Zeus was not to have a temple in Dodona, the most ancient of oracles, until the fifth century. The center of the sanctuary was an oak, protected by a circle of tripods. It looked out over a broad, flattish valley. At each side of the valley rose long, rolling hills, hills like so many others, their slopes mottled with green patches that grew thicker and thicker until they formed a solid green carpet at the bottom of the valley. Dodona was not a prominent, strategic, exposed place, like Delphi; nor was it a blissful place, like Olympia. Dodona had no profile, whereas Delphi was nothing but. But Delphi was Apollo. And everything that is not Apollo is an enemy of Apollo. By contrast, Zeus is flat, accepting and welcoming everything.
Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character. Just as his statue in Olympia was the support for all the shapes and parasites on it, his place admits of every other place. And his voice, the rustling of the oak, is the closest thing imaginable to undifferentiated sound, a voice that more than any other on earth recalls the sea. Only Zeus is able to transform the flat background of existence into something marvelous. All the other gods have their shapes, their signs, their profiles. Zeus has the background, and the background noise. Zeus is the commonplace supporting the unique. The unique cannot exist without that support. But the support can exist alone. The unique tends to be jealous, because there are things that don’t belong to it. The support tends to be indifferent, because everything rests upon it.
On the small lead plates people would use to consult the oracle at Dodona, we read: “Did Pistus steal the wool from the mattress?” “Eurydamus would like to know where he might find his lost cup.” But, alongside these trivial requests referring to everyday objects, we also find a quite different kind: “Which god should I ask to help me do what I have in mind?” “Peithione would like to know whether he would do well to pray and offer sacrifices to Asclepius.” “Hermone the Corinthian would like to know what god he should invoke to have good children by his wife Cratea.”
In Delphi, people consulted the Pythia to find out what Apollo thought about something. In Dodona, they consulted the oak to have Zeus guide them through the tangle of the gods. Those coming to the oracle weren’t anxious about whether they should make a sacrifice or not. They were anxious because they were afraid of making their sacrifice to the wrong god. And there is nothing as sad as a sacrifice made to the wrong god. So much of our lives is made up of them. It was precisely to avoid mistakes of that kind that people followed the footsteps of the Hyperboreans to Dodona. Like some supreme post office, Zeus sorted their requests and sent off the supplicants to this or that Olympian or hero, suggesting into which vein of the invisible their offerings should be poured. No matter was too small, no question too big to be put to Zeus. Apollo wove conspiracies with those who came to him, greeted them in a temple crammed with spoils. Zeus resided in the trunk of an oak tree, and from there, with the neutrality of a guide, pointed the way to recovering the lost cup, the way to gaining the favor of the god most suitable for the occasion.
Among the many acacias and poplars, there is only one oak tree left in Dodona, and not a particularly big one at that. But such is Zeus: any old oak tree. Only Zeus can sustain the wonder of normality.
The hymn etched in the stele of Palaikastro describes Zeus as the mégistos koûros, “the greatest of the koûroi.” As though he had only just detached himself from his identical companions, and so become the sovereign, the unique Zeus; as though the god were born from a projection of the initiates’ gaze. They see themselves in the one koûros who steps forward from the ranks of the others. They are the Curetes who danced around the infant Zeus, clashing their shields. Now they are ready to follow him through the mountains, vagabonds and wizards and assayers of metals. On the stele of Palaikastro, Zeus is also invoked as pankrat
s gánous, “sovereign of the liquid splendor.” But gános is something no one can circumscribe. The Etymologicon Magnum attributes to it the following sequence of meanings: hýdōr chárma ph
s lípos aug leukótes lampedn: “water joy light fat brilliance whiteness flash.” And then adds these words, ignored for centuries, words that mark the point where, in the waters of the Mediterranean, the essences of Athens and Jerusalem meet: “Gános, to the Cypriots, means paradise (parádeisos).”
Gános is a substance, a feeling, a radiance. Zeus is made of gános; the Twelve Olympians are made of gános. Zeus is sovereign of the radiant material with which he shapes himself and with which the circle of the Twelve is shaped round about him. A reflection of that substance shone in the statue that Zeus fashioned to hide the heart of Zagreus.
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(photo credit 10.1)
FROM TIME TO TIME THE HEROES WOULD get together for some common adventure: a hunting party, a conquest, a war. The prey might be a fabulous animal, or an image, a statue: the Calydonian boar, the Golden Fleece, the Trojan Palladium. They are a magnificent sight, the heroes, lining up in disciplined ranks on the benches of the Argo, muscles glistening like flames. And all the Olympians watch them, from the balconies of heaven. Or there’s that moment when Jason shoulders his way through the throng of the Magnetes before setting out on his travels, and the priestess of Artemis kisses his hands and stares at him with such feeling she can’t say a word, and Jason leaves her behind him, as the young leave the old. Or the moment when Pollux, Zeus’s boxer son, gets ready to face Amycus, king of the Bebryces, and radiates strength, although his cheeks are barely downed with hair and his eye is wet and glistening like a child’s. It is at such moments, and not in their shrewder gestures, that the splendor of the heroes shines through. Apart from Theseus and Odysseus, whose greatest adventures were solitary, the heroes reveal something about themselves when they’re together, something that was already there and oppressing them when they were alone: a sort of dark curtain weighs on their minds, a noble obtuseness dogs them.
Before setting out, Jason is immersed in gloomy reflections. He feels he is not in control of the adventure. There is so much enthusiasm for it, so much noise, even nature is joining in, with a cry raised by the harbor of Pagasae and another by the Argo itself, a cry that comes from the “divine beam,” which crossed the ship from stem to stern and had grown as an oak in Dodona. And indeed at the beginning of their adventure the Argonauts act like so many sleepwalkers, as if blindly obeying a mechanism that makes fools of them. Seized by lust, they all, without exception, throw themselves on the women of Lemnos. One night they perpetrate a massacre by mistake, killing the best of the Doliones, who had received them with friendship. Another day they set sail and only discover they have left Heracles and Polyphemus behind when it is too late to turn back. Little by little, one begins to appreciate why the greatest heroes were so stubbornly determined to become initiates, as Heracles and the Dioscuri finally did at Eleusis, or the whole party of the Argonauts at Samothrace: they know there is something essential that they haven’t got and need; they know they are not perfect.