(photo credit 12.1)
ZEUS IS NEVER RIDICULOUS, BECAUSE HIS dignity is of no concern to him. “Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur / Maiestas et amor,” says Ovid, master of matters erotic. To seduce a woman with a bundle of lightning bolts in one’s hand would be injudicious, and not even very exciting. But a white bull, an eagle, a swan, a false satyr, a stallion, a stream of gold, a blaze of fire: these are divine. Only when he assumes these forms does Zeus manage to “leave aside his very being Zeus.” Thus when the god came down from Olympus to seduce some mortal woman, the lightning was left behind, forgotten. Zeus preferred to be unarmed when he exposed himself to the amorous gadfly that tormented and aroused him just as it did the lowliest of his subjects. Eros is the helplessness of that which is sovereign: it is strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.
Zeus was seducing the Nymph Pluto when Ge, avenger of all the victims of the Olympian age, nodded to her son Typhon, as one assassin giving the go-ahead to another. A huge body stretched across heaven and earth: an arm, one of the two hundred attached to that body, reached out to Olympus, the fingers searching behind a rock from which rose rags of smoke. Typhon’s hand closed around Zeus’s bundle of thunderbolts. The sovereign god had lost his weapon. Olympus was terror-struck. The gods fled like a stampeding herd. They shed the human forms that made them too recognizable and unique. Trembling, they camouflaged themselves beneath animal skins: ibis, jackals, dogs. And they flew toward Egypt, where they would be able to blend in among the hundreds and thousands of other ibis, jackals, and dogs, the motionless, painted guardians of tombs and temples.
Europa’s fine hair was still shrinking to a speck that would lose itself in the wide expanse of sea when King Agenor called together his sons Cilix, Phoenix, Cepheus, Thasus, and Cadmus. He commanded them to go and find their sister. They were to never show their faces in Sidon again unless they had Europa with them. The sons had already traveled for years with their father through Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia. Now they had to set out again, and this time alone. Thus began the long wanderings of Cadmus. His brothers set out too but were soon distracted from the quest that had driven them from their home. Cadmus thought of the bull, the bull “that no mortal can find.”
Still wandering about in search of his sister, he reached the Cilician mountains. He was walking through dense woodland when a flock of birds flew over his head with a convulsed whirring of wings, heading south. Cadmus sensed a sudden emptiness above and beneath him. He didn’t know that that flock of birds were the Olympians, fleeing to Egypt. Olympus was uninhabited now, a museum in the night. And in a cave a few yards from Cadmus, although he hadn’t found the place yet, lay Zeus, helpless. Wrapping himself around the god’s body, Typhon had managed to wrench his adamantine sickle from him and had cut through the sinews of his hands and feet. Now, drawn out from his body, Zeus’s sinews formed a bundle of dark, shiny stalks, not unlike the bundle of lightning bolts that lay beside them, although these were bright and smoking. Zeus’s body could just be glimpsed through the shadows, an abandoned sack. Wrapped in a bearskin, his sinews were being guarded by Delphine, half girl, half snake. And out from the cave drifted the breath of Typhon’s many mouths, Typhon with his hundred animal heads and the thousands of snakes that framed them. The Olympians were routed. Already nature was slowly degenerating. And the only witness to the scene was that traveler lost in the woods dressed as a shepherd.
Cadmus felt a loneliness no one had ever felt before. Nature’s soul was fading, order gasped its death rattle, destiny shrank to a single point, in that wood, before the mouth of that cave, where a Phoenician prince was about to take on a primordial and evil creature, Typhon. Cadmus had no weapons, bar the invisible resources of his mind. He remembered how in his childhood, when he used to follow his father on his travels, the priests of the Egyptian temples had squeezed into his mouth “the ineffable milk of books.” And he remembered the most intense joy he had ever known: one day Apollo had revealed to him, and him alone, “the just music.” What was the just music? No one else would ever know, but Cadmus decided to play it to the monster now, a last voice from the deserted world of the gods. Hiding in a thicket of trees, he played his pipes. The notes penetrated Typhon’s cave, rousing him from his happy torpor. Then Cadmus saw some of Typhon’s arms slithering toward him. Head after head rose before him, until the only human one among them spoke to him in a friendly voice. Typhon invited Cadmus to compete with him: pipes versus thunder. He spoke like a bandit in need of company who grabs at the first chance to show off his power. With the bluster of the braggart, he promised him marvelous things, although in this particular moment that braggart really was the sole master of the cosmos. And, as he spoke, he was struggling to imitate Zeus, whom he had long observed with resentment. He told Cadmus he would take him up to Olympus. He would grant him Athena’s body, untouched. And if he didn’t like Athena he could have Artemis, or Aphrodite, or Hebe. Only Hera was out of bounds, because she belonged to him, the new sovereign. Never had anyone been at once so ridiculous and so powerful.
Cadmus contrived to look serious and respectful, but not frightened. He said it was pointless him trying to compete with his pipes. But with a lyre, maybe. He made up a story of his once having competed with Apollo. And said that, to save his son the embarrassment of being beaten, Zeus had burned his strings to ashes. If only he had some good, tough sinews to make himself a new instrument! With the music of his lyre, Cadmus said, he would be able to stop the planets in their courses and enchant the wild beasts. These words convinced the ingenuous monster, who enjoyed conversation only when it centered on power, immense power, the one thing he was interested in. He agreed. His many heads went back into the cave and then emerged again. In one hand he was holding the shining bundle of Zeus’s sinews. He handed them to Cadmus. He said they were a gift for his guest. He thought this was how sovereigns behaved. Cadmus began to finger the divine sinews like a craftsman examining his materials before getting down to work. Then he went off to build his instrument. He hid Zeus’s sinews beneath a rock. Then he pressed on into the thicket and, skillfully sweetening the tone of his pipes, began to play a tune.
Typhon strained hundreds of ears to listen. He heard the tune and didn’t understand it. But harmony was working on him. Cadmus told him he had invented the composition to celebrate the flight of the gods from Olympus. Typhon wallowed in self-gratification. The music pricked him with its sweet goad. He ventured outside the cave to hear it better. For the first time he felt he understood how Zeus must feel when his eye settled on the breast and hips of a woman about to yield to him. That sensation had always been obscure and impenetrable to Typhon. But now he must learn all about it, if he was to take Zeus’s place. Typhon was immersed in the music, every one of his hundred heads distracted. Zeus took advantage of the situation to sneak out of the cave. Dragging himself across the ground with great effort, he found his sinews behind the rock. A few moments later the bundle of lightning bolts was back in his hand. He had seen the smoke rising from them in the darkness. When Typhon roused himself and went back to the cave, he found it empty.
Before Cadmus embarked on his musical competition with Typhon, Zeus appeared to him in the shape of a bull. He was full of anguish, fearing defeat and ridicule. He was afraid the cosmos might break its sudden silence with a roar of mocking laughter from his old father, Kronos. And he was afraid that “Hellas, mother of myths,” might rearrange all her fables, transferring to Typhon all those gratifying epithets of sovereignty that he himself had enjoyed until now. So it was that the bull, like Typhon, solemnly promised Cadmus a woman, and something else as welclass="underline" he would sleep with Harmony and be “savior of the cosmic harmony.”