That reluctance to admit the pleasure involved would never be dropped, not even in the ultimate intimacy: “in the act of love the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure, as does the woman; but contemplates, in a state of sobriety, the excitement of the other drunken with Aphrodite.” When the lover approaches, the beloved stands upright and looks straight ahead, his eyes not meeting those of his lover, who bends down and almost doubles up over him, greedily. The vase painters generally show thigh-to-thigh contact rather than anal penetration: this allows the beloved to maintain his erect, indifferent, detached position. But all too soon the whole situation would be reversed. The first facial hair marked the beginning of the end of the boy’s period as beloved. The hairs were called Harmodius and Aristogiton because they freed the boy from this erotic tyranny. Then, as though in need of a little time out, the boy escapes “from the tempest and torment of male love.” But very soon he is back in that tempest, and in a new role: instead of being eyed, nude in the gymnasium, he is himself cruising around younger boys, in the same places, nosing out his prey. Transformed from erómenos into erast
s, he would finally discover, as a lover, what it means to be possessed by love. Only the lover is éntheos, says Plato. Only the lover is “full of god.”
IV
(photo credit 4.1)
OF THE OLYMPIANS, THE FIRST THING WE can say is that they were new gods. They had names and shapes. But Herodotus assures us that “before yesterday” no one knew “where any of these gods had come from, nor whether they had existed eternally, nor what they looked like.” When Herodotus says “yesterday,” he means Homer and Hesiod, whom he calculated as having lived four centuries before himself. And to his mind it was they who “gave the gods their names, shared out arts and honors among them, and revealed what they looked like.” But in Hesiod we can still sense the effort involved in establishing a cosmogony, the slow detachment of the gods from what is either too abstract or too concrete. Only at the end, after the cosmos had quaked again and again, did Zeus “divide the honors among them.”
But Homer is the real scandal, his indifference toward the origin of things, the total absence of pomposity, his presumption in beginning not at the beginning of his tale but at the end, at the last of those ten disastrous years of war beneath the walls of Troy, years that had served, above all else, to wipe out the whole race of the heroes. The heroes were themselves a recent phenomenon, and here was the poet already celebrating their passing. The Olympians had quickly established a constant rhythm to their lives and seemed intent on maintaining it forever, as if it were the obvious choice. The earth was there for raids, whims, intrigues, experiments. But what happened before Olympus? Here and there Homer does give us hints, but fleeting ones. No one is interested in going into details. While the destiny of a Trojan warrior can be most engrossing.
There is something assumed in Homer but never mentioned, something that lies behind both silences and eloquence. It is the idea of perfection. What is perfect is its own origin and does not wish to dwell on how it came into being. What is perfect severs all ties with its surroundings, because sufficient unto itself. Perfection doesn’t explain its own history but offers its completion. In the long history of divinities, the inhabitants of Olympus were the first who wished to be perfect rather than powerful. Like an obsidian blade, the aesthetic for the first time cut away all ties, connections, devotions. What remained was a group of figures, isolated in the air, complete, initiated, perfect — three words that Greek covers in just one: téleios. Even though it would not appear until much later, the statue was the beginning, the way in which these new beings would manifest themselves.
When the Greeks needed to appeal to an ultimate authority, it wasn’t a sacred text but Homer that they went to. Greece was founded on the Iliad. And the Iliad was founded on a play of words, the substitution of a couple of letters in a name. Briseis, Chryseis. The bone of contention that triggers the poem is Briseis kallipárēos, Briseis “of the lovely cheeks”: Agamemnon wants her exchanged with, or substituted for, Chryseis kallipárēos, Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” In Greek only two letters separate the two girls. And it was not “because of the girl,” Achilles childishly insists, that the whole quarrel began but because of the substitution, as if the hero sensed that it was this notion of exchange that had tightened the noose that no hero, nor any generation that came after the heroes, would be able to loosen.
It is the power of exchange in all its manifestations that looms over the opening of the Iliad: there is the woman, or rather the two women, each with lovely cheeks, almost indistinguishable, like coins from the same mint; there are the words of Agamemnon and Achilles, which oppose each other as one force opposes another (antibíosi epéessin); there is the “immense,” the “splendid ransom,” offered by the priest Chryses for his daughter Chryseis, and “the holy hecatomb” the Achaeans offer the priest. On each occasion, the elements of the exchange are presented in pairs: the women, the words, the offerings. The only thing missing is money, which will eventually be composed from the mixing of these elements. But, for money to emerge in its purest form, the heroes must first kill each other off. As early as Thucydides we have the observation that precisely what was lacking during the Trojan War was money. That “lack of money” (achrēmatía) made the whole mixture less potent than it would later be, but far more glorious.
“Helen is the only woman in Homer who clearly has distinctive epithets of her own,” observes Milman Parry. Kallipárēos—“of the lovely cheeks”—is applied to eight women and thus used more than any other female epithet. The Iliad tells the story of two quarrels: the quarrel over Helen, the unique Helen, who no one would dare to substitute; and the quarrel over Briseis “of the lovely cheeks,” who Agamemnon would like to substitute with Chryseis “of the lovely cheeks.” Between uniqueness unassailable and unassailable substitution, a war flares up on the Trojan plain, a war that can never end.
If we are to give credence to his spouse-sister, Hera, Zeus “was interested in only one thing, going to bed with women, mortal and immortal alike.” But at least one woman rejected him, and, what was worse, an immortaclass="underline" Thetis. Resentful, Zeus went on “spying on her from on high, against her will.” And, given that she had refused him, he resorted to the most solemn of oaths to make sure she would never have an immortal companion. As Hera saw it, Thetis didn’t yield to Zeus because she was “at once respectful and secretly afraid” of his celestial partner, herself. So the two of them became friends. But here, as elsewhere, Hera’s vision of events is too self-centered. There was a more serious motive behind Thetis’s rejection, indeed the most serious motive possible: her union with Zeus would have led to the birth of the son destined to displace his father: “a son stronger than his father,” say both Pindar and Aeschylus, using exactly the same words.