As to the origin of tragedy, all reconstructions ultimately come up against this contradiction. On the one hand there is Eratosthenes’ remark: “It was then that the inhabitants of Icarius danced around a goat for the first time.” Here tragedy seems to involve singing and dancing around the goat. But then Aristotle says that early tragedy was the singing and dancing of the goats. An ancient and pointless dispute was to go on for generations around this contradiction, which isn’t actually a contradiction at all. “If one wishes to dress up as a satyr [a goat], one first has to kill a goat and skin it.” Eratosthenes and Aristotle were saying the same thing, except that Aristotle omits the first and decisive part of the process: the slaying of the goat. Thus it is to Eratosthenes that, along with the first extremely accurate estimate of the circumference of the earth, we owe an extremely concise definition of the process from which tragedy developed. There are three phases: Icarius kills the goat; Icarius skins the goat and stretches part of the pelt into a wineskin; Icarius and his friends dance around the goat and stamp on the wineskin while wearing strips of the pelt. Thus the dance around the goat is also the dance of the goats. It is as if a long, tortuous, and obscure process were suddenly reduced before our very eyes to a few shabby elements which are nevertheless capable of releasing an enormous power.
Of all the women who ascended to the heavens, Erigone was the poorest, the one we know least about. They called her Atletis: the wanderer, the roving spirit, the beggar. And yet this woman’s dog, Maera, was to assume an important position in the night sky, a place central to every calamity, every blessing: he was to become Sirius. One day Erigone was woken up by Maera’s whimpering. Her father had disappeared some months ago. His daughter had searched for him far and wide, wandering about speechless. She felt Maera tugging at her tunic. The dog wanted to take her somewhere. He led her to a well beneath a big tree where they had thrown Icarius’s body. Erigone buried him. Then she climbed high into the tree and hanged herself. Maera stayed there to watch over the two bodies and starved himself to death.
Attica was soon in the thrall of an extraordinary epidemic of suicides: as in Wedekind’s Germany, where the schoolchildren killed themselves with the coming of spring, in Athens young girls began to hang themselves for no apparent reason. Apollo’s oracle proposed a remedy: they must introduce a ceremony in honor of the peasant’s daughter to be found hanging from a branch of the big tree above the well. In the middle of the ceremony was a swing. Then dolls and masks were hung on trees, to sway back and forth in the wind.
Meanwhile, Icarius’s murderers had escaped to the island of Ceos. These were the dog days of the year with Sirius ascendant; the island was suffering from a devastating heat wave. Everything had burned up and died. This time Apollo spoke through his son Aristaeus, who was king of the island. Icarius’s murderers must be punished. As soon as they had been killed, a cool northwesterly wind began to blow, the meltemi which makes life possible in Greece and which would reappear every year from then on, along with the dog days.
From a rock, Ariadne watches Phaedra on her swing. Their mother, Pasiphaë, hangs herself. Ariadne hangs herself. Phaedra hangs herself. Erigone hangs herself. Erigone is not a princess, but it is she who ascends to the heavens as the hanged woman. Her celestial home is the constellation of Virgo. Ariadne is nearby, in the sky, but as Dionysus’s bride. With Erigone we come to the first of the hanged women. And we also come back to the swing. Behind the swing is the image of “the golden swing in the sky,” mentioned in the Rig Veda. Every time the sun approaches the solstices, it risks going out of control; the world trembles; its star may just go on along its trajectory, carried away by its momentum, rather than turning back. And it is precisely here, at the solstice, that we have that curve which forms the golden swing in the sky. Having reached the limit of its oscillation, the sun turns back, as does the Athenian girl on her swing, pushed by a satyr. But, for this to happen, people have to die. Some of the victims are guilty, like Icarius’s murderers. But, before them, we must have a perfectly innocent victim: Erigone. The swinging stops in the perpendicular jerk of the hanged woman.
