The Magic of ‘The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony’

Introduction

‘But how did it all begin?’

It was 2023 when a friend of mine convinced me to read a book about Greek mythology called ‘The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony’ (TMOCAH) by Roberto Calasso. Since the end of my time at University I’ve been on a bit of a Classical Greek tear, so I thought sure, why not? I know my myths, I’ve gone through Hesiod, Ovid, Virgil, Apollodorus, the Hymns, Apollonius, Quintus, Homer; I’ve read Percy Jackson. I figured some Italian authors retelling of the Greek myths would be a fun break from the finer points of analyzing Homeric poetry. The book even has citations at the back, how handy!

Oh hubris, thy name is Dunning-Kruger. Back then I had even initially tried to write a review for this very contest, but only now after 3 years of study do I believe I have the understanding to submit an entry. What I have come to realize about this book is that it is the handiwork of a true, steeped master. Someone who grasps Greek mythology, history, philosophy on a level beyond that which I have ever seen or thought was attainable. The author, Roberto Calasso, died only a short while ago in 2021 at the age of 80. He was the head of Adelphi publishing house in Milan and spoke Italian, French, English, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and dabbled in Sanskrit. He wrote more than 10 books ranging in topics from Franz Kafka, to Indian mythology, to the psychology of prehistoric man. TMOCAH is one of his earliest works and was released in English in 1993. Roberto Calasso is now who I think of when I imagine a scholar.

The quote on the cover of the book reads a bit pretentious. “A perfect work like no other. [Calasso] has re-created, in a blaze of light, the morning of our world.” - Gore Vidal. Regardless of who Gore Vidal is, calling anything ‘a perfect work’ seems a bit farfetched, but that is part of the book's magic. This is a perfect work like no other.

This is a book review and TMOCAH is a book, and to say what this book is is rather straightforward. This is a book containing and about Greek mythology. It recounts a large number of the famous Greek myths, told in a unique way. Most chapters do not really have any overarching theme or organization. A couple cover things like the whole house of Tantalus, others cover Apollo and Athena, another one contains many Iliad and Odyssey references, another lots of juxtaposition between Athens and Sparta, but not one of the chapters has only a single topic or theme. As a whole the text seems to meander and flit between various myths with nearly no overarching connections. I’d like to emphasize that, because if you are looking for a conventional narrative you will not find it here. This makes placing TMOCAH in a modern genre for the sake of this review difficult. So instead of trying to show you what this book is ‘about’, I would like to illustrate the magic of TMOCAH by teasing apart one of its more enigmatic riddles. Best to just dive in.

The Pledge

The first chapter sets a blistering pace and recounts 4 distinct versions of Europa’s myth in succession. In the first version, the traditional one, she is picking flowers along a river with her maidens when the tame bull approaches. In the second, she is asleep in the palace and dreams of the tame white bull. She goes to the river to pick flowers to add to her basket, and the bull is there. In the third, the basket she is holding is the focus, and it depicts the myth of her great-great-grandmother Io and her transformation and wanderings as a cow; an inversion of Europa's own story, where a bull carried her from Asia to Europe, the continent that would become her namesake. The fourth is history, or so it is claimed. Phoenician merchants are said to have abducted the tauroparthenos, or virgin dedicated to the bull, Io. The Cretans then avenged this abduction by stealing the Phoenician king's daughter and bringing her to Crete; Europa. The tit-for-tat abductions of women would continue through Greek myth with the Argonauts stealing Medea, and Paris stealing Helen, until history itself is born.

Your modern one-track-narrative mind may have questions. What should you make of these multiple versions? Which one has the most authority? Can a few be collapsed together and called a transcription error? Calasso cares not for your modern narratological sentiments. That’s the point he’s trying to make with this opening book.

“Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.” Ch 1, pg 22.

People are often confused or surprised that there are multiple versions of the same Greek myths. Even the most famous ones have significant differences. In one version of the Trojan war Helen doesn’t even go to Troy! A phantom is sent in her place and everyone fights over that for 10 years. The ancients thought that this version was just as plausible as the others, yet nowadays we reject this version for the most part. Throughout the book Calasso makes it clear that this is not the correct way to deal with myth. Myth is not the novel, and it should not be treated as such, and neither should this book.

The competing versions of the Europa myth in TMOCAH illustrate this. Europa crosses the water on the back of a bull despite the context. If she was with her maidens on the beach, if she was alone in a field with the bull, or if she was from Phoenicia or Crete, it matters not. All these versions are recorded and all are recounted.

The multiple versions for each Greek myth arises out of the oral storytelling culture of dark age Greece (1150 - 800 BCE). Each myth was told and retold in each mountain valley, resulting in the multiple competing versions that have come down to us today. We have evidence that bards would travel from town to town singing their tales. A bard might impart authority to a specific retelling simply through popularity, but the bards were clever about it. At the start of the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns, there is a particular structure known as the invocation of the Muse. The short of it is that the Bard prefaces his work by saying, ‘these are not my words, but the words of a Goddess spoken through me’, and in doing so they lend divine weight to their tale. Calasso doesn’t go as far as to invoke the muses to tell his many tales, but the list of sources at the back functions as a substitute.

But interspersed between the multiple versions of the most famous abductions and transformations are musings on the interconnectedness of myth, suffused with ancient sources pertinent to the topic. Take the following convoluted and confusing paragraph as an example.

