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Heracles is contaminated by the sacred, it persecutes him his whole life. It drives him mad, and in the end it destroys him. Theseus, in contrast, seems to wash the blood from his hands after every adventure, to shrug off the violence and the many deaths. Heracles becomes a pretext for the gods to play out a long game. Theseus dares to use the gods to play his own game. But it would be churlish to see him as someone who knows how to turn everything to his advantage. The hero who founded Athens was also to have the privilege of being the first to be expelled from it. “After Theseus had given the Athenians democracy, a certain Lycus denounced him and managed to have the hero ostracized.” In the end, even Theseus will be killed. He dies in exile, dashed to pieces at the foot of a cliff. Somebody pushed him from behind. “At the time, nobody paid any attention to the fact that Theseus was dead.” But his game is still played in the city Theseus himself named: Athens, the most sacred, the most blasphemous of cities.
Heracles deserves the compassion of the moderns, because he was one of the last victims of the Zodiac. And the moderns no longer really appreciate what that means. They are no longer in the habit of calculating a man’s deeds in terms of the measures of the heavens. As a hero, Heracles is a beast of burden: he has to plow the immense plain of the heavens in every one of its twelve segments. As a result he never manages to achieve that detachment from self which the modern demands and which Theseus achieves so gloriously. Such detachment entails the hero’s mingling and alternating the deeds he is obliged to do with his own personal acts of caprice and defiance. But for Heracles everything is obligation, right up to the atrocious burns that kill him. A pitiful seriousness weighs him down. All too rarely does he laugh. And sometimes he finds himself having to suffer the laughter of others.
Heracles’ buttocks were like an old leather shield, blackened by long exposure to the sun and by the fiery breaths of Cacus and of the Cretan bull. When Heracles caught the mocking Cercopes, who came in the form of two annoying gadflies to rob him and deprive him of his sleep, first he forced them to return to their human form, then he hung them both by their feet on a beam and lifted them on his shoulders, balancing out the weight on both sides. The heads of the two tiny rascals thus dangled at the level of the hero’s powerful buttocks, left uncovered by his lionskin. At which the Cercops remembered the prophetic words of their mother: “My little White Asses, beware of the moment when you meet the great Black Ass.” Hanging upside down, the two thieves shook with laughter, while the hero’s buttocks continued to rise and fall as he marched steadily on. And, as he walked, the hero heard their muffled sneering behind his back. He was sad. Even the people he thrashed didn’t take him seriously. He let the two rascals down and started laughing with them. Others say he killed them.
A mythical event can mean a change of landscape. The Rock of Argos once looked out over a countryside famous for its droughts. And from dry dust one went straight into the mud of the Lerna marshes. So Argos lacked a clean supply of fresh running water. Before it could have one, the bloody affair of the Danaids must take place. A fifty-oared galley arrived from Egypt. With a girl at every oar. They were the fifty daughters of Danaus, the Danaids, with their father. Driven by “an innate repulsion for men,” they were fleeing forced marriages with their fifty cousins, sons of Aegyptus. And, having fled, they had chosen to return to their family’s ancestral home, the place where the wanderings of their forebear Io had begun. They spoke a foreign language, and their skin had been darkened by the African sun. The old king of Argos, Pelasgus, immediately saw their arrival as an unmanageable invasion. Coming toward him were fifty women with extravagant, barbaric clothes and nomadic desert eyes, but from the left arm hole of each Danaid protruded an olive branch wound in white wool. It was the only recognizably Greek sign they carried, but it was a clear one: they were asking for asylum. And they added that, if they were not granted it, they would hang themselves. They were more specific: they would hang themselves from the statues in the temple, using the girdles from their tunics. Fifty women hanging themselves from fifty statues! What a pestilence, dense and poisonous as the muggy airs of Egypt! Better risk a war than that.
Pelasgus gave asylum to this crowd of beautiful barbarians and took them into the town. He was a shade embarrassed: he didn’t know whether to have them sleep in the houses of his subjects or apart, in buildings placed at their disposition. He sensed he was risking his kingdom for these unknown foreigners, who had arrived only the day before. But he didn’t dare send them away. Every time he wavered, he would see fifty statues with fifty women hanging from them. From the Rock of Argos, the ships of the defiant cousins were spotted on the horizon, coming to get their women. They were Egyptians and respected only Egyptian gods; there wasn’t a shrine in the whole of Greece could stop them. Pelasgus had always hoped some sort of compromise might be reached. What if the piratical abduction were dressed up as a series of peaceful marriages? Fifty couples reunited in a huge party? In the end the Danaids gave in. But each went to her marriage bed concealing a knife. And forty-nine times that night a woman’s hand plunged its blade into the body of the man who lay beside her. Only the eldest sister broke the pact: Hypermestra. She let her husband, Lynceus, escape. Throughout the bloody night, torch signals were exchanged among the hills. Hypermestra’s sisters cut off forty-nine heads and went to toss them into the Lerna marshes. Then they heaped up the headless corpses before the gates of Argos.
What happened to the Danaids after that is far from clear. We do know that they were purified by Athena and Hermes. And we know that around the scorching Argos they discovered springs of the purest water. This, together with the massacre of their husbands, was their greatest achievement. Then their father decided they should marry again. Not an easy matter. Nobody came forward with any nuptial gifts. So the deal was turned on its head: the Danaids would be given away to the winners of a series of races. Only Hypermestra, who had run off with Lynceus, and Amymone, abducted by the god Poseidon, were missing. Lined up like a chorus in a play, Danaus gave away the forty-eight remaining girls at the finish line. Whoever touched the tunic of a Danaid first could have her as his bride. “The fastest matchmaking ever,” Pindar remarked. By noon it was all over.
And they’re lined up again the next time we see them, with all their enchanting names — Autonoe, Automate, Cleopatra, Pirene, Iphimedusa, Asteria, Gorge, Hyperippe, Clite — but this time in the underworld, not far from where Sisyphus is pushing his rock. Each is holding a jar. They are taking turns pouring water into a big, leaky pitcher. The water flows out and runs away. For many commentators this became an image of the unhappiness related to something that can never be achieved. But Bachofen sees the forty-eight girls differently. He doesn’t place them in the underworld but in a primordial landscape of reeds and marshes, where the Nile splits up into its delta and sinks into the thirsty soil. The Danaids had come from Africa to the driest place in the Peloponnese, bringing with them the gift of water. Their ancestor Io also liked to appear with a reed in her hand, a creature of the marshes. As Bachofen saw it, that constant pouring of water into a bottomless container had nothing futile or despairing about it. On the contrary, it was almost an image of happiness. He recalled another mythical girclass="underline" Iphimedeia. She had fallen in love with Poseidon, as had Io with Zeus. So she would often walk along the beach, go down into the sea, raise the water from the waves and pour it over her breasts. A gesture of love. Then one day Poseidon appeared, wrapped himself around her, and generated two children. Iphimedeia’s gesture has something blissful and timeless about it; it is the motion of feminine substance toward the other, toward any other. A motion that cannot be satisfied, satisfied only in its unfailing repetition.