After the age of the heroes, the Greeks measured time by the succession of priestesses in the sanctuary of Hera in Argos. During the age of the heroes the passing of time took its rhythm from the succession of divine rapes. The anonymous author of the Catalogue of Women lists sixteen for the house of the Deucalionides alone, and eight for the Inachides. Whereas among the Pelasgides they were rare. In those races where divine rape was frequent, so was contact, exchange, and interbreeding with remote and fabulous lands. It was among these peoples that sea routes were opened, kingdoms rose and fell, dynasties migrated. In those races where divine rape was rare, events remained circumscribed and trapped, as the Pelasgides were trapped in the mountains of Arcadia.
hoíē: “Or like she who …”: such was the recurrent formula in the Catalogue of Women, for centuries attributed to Hesiod, and then lost. Thus, time after time, the story of another woman in the catalogue would begin. Thus was each new link in the chain of generations opened, as though, for the Greeks, the only form in which the heroic past, from beginning to end, might be recorded was not that of a genealogy of kings but this linking together of scores of girls and their stories in monotonous and stupefying succession. In the end, the Iliad and the Odyssey recounted only a few days and a few years of the story, the last throes of the heroic age. While the age as a whole could only be told as a sequence of women’s tales, as though turning page after page of a family album. For those learned genealogists whose supreme ambition it was to map out the tree of time through all its branches, the only frame that could contain the age of the heroes was there in those two words: hoíē …, “Or like she who …”
Unlike the peoples of the ages that preceded them — the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age — the heroes had no metal upon which to model themselves and their world. Their physiological composition was hybrid but impalpable, because half of their being was made up of the substance of the gods. And their appearance marks a break in the order of descendances, which until now had merely degenerated from one metal to the next.
Quite suddenly, when the people of the bronze age, a race of muscled armed warriors, went under the earth again, leaving only silence behind, having killed one another off without the name or glory of even one of them surviving — quite suddenly, Zeus had the fanciful idea of breaking the chain of peoples for a while and so allowed the gods to follow what was first and foremost his own example and couple with the daughters of men. It was a brief and dangerous attraction, out of which history was born. It was the age of the heroes. Only then did Names emerge that would outlive the race that bore them. Until one day, when Helen had just given birth to Hermione in Sparta, and with the other gods quarreling furiously round about him, Zeus began to think. And what he thought was that this breed must die out like the others. The time had come. The heroes, this parenthesis in the affairs of the world and the succession of metals, must be wiped out. The age of black iron was approaching, age of a people who would live in the memory of the heroes. Zeus thought, and round about him none of the rest of the Twelve realized what was happening. They had become so used to the heroes, so involved with them, they thought they would go on forever, as if it were quite normal for the Olympians to have these charming mobile toys down on earth, toys they quarreled over every day now.
The climate began to change. Camped in Aulis, the Greeks were astonished by unseasonal storms, endless, unremitting gales that prevented them from sailing. Like the gods, they didn’t realize that these unusual storms marked the beginning of the end for their age. There were only a few years left now, just long enough to kill off all those who were setting out to fight on the plains of Troy. The events of those years would be told in detail as none had ever been told before, as if a huge lens had come down from the sky to magnify every tiny gesture. If time speeded up toward the end, the focus certainly broadened: in that last generation of the heroes, even the names of those who lived in the shadow of glory, the names of the cupbearers, the helmsmen, the serving maids, would be etched in the air for the first time.
Why did Zeus decide to wipe out the heroes? A thousand tribes trod the soil and, “seeing this, Zeus felt pity in the depths of his thoughts.” So says the poet of the Kypria. But why did Zeus, who wasn’t easily stirred to pity, feel concerned for the vast body of the earth, on which, when seen from on high, the race of heroes, however numerous, couldn’t have looked very different from all the other clinging parasites?
The crime of the heroes, perhaps, lay not so much in their treading the earth but in their detaching themselves from it. The heroes were the first to look at the earth before them as an object. And seeing it as an object, they struck out at it. Their model was Apollo, who loosed his arrows at Python’s scales, mottled as the slopes of Delphi were mottled with shrubs. He who strikes the snake strikes the earth on which it slithers and the water that springs from the earth. Now the heroes were imitating Apollo, and Apollo had imitated Zeus. Imitation is the most dangerous of activities for world order, because it tends to break down boundaries. Just as Plato wanted to banish the poets, whom he loved, from the city, Zeus wanted to see the heroes, whom he loved, wiped off the face of the earth. They had to go, before they began to tread that earth with the same heedlessness with which the Olympians had trodden it before them.
But Zeus didn’t just want the heroes dead: “he forced the land of the Greeks and the hapless Phrygians to go to war so that Mother Earth might be lightened of the mass of mortals and so that the strongest of the Greeks might be made famous.” Here Zeus’s plan seems appalling. The extermination of a whole race turns out to be a necessary step in exalting the glory of a single person, Achilles — and this in a world that had still to discover what glory was, in the sense of a power that goes beyond the race. To bestow glory on a hero means to bestow it on all the heroes. It means to evoke glory itself, something unknown to the peoples of the golden, silver, and bronze ages. Glory is a pact with time. Thanks to the death of the heroes, men would win themselves a bond with time. The most arduous of bonds and metaphysically superior to all others. Zeus wanted the death of the heroes to be a new death. What had death meant until now? Being covered once again by the earth. But, with the heroes, death coincided with the evocation of glory. Glory was something you could breathe now. The men of the iron age would not be composed in body and mind as the heroes had been, but they moved in an air that was drenched with glory, as their predecessors had lived among the “mist-clad” daímones, the thirty thousand invisible “guardians of men” into whom the beings of the golden age had been transformed.
How did the heroes explain this plan of Zeus that condemned them to extinction? They didn’t explain it, they submitted to it. But there were two people living among them who dared to posit the motives behind that plan: Helen and Alcinous. Just a few words, almost the same in each case. Speaking to Hector and having twice referred to herself as a “slut,” Helen concludes: “Zeus has prepared a woeful destiny for us so that in the future we might be sung of by the bards.” Alcinous, king of an intermediate realm, of a race of ferrymen who go back and forth more through time than on the water, catches Odysseus trying to hide his tears on hearing the story of the sack of Troy and says: “This is the work of the gods: they brought about the ruin of men so that others might have song in the future.” Alcinous, like his people, loves parties, seafaring, and song. He loves “frequent changes of clothes, warm baths and beds.” Nothing else. And his near-perfect, marginal world is at a good safe distance from all the others. Helen is the opposite: the center of the exterminating storm that swirls around her body. But does her body exist in the same way other bodies do? And what is going on in Helen’s mind, that mind that nobody pays any attention to?