The Greeks welcomed the gift of water, but rejected the Danaids. Lérnē kakôn, “Lerna, place of evil,” became a proverbial saying recalling another: L
mnia kaká, which evoked the crime of the women of Lemnos. The two massacres had much in common. On both occasions the murderers were Amazons. On both occasions all the men but one got their throats cut. On Lemnos, Hypsipyle took pity on her father, Thoas. In Argos, Hypermestra took pity on her husband, Lynceus. “Of all crimes, that of the women of Lemnos was the worst,” says Aeschylus. It was the utmost iniquity. With time, from the forty-nine putrefied heads of the sons of Aegyptus, a countless-headed hydra was born. It would take Heracles, scourge of the Amazons and descendant of Hypermestra, the only Danaid who broke the pact, to kill that monster.
Aeschylus wrote two trilogies that take absolution as their theme: the Oresteia and the Danaides. The first has come down to us complete; of the second we have only the first tragedy, the Supplices, and a few fragments. In the first trilogy, Athena absolves Orestes of a crime he has indeed committed, matricide. In the second, Aphrodite absolves Hypermestra of the charge of not having committed a crime, not having killed her husband. It was upon these two absolutions that classical Athens was founded.
The Oresteia has survived the centuries intact, and its story is common knowledge; the Danaides has been forgotten, and few think of the fifty sisters as an exemplary subject for tragedy. But one may assume that to Aeschylus’s mind the two absolutions were mirror images of each other and the two trilogies had the same weight, the one counterbalancing the other. One absolved a man, the other a woman. Everybody feels that Orestes’ guilt is the more obvious, Hypermestra’s the more paradoxicaclass="underline" how can one consider it a crime to back out of a premeditated and traitorous murder? But Aeschylus has weighed his crimes well. Hypermestra’s real crime is her betrayal of her sisters. She is the African Amazon breaking away from her tribe. And this is the kind of crime that Athens understands, makes its own, just as it will make Antiope, queen of the Amazons, its own once she has become Theseus’s bride. It is a mysteriously fecund crime. Antiope will give birth to Hippolytus, the handsome Orphic, dressed in white linen, who flees the girls; one of Hypermestra’s descendants will be Heracles, enemy of the Amazons. The Amazon graft is a precious one, a delicate one, producing useful, antidotal fruits. Just as Athena defends Orestes, so does Aphrodite Hypermestra, and with the same high eloquence: “The pure sky loves to violate the land, / and the land is seized by desire for this embrace; / the teeming rain from the sky / makes the earth fecund, so that for mortals it generates / the pastures for their flocks and the sap of Demeter / and the fruit on the trees. From these moist embraces / everything which is comes into being. And I am the cause of this.” Greece was a nuptial land of sexual union, attracted by divine virginity. But it feared those Amazons with neither home nor husband. Hypermestra had betrayed them. For that she deserved to be saved.
Apollo was the first slayer of monsters; then came Cadmus, Perseus, Bellerophon, Heracles, Jason, Theseus. Alongside this list of monster slayers we could place a list of traitors, of women: Hypermestra, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, Antiope, Helen, Antigone. These women don’t have a god as their forebear, but a priestess: Io, who betrayed her goddess, Hera, in whose sanctuary she lived as “guardian of the keys.” “Io illustrates the awakening of woman from the long sleep of an untroubled infancy, a happiness that was ignorant but perfect, to a tormenting love that will be at once the delight and sorrow of her life, forever. She has been dazzled by the divinity of Zeus.”
The heroic gesture of woman is betrayaclass="underline" its influence on the course of events is just as great as the slaying of monsters. With the monster slain, an impurity lingers on to dog the hero. There will also be the withered remains of the foe whose power the hero turns to his advantage. Heracles clothes himself in the skin of the Nemean lion; Perseus brandishes the petrifying face of the Gorgon as he goes into battle. Leave only emptiness and the chatter of human voices. The isthmus becomes practicable, people trade, and write poems recalling monsters.
The effects of woman’s betrayal are more subtle and less immediate perhaps, but equally devastating. Helen provokes a war that wipes out the entire race of heroes, ushering in a completely new age, when the heroes will merely be remembered in verse. And as a civilizing gesture, woman’s betrayal is no less effective than man’s monster slaying. The monster is an enemy beaten in a duel; in her betrayal, the traitor suppresses her own roots, detaching her life from its natural context. Ariadne is the ruin of Crete, where she was born; Antiope dies fighting the Amazons, her own subjects who were faithfully rallying to her aid; Helen leads the heroes she has loved to their downfall; Medea forsakes the country of sorcery to arrive, at the end of her adventures, in the country of law, Athens; Antigone betrays the law of her city to make a gesture of mercy toward a dead man who does not belong to that city. Like a spiral, woman’s betrayal twists around on itself, forever rejecting that which is given. It is not the negation that comes into play in the frontal and mortal collision of forces but the negation that amounts to a gradual breaking away from ourselves, opposition to ourselves, effacement of ourselves, in a game that may exalt or destroy and which generally both exalts and destroys.
The slaying of monsters and woman’s betrayal are two ways in which negation can operate. The first clears a space, leaves an evocative vacuum where before there was a clutter, thick with heads and tentacles, a scaly arabesque. Woman’s betrayal does not alter the elements in space but rearranges them. The influence of certain pieces on the chessboard is inverted. White attacks white. Black attacks black. The effect is confusing, above all disturbing. For the first time roles have been reversed. And it is always a woman who reverses them. There’s an obstinacy about the hero that obliges him to keep on and on, following just the one path and no other. Hence his need to be complemented, his need of another form of negation. The woman with her betrayal completes the hero’s work: she brings it to its conclusion and winds up the story. This is done in agreement with the hero. It is part of the hero’s civilizing work to suppress himself, because the hero is monstrous. Immediately after the monsters, die the heroes.
With the heroes, man takes his first step beyond the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art. And with the heroes a new world of love is disclosed. The woman helps the hero to slay monsters and capture talismans. A shining initiator into religious mystagogue, she has a splendor that ranges from the glimmering radiance of Ariadne to the dazzle of Medea. But the heroes also ushered in a new kind of love: that between man and man. Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Peirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades — all enjoyed what Aeschylus calls “the sacred communion of thighs,” a communion Achilles chided Patroclus for having forgotten merely because he was dead.