When Iphigenia agrees to her own sacrifice, agrees, as she puts it, “to this wicked spilling of blood by a wicked father,” because “the whole of Greece is looking to her” and her death will allow “the Greeks to reign over the barbarians rather than the barbarians over the Greeks,” for “the barbarians stand for slavery, the Greeks for freedom”—when a speech like this pours rapidly, confidently, from the mouth of the virgin of Mycenae, it’s clear that any cosmic vision of sacrifice has already foundered. Sacrifice here no longer has to do with the equilibrium between gods and men but between men and other men, between “the kings of men” and that dangerous multitude milling around the tents.
But here comes the outrageous enigma: man now discovers that sacrifice is just as effective as a tool of social manipulation as it was to appease the gods. Any cosmic tension evaporates. What we’re left with is an unsuspecting girl whose throat is to be cut before an army mad with the lust to be setting sail for an almighty bloodletting (it’s Aphrodite, not Ares, who’s goading them on). And that killing turns out to be very useful. It is the first pro patria mori, and it stands apart from all the others and dwarfs them, just as Pericles’ speech on democracy dwarfs thousands of later speeches on the subject. Even before the Achaeans hoisted their sails for Troy, Iphigenia’s body had been used as the medium for a radical secularization of the practice of sacrifice. The gods were still there, intact, but man’s relationship with them was now taking on the same spareness and pathos as that between daughter and father, servant and master, lover and beloved, husband and wife. The only thing that separated heaven and earth now was an immense inequality in terms of power. Not an inequality of mind, or heart, or ceremony at all. With all the cosmic scaffolding that had stood between gods and men having thus collapsed, life seemed the more buoyant and resplendent, but lonely too, fleeting and irretrievable. Such is the dominant sentiment that runs through the lucid age of Greece from Homer to Euripides. Everything is reduced to a few simple elements that can be reduced no further. Life is no longer a series of trade-offs between invisible powers but “the sweetness of looking at the light.” Thus speaks the philopsychía in Iphigenia, that last “clutching at life.” And her conclusion is brusque: “To look into the light is the sweetest thing for a mortal; what lies beneath the earth is nothingness.”
This brazen speech, the daring claim that the whole world of spirits is “nothingness,” points to the affinity that predestined the girl to be Achilles’ bride. For the defiant words she hurls at Agamemnon as she is about to die prefigure Achilles’ answer to Odysseus in the underworld, his scorn for any vain sovereignty over the dead and his heartrending desire for a part, however miserable, in the life above.
The whole classical world, from the Minoan frescoes to the Roman banquets, is strewn with leafy crowns. To be a coronarius in Rome was to have a profitable business, since crowns were used on all kinds of occasions. “In the olden times,” Pliny recalls, “crowns were used to show respect for the gods and the Lares, public and private, the tombs and the Manes.” Then there were crowns for the statues of the gods, for sacrificial victims, and for brides and bridegrooms. Crowns for the winning athletes at the games. Crowns for poets and soldiers who excelled. Crowns worn for fun at banquets. Lovers would hang crowns on their beloveds’ doors. And Cleopatra even had the idea of poisoning Antony with the petals of a crown. From the Egyptian mummies to the Christian polemicists, who tried to avoid this pagan usage but lapsed back into it just the same, you could say that the Mediterranean world lived and moved for centuries within that circular image, those symbolic but ephemeral flowers, different for every occasion. Such was the ubiquitousness of the crown that a whole literature sprang up around it. Few other subjects seemed so well suited to contests of erudition between sophists at banquets. But, if we look behind their relaxed chatter to the origin of the crown, what do we find?
The first crown was a gift from Zeus to Prometheus. It thus came from the gods as homage to a man whose relationship with them was anything but clear, at once a threat and a means of salvation. The crown in fact was supposed to compensate for the fetters in which Zeus himself had long imprisoned Prometheus. The cold grip of the metal was thus transformed into what Aeschylus calls “the best of all fetters”: a circular weave of leaves, twigs, and flowers. It was the same process by which Aphrodite’s many-colored girdle had come to be superimposed over Ate’s suffocating net. And, just as deceit was woven into Aphrodite’s girdle, in the crown of Prometheus we can see deceit throwing down its ultimate challenge. Hyginus writes: “Nonnulli etiam coronam habuisse dixerunt, ut se victorem impune peccasse diceret”: “Some say that [Prometheus] got hold of a crown, so that he could claim to have triumphed, unpunished for his crime.” Like the girdle of Aphrodite, Prometheus’s crown is the fetter of necessity. Except that now, dispersed in petals and transformed by beauty, that fetter approaches the delicate superfluousness of ornament. The veil of aesthetic appearance can conceal beneath it even the gamble of the man who attempts to elude necessity, the man who still seeks an impunity anánkē does not concede. Or so Hyginus insinuates.
Aeschylus, however, has a different vision of events. He describes the crown given to Prometheus as an antípoina, a “retribution,” which is also a ransom. Prometheus had earned his ransom by revealing to Zeus that, if he had a child with Thetis, it would overthrow him. Hence, having first deceived the god, Prometheus had then saved him. And now he was to remain among men and bring them a second revelation, after that of fire: the crown. From chain to crown: it was still a fetter of a kind; anything strong that grips us is a fetter. But now the fetter had been lightened; it became fragile and soft, gently encircling the head, for “all our feelings are in our heads.” What did that vegetable weave conceal, then, that was so precious? Perfection. It was the Greek gift par excellence, the goal this people always sought.
It would be a long time before crowns were being handed out at banquets. In the beginning, it was the idea of separation that was essential. Forerunner of the magic circle, the crown divided the world in two: there was the sacred fragment within the crown (sacrificial victim, spouse, or statue) and everything else outside. “Everything that belonged to the cult, whether people, animals, victims, or symbols, would be marked out by a crown or a band, as a sign of consecration, and often by both crown and band.” At this point the crown was “herald of the holy silence,” prelude to the sacrificial killing. But, having begun with this cult use, the Greeks developed the crown in a way all their own. The sacred is something that impregnates, it pours into the young girl, the animal, the statue, and fills them. Hence the sacred comes to partake of fullness, and fullness with perfection, since as Aristotle puts it, “we offer to the gods only that which is perfect and whole.” The Iliad speaks of “youths who filled [or crowned: epestépsanto] the bowls with wine.” The crown was the rim of the goblet, the point at which fullness becomes excess. The crown was a mobile templum, bringing together election and danger. The perfect brings death upon itself, since one can’t have fullness without spillage, and what spills out is the excess that sacrifice claims for itself. “What is full, is perfect, and coronation signifies perfection of some kind.” So says Athenaeus. Animals for sacrifice would only be crowned once it was clear that they were perfect, “so as not to kill something that was not useful.”