking up everything unfamiliar or forgotten, and instead just allowed myself to indulge in Calasso’s wonderful prose, which—like Faulkner, for instance—is a joy to get lost within even if you do not always know exactly what he is talking about. It is impossible to describe except by excerpt, as in this one that underscores the centrality of Zeus to all things:

Night was the wet nurse of the gods; her very substance was ambrosia. She advised Zeus to swallow up Phanes, the Protogonos, firstborn of the sovereigns of the world, and then to swallow the other gods and goddesses born from him, and the universe too. Thus gods, goddesses, earth and starry splendor, Ocean, rivers, and the deep cavern of the underworld all wound up in Zeus’s sacred belly, which now contained everything that had been and ever would be. Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titans’ children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. [p199]

There’s almost four hundred pages of stylized prose like that, evidence of a splendid work of genius that Calasso has crafted in a singular brand of literature that defies genre, and ultimately leaves the reader dizzied and in awe. It would be fair to say that The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is hardly suitable for every audience, but now that I have read it, I would strongly recommend it to those, like myself, who have been bitten by that bug that begets an irrepressible passion for the ancient Greeks, who themselves—if hardly the fathers of our own civilization—were without doubt our hoary great-grandfathers. There is, of course, a calculated risk in getting caught up in great literature, just as there is in letting yourself get tangled up with the gods. But for that I will let Calasso have the last word here, plucked from a paragraph towards the end of this magnificent work:

What conclusions can we draw? To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories. And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations were in fact contrived by the gods themselves, because the gods get bored with men who have no stories. [p387]

My review of: “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,” by Roberto Calasso https://regarp.com/2017/12/17/review-of-the-marriage-of-cadmus-and-harmony-by-ro... show less

Mr. Calasso has created a wonderful, (in both senses of the word!) meditation on the religious structure pf the Ancient World. One must recognize that only at the time of the Roman Emperor Julian the apostate (361 - 63 CE) was there an attempt to create a consistent organized, picture of the Pagan Gods and their exploits and duties, trying to rival the tidy picture of the Christian gospels and Acts. Pausanias' travelogue has shown us that the Pagan world's religion was a confused picture, where various temples created their own versions of Genesis and Exodus, and Joshua, mixing and matching names and attributes of their Gods but seldom trying to co-ordinate the narrative to be consistent. Julian did not remain in office long enough to show more complete his attempt. Thus, to this day, the Pagan religion remains a mass of material and it's expression is primarily found in the Works of the Athenian Tragedians, the epic
and lyric poets of the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, and Homer. There's no plan! Some Gods are described as children of gods who, elsewhere are described as the fathers of the same Gods. Into what is often an Escher-like set of Genealogies, a conflicting set of actions, and confused power relationships , Robert Colasso plunges, and manges, very cleverly, to produce a set of meditations on this canon. His scholarship is deep, and in my mind at least, he manages to create a set of explanations and interactions that may have occurred in the minds of a very clever and well read mythographer of the later Roman Empire. Do not look for a connected narrative here, but the modern reader will come away with a fuller appreciation of what the classical mindset could contain. This is not a book for a single reading, but a keeper and consultation fountain. Bravo! show less

A "thoughtful romp" through classical mythology: serpentine and cyclical, symmetrical and ornate, equal parts pornographic and gruesome. It is very easy to get lost in this book and then resurface, cresting on a particularly beautiful passage and unsure of quite where you've landed. More than that, the chapters on Pelops, the Oracle at Delphi and others read like some freak Greek blockbuster.

"What are the mysteries? 'The saying of many ridiculous things and many serious things' is the definition Aristophanes offers, and no one has ever bettered it.'"

On "the Greek thing":

"'With a god, you are always crying and laughing,' we read in Sophocles' Ajax. Life as mere vegetative protraction, glazed eyes looking out on the world, the certainty show more of being oneself without knowing what one is: such a life has no need of a god. It is the realm of the spontaneous atheism of the homme naturel.

But when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. He no longer has the calm clarity of a perception he had in his mediocre state of existence. Instead, that clarity has migrated into his divine companion. A sharp profile against the sky, the god is resplendent, while the person who evoked him is left confused and overwhelmed." show less

I enjoyed this. Calasso has a number of interesting thoughts about various myths, drawing parallels between different characters and gods - Apollo and Dionysos, for instance - that had not occurred to me before.

However, if you are not familiar with Greek Mythology this book is not for you. It is written in a meandering, sometimes poetic style, which often references more than explains.

Calasso é muito contundente em suas declarações, como quando diz que só havia duas formas de relação com os deuses: o convívio e o estupro.
Gosto muito de como ele parece colocar uma ordem nos mitos, não parecem cem histórias separadas, como a gente normalmente aprende, mas algo coeso.

A re-read after about 15 years. I haven't read a book so slowly in a long time and it felt like a very indulgent exercise.

I'd recommend it to anyone with a taste for Ovid, Homer or Plato. It's a retelling of the myths with a distinctly labyrinthine feel and theme after theme of betrayal, repetition, metamorphosis, sacrifice and innocence amongst others. Crowns and garlands, statues and monstors abound in the fanciful parts alongside some ripping apart of Plato and a knowing take on the Spartans. My only complaint is a reference to 'one foul swoop' but whether this is a slip on the part of the otherwise brilliant author or the otherwise brilliant translator, I don't know.

There is a cheekiness in the writing too, sometimes pulling the show more reader into the joke sometimes putting the reader in his/her place, so you feel almost at sea, which also features heavily in the book, starting with Europa being carried off by the bull, Zeus.

Back on the shelf it goes now, with lots of corners of pages turned over for dipping into whenever and wherever. show less

This is the second time I have read this wonderful book. It just gets better. Elegantly written, it takes you on a deceptively casual meander through (mostly) Greek myth, literature and thought. Calasso creates a kind of mythic history and polity. He takes a myth at face value, moves through its variants and parallels - how, say Zeus has to have Necessity in order to establish his own order but in doing so creates the ending of his own order. He traces the image, figure, idea of the abandoned woman through the myths, drawing out parallels and differences. It is like some ever more intricate silk weaving - there is always another strand leading off. Fascinating.

And it is also a discursion on the literature which uses or, more commonly, show more develops these myths and creates new ones. So there are perceptive insights on Homer or the dramatists and even Nonnus whom otherwise one would avoid as a writer is enthusiastically presented. show less