The tree where Erigone’s body was to remain hanging is not just large, it is immense: it covers the whole earth, and its branches stretch away among the constellations. In the sky, Erigone holds an ear of corn in her hand. She has rejected a bunch of those grapes that brought death to her father and herself. Icarius’s last words were “The sweet [Dionysus] is Erigone’s enemy.” That hanged orphan reminds us of the death that is not assimilated back into life, the death that wanders about continually in the air, with the spirits of the dead, the dolls and masks hung from a tree.
Erigone is an Isis flung by the mystical law of inversion to a point exactly opposite that of the celestial queen: in terrestrial terms Erigone represents the total impotence of the poor and vagrant orphan girl. But Isis too had been a beggar in the world when looking for the body of Osiris. In the heavens, Isis and Erigone find themselves together in the same constellation: Virgo. In Sirius they see the dog that helped them: Anubis in the case of Isis, Maera in the case of Erigone. After Osiris’s death, Isis tore out a lock of her hair. Erigone too tore out a lock of her hair after Icarius’s death. Not far from Virgo and from the Dog, we find the locks placed on top of each other in Berenice’s Hair, also known as the Lock, and even Ariadne’s Lock. And Nonnus uses the same word, bótrys, to mean either a lock of hair or a bunch of grapes. Dionysus didn’t let Erigone escape him, even in the heavens. He is there in the gift of mourning.
Dionysus would arrive in Athens for the Anthesteria with the spirits of the dead, then disappear with them. The big sealed jars were opened, the new wine flowed. They carried it in carts pulled by donkeys to Dionysus’s shrine in the Marshes, and there they worshiped the god. It was an enigmatic place: there were no marshes where the small shrine stood, nor had there ever been any. But the gods inhabit a different world from our own, and the marsh from which Dionysus was supposed to emerge belonged to that world. Farmers, slaves, and the laborers of large landowners all gathered together. They danced and waited for the feast. The shrine opened at sundown and would stay open only for that one day of the year. It was an unclean day. The fresh pitch on the doors of the houses reminded people of the spirits roaming about who would eventually be chased off. All the other shrines were closed, their doors tied tight with ropes. Paralysis seized the very heart of the city.
In the evening, a trumpet blast marked the beginning of a drinking contest. “The King drinks, the Queen laughs.” But they drank without talking, without singing, without praying. There were hundreds of them, under many roofs, each with his big pitcher. Yet there was the same silence the herald commanded during sacrifices. Even the children had their own tables, their own pitchers, and sat silent. An invisible guest was among them: Orestes, the impure, who had once sought refuge in Athens. Nobody had dared take him into their homes, but nor had anyone dared send him away. Athens loves the guilty. Sitting alone at a table, a pitcher all to himself, the man who had killed his mother drank in silence. And that had been the first day of this feast, the Choes. Wine and blood ran together, as they had when Icarius was killed by the shepherds. In opening the big jugs, the worshipers had released not only the wine but also the dead, and now they stalked about disguised with masks. Often they were women: Nymphs or others of Dionysus’s creatures. They asked for food and wine, begging as Erigone had. None of them must be left unsatisfied. When it was over, everybody took their jugs and heather crowns back to Dionysus’s shrine like broken toys. They arrived, staggering in the evening torchlight, as the fourteen dames of honor chosen by the king took their secret oaths over the baskets. Then there was another procession, from the shrine to the house of the king-archon, in the agorá, the marketplace. And there, in the king’s very bed, Dionysus would take the man’s place and possess the queen, the Basilinna. This wasn’t a temple but the house of an important public official, and the Basilinna was not one of the god’s priestesses. For one night Dionysus imposed his presence in the bed of an important citizen. He had arrived in Piraeus that very day, a sailor from far away. His ship had been solemnly hauled as far as the city. Now he was demanding a night of passion, surrounded by secrecy. A still damp prow forced its way through the door of a bedroom in the city center.