Why did Zeus throw them all into the fray? We are closing in on the nerve of Homeric theology here. In the maximum pointlessness lies the maximum splendor. And the real never shines so brightly as when its reality is duplicated, when for every hero’s arm there is a god’s arm coming to meet it, to guide it, when two scenes, one visible, the other invisible, because dazzling, are one inside the other, so that every joint is doubled. Achilles is denied any chance of putting off his end, which must happen, for so it has been decreed, in a certain way, at a certain moment. But destiny does hold out one last honor for Achilles, and Zeus has no desire to deprive him of it, because this honor is his pleasure: it is that the last battle be hard, uncertain, furious.
At the same time Zeus has something else on his mind: he must see that no one on the earth can ever, by mere dint of force, do anything that goes “beyond destiny,” that no one ever manage to postpone his own death. Achilles’ fury might allow him to conquer those walls that are destined to fall at a later date. This would put a crack in the order of things. So now, with the intervention of the Olympians, the tension on the battlefield is raised to something almost unbearable and at the same time placed in a new equilibrium. The clashing swells, indicating that an unprecedented concentration of forces is at work. Indeed the noise even has Hades starting nervously. The only one of the gods not on the battlefield, he senses the excess of tension on the earth and gets up from his throne, fearing that the grassy mantle above him may be about to break up and expose to the light the endless mold of his subterranean world, abhorred by gods and men alike.
In the Iliad, all living things, even the horse Xanthus, even the river Scamander, tell us that they are not the “cause,” not responsible for anything. But they don’t say this in order to lay the blame on someone else. No, that recognition is the supreme act of Homeric devotion, a stepping aside before overwhelming power. Every affirmation of an ego would be crude, here where the distinction between how much each person may do alone and how much a god allows him to do or gives to him is so subtle. The merest breath decides everything, a change in the rhythm of the massacre grants the upper hand to one side or the other.
There is something that distinguishes Homeric characters from everything that was written before or would be written after. They behave like those perfect atheists who have never existed and who are convinced that life is coterminous with breath. After death, for the science-bound atheist, there is but a vague nothingness. For the Homeric character, there is a long torment, a craving without mind or memory. Not another life, and not even a punishment for their lives, but an enervated and delirious physiology, which stops short of life.
Yet for as long as they drew breath, everything was full of gods. Thinking of Achilles, who every day at dawn dragged Hector’s corpse around Patroclus’s pyre, Hecuba says: “But not for this was he [Patroclus] brought back to life.” No artifice, no rite, no merit can alter this fact. The gods “are always,” as the formulaic tags unceasingly tell us; those who recognize the gods live but a brief space. In their modesty, the atheists are full of vainglory. For the brief span of their lives they are convinced they are in control of something, an island of independence later to be dispersed into blind atoms. The Homeric heroes allowed themselves no such consolation: while they lived they were aware of being sustained and imbued by something remote and whole, which then abandoned them at death like so many rags.
The Iliad is the world of brusque, precipitous passages from one state to the other. Its consummate expression is Achilles. Achilles weeps with Priam, his enemy’s father, then looks at him with admiration, then, just a few moments later, has to stop himself from killing him. The intensity is extreme in each phase. And each phase lives by and for itself, nor is it concerned with what came before or will come after. Why should things be consequent upon one another? Is a motionless, bleeding body consequent upon a body tense in the chase? These states follow each other like stretches of a giant wall, reduced to stumps. Marooned in the powerful isolation of each separate block, we must always try to remember that those walls form a single line. When Thetis visits her son, Achilles, wallowing in grief for Patroclus, she doesn’t try to lead him slowly out of his suffering, step by step. Thetis looks at him and reminds him of the existence of bread and bed. Then adds: “It is a good thing to unite with a woman in love.”
When the Christians built churches on the sites of pagan sanctuaries, incorporating the old capitals and columns in their naves, they were behaving as Heracles had with the Nemean lion, or Athena with Gorgon. In the hero’s relationship with the monster, what matters is this: that the monster possesses, or protects, or even is the treasure. To kill the monster means to incorporate it in oneself, to take its place. The hero becomes the new monster, clothed in the skin of the old and decorated with some metonymic trophy. Thus Heracles will no longer show his face, except through the motionless jaws of the lion he has killed.
The monster is the most precious of enemies: therefore it is the enemy one goes and looks for. Other enemies might simply attack us: the Giants, for example, or the Titans, representatives of an order in the process of being replaced, or looking for revenge for having already been replaced. The monster is quite different. The monster waits near the well-spring. The monster is the spring. He doesn’t need the hero. It is the hero who needs him for his very existence, because his power will be protected by and indeed must be snatched from the monster. When the hero confronts the monster, he has as yet neither power nor knowledge. The monster is his secret father, who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give him.
In the beginning the monster was in the center, the center of the earth and the heavens, where the waters rise. When the monster was killed by the hero, his dismembered body migrated to recompose itself at the four corners of the earth. Then it embraced the world in a circle of scales and water. It was the composite margin of all there was. It was the frame. That the frame is the home of the monster, the artisans of the Baroque knew only too well, and the frames they made were far more intricate, far denser, far more archaic than all the idylls they enclosed — and perhaps would one day suffocate. Then came the moment when people didn’t want frames anymore. The museums hung pictures without frames, which looked as though they’d been stripped bare. The frame is not the antiquated, but the remote. With the frame gone, the monster loses his last home. And returns to wander where he will.
The Greeks were drawn to enigmas. But what is an enigma? A mysterious formulation, you could say. Yet that wouldn’t be enough to define an enigma. The other thing you have to say is that the answer to an enigma is likewise mysterious. This is what distinguishes the enigma from the problem, although at the beginning of Greek civilization the two categories were confused. When a problem is resolved, both question and answer dissolve, are absorbed into a mechanical formula. Climbing a wall is a problem, until you lean a ladder against it. Afterward, you have neither problem nor solution, just a wall and a ladder. This is not so for the enigma. Take the most famous one of all, the Sphinx’s: “What is the being that has but one voice and yet sometimes has two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is progressively weaker the more feet it has?” Oedipus answers: “Man.” But if we think about that answer, we realize that precisely the fact that “man” is the solution to such an enigma suggests the enigmatic nature of man. What is this incongruous being that goes from the animal condition of the quadruped through to the prosthesis (the old man’s stick), all the time preserving a single voice? The solution to the enigma is thus itself an enigma, and a more difficult one.