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

The books about Mythology by Hamilton and Bulfinch are like those froofy drinks you get at the bar. You know: the ones that taste like candy or juice, and have a little umbrella or other bauble in them. At least, that's what they are when compared to Calasso. His book on mythology; that's like a shot of whiskey, neat.

While Hamilton and Bulfinch are accessible, and goes down smooth, Calasso's writing is hard to swallow, but hits you like a freight train. In his book, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, he takes you, the reader, on an epic journey across the whole of Greek Mythology, from the creation of creation to the early vestiges of paganism that shot off from it.

This book is a must have for any student of Greco-Roman Mythology, as show more Calasso has done most of the hard work for you, pouring through myth after myth and refining the results for you to consume in more readily digestible chunks (though, not quite as digestible as those in Hamilton or Bulfinch).

The writing is very dry at times, but that does not mean it is not worth reading. In fact, the dry prose gives more life to these ancient tales of gods and heroes. It gives them an air of realism, written as if they actually roamed the earth.

If you seek one volume to summarize an ancient religion, I would highly recommend it be this one. You may need to get volumes written by other authors to better understand what you read there, but it is definitely an indispensable resource for your mythological studies. 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

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso.

I read this book on the recommendation of a friend commenting on my blog. First published in English in 1993 it’s clearly something I should have picked up before. Or should I? Initially I felt, by turns, beguiled, exploited, delighted and even insulted. It seemed to me, before I was very far in, to be moving between the profound and the whimsical across the space of a single page. I was not sure whether I regarded it as an insightful interpretation of Greek mythology or a comic-book vision of the gods. I also felt that I should actually be reading Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, not just because it is usually better to read things in their original language but because it felt like a show more very Italian text even via the American English into which it has been translated. I was reminded of the style of Ripellino in his Praga Magica. Perhaps ‘style’ is the best way to approach a description of the book. Its originality of presentation of the gods owes everything to its style. The way things are said is as significant as what is said. Once I had accommodated myself to that I began to enjoy it.

And there is much to enjoy. There was a time when Cadmus and Harmony could get married at Thebes and the gods would come to the wedding. But since then they have withdrawn, to Olympus and further off. The Golden Age and its dissolution through Silver to Iron and Bronze is chronicled here with as much élan as could be wished for. But those stretches of apparent frivolity, crystallize into some cameos which are worth reading the book for in themselves:

"Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together, but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies. Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will leave their looms and dash off after him into the mountains. Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant."

This is brilliant stuff and brings the gods alive in a way that other works rarely do. If I consider how else readers of English might gain an understanding of these gods, I suppose the comprehensive text that would be referred to is Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. Graves is himself often whimsical and irreverent, but compared to Calasso his is a mere reference book, and one than can itself deceive by appearing to be so definitive when he is, of course, as liable to be arbitrary in his interpretations and definitions as is Calasso. But with the Italian it is all on the surface, part of appearance, as he himself defines one aspect of the gods. Besides, this is a book to be read through; Graves’ two volumes sit on the reference shelf to be consulted rather than followed as narrative.

I must, finally, comment on the presentation of the relationship between Odysseus and Athena. I found it epiphanic. I’ll resist the temptation to quote from it as it’s the sort of thing best discovered rather than isolated from its context. And here I have to concede that the apparently arbitrary way that Calasso throws in brief paragraphs of information between longer stretches of narrative and illustration, creating an apparently disjointed structure, as if wondering where this bit or that bit can best be fitted in, is not so whimsical after all. He has created a form that is disconcertingly effective, encompassing the many contradictions which can thwart the task of description and casting light, sometimes directly but often elliptically on his subjects. "In the beginning was the word" says the christian text. In Calasso's view, for the gods, it was more like the end. Except that his words attempt to reclaim them as the only way to lead an interesting life show less

One of those books that I raved about when I read it. I urged everyone I knew to read it.

As an examination of the well-spring of western moral and religious thought, this is superb. All the Greek myths are dissected with great erudition, and their contribution to western thought simply and clearly examined without losing the enthusiasm for the myths themselves. It is not a dry, intellectual book, though it is not an lazy read. You will be challenged by it, but the rewards are immense.

We can lose track of what underpins our culture and our sensibilities and it illuminates our experience of life, especially the creative forms, to be reminded as sharply as Calasso does here.