“Ariadne, Coronis: two stories that call to each other, that answer each other. Not only was the killer the same in both cases - Artemis- but perhaps the mortal seducer was likewise the same - Theseus. Ischys is a shadowy figure, of whom we know nothing apart from his name. But of Theseus we know a great deal; we know that in one version he left Ariadne the moment “he fell desperately in love with Aigle, daughter of Panopeus.” So wrote Hesiod; but Pisistratus chose to delete this very line. Why? Did it reveal too much about the hero? A marble stele found in Epidaurus and signed by Isyllus explains that Aigle (or Aegla) “was so beautiful that people would also call her Coronis,” and that she had a child called Asclepius. Aigle means “splendor,” as Ariadne-Aridela means “the resplendent one.” Coronis (crown) suggests a beauty that goes beyond diffuse brilliance, involves the etching of a form. But who was “Aigle, daughter of Panopeus”? Her father was the king of a small Phocian town with the same name, Panopeus: “Panopeus with its lovely open space for dancing,” says Homer,” Ch 3, pg 57.

Calasso goes on to connect this otherwise obscure character Ischys with the famous Theseus slayer of the Minotaur. Not by anything you could call proof of course, but through vibes. The number of coincidences between the stories is peculiar, and the breadth of the sources he uses to connect the two impressive. In the one paragraph he weaves anecdotes from Hesiod, Isyllus, Homer, Pausanias, and an Athenian vase depicting the hero. It’s paragraphs like this where Calasso flexes his scholarly muscles. An interview with him from The Paris Review in 2012 describes him as a “literary institution of one” and a “neo-gnostic” or master of secret knowledge. This is unsurprising as Isyllus is a poet with only a single known source: an offering stone with his name and poem on it that was unearthed in Epidaurus. Homer, Hesiod, and Pausanias are big hitters, but Calasso has extracted a handful of words from each to support his thesis.

Oh, which is what exactly? What is the takeaway from this section? That Theseus is Ischys? That both these myths hail from some proto-indo-european source myth? The off hand, cherry picking of details from sources, stitched together, sort of didactic, fire-side chat-esque rhetorical-question filled paragraph lulls you into accepting the initially unlikely notion that Thesus and Ischys are somehow connected. But the real point is not so scholarly. Two chapters later Calasso gives an answer.

“No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin. Everything that happens, happens this way, or that way, or this other way. And in each of these diverging stories all the others are reflected, all brush by us like folds of the same cloth. If, out of some perversity of tradition, only one version of some mythical event has come down to us, it is like a body without a shadow, and we must do our best to trace out that invisible shadow in our minds.” Ch 5, pg 147.

The variant is the origin. Whether Theseus and Ischys are the same is irrelevant. Better questions are what kind of shadow does the body of their myths cast? What is it about this story structure that has caused it to become multiformed and variant? I do not know.

In TMOCAH, preceding and following paragraphs are not necessarily connected by theme, idea, or even time. Often the writing feels like the offhanded theory crafting of an old mythographer, as in the above two paragraphs. One page will be discussing Dionysus, and the next suddenly shifts to expounding the fledgling Greek identity nascent in their myths. In the middle of talking about Jason and the Argonauts, Calasso brings up Nietzsche. The text weaves through Greek myth and modernity wherever it feels like, and Calasso is never in short supply for obscure, relevant, and oftentimes perplexing anecdotes from all sources. In the same article from the Paris Review he explains his writing method:

“I have never written a book, except maybe L’impuro folle, from beginning to end. It is always a mosaic, if you will, in which I write page 80, 30, 315 in any given order. And I never know where the final place of what I am writing in the book will be. It’s the same with every book. I also have thousands of Bristol cards. I use them for detailed notes on the books I read, and more general notes as well. I call this “the material.” It’s whatever may be useful one day. Sometimes these cards contain fragments of my future books.” ^[1]

This system is undoubtedly the basis for TMOCAH. Many times throughout this book I was confused. Impressed, entertained, intrigued, but confused. Within the haze of confusion was a sort of mystical feeling whenever I would encounter this multiformity. This also may have been confusion, but I think that’s Calasso’s point. He is not creating a novel and the characters within are not simply characters, because they are inherently multiform. It is only when we consider the multiformity, the true nature of myth, and our brows get a bit furrowed, do we glimpse its true nature. The body that produces the shadow.

This is a book review though, so If I had to choose a structure for this book, I would have to say that it involves the myth of the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. A revelation, I know, but that really is the only thread! The stories loosely follow the house of Cadmus, starting from the abduction of Europa like I mentioned, to Cadmus searching for his sister Europa and founding Thebes, and ending with Cadmus and wife Harmony leaving Thebes after Dionysus’ arrival. Between those events Calasso covers nearly all mythological ground and heroes, but he is not interested in all equally. Large areas of text are dedicated to expanding on seemingly minor characters. Take for example Ariadne. She is known for helping Theseus navigate Daedelus’ labyrinth and escaping with him from Crete, only to be left behind on an island along the way. Calasso adds that Ariadne had met the God Dionysus before she met Theseus, and that the two were already acquainted,

“From first to last Ariadne’s story is woven into a crown. “My cousin’s arriving,” the young princess thought when they told her Dionysus had landed on the island. She had never seen this relative, born from his mother’s death pyre and rumored to be so handsome. When he appeared, Dionysus didn’t want to stay in the palace. He gripped her wrist and led her to one of Crete’s many caves. And there the darkness was rent by a dazzling crown. Fiery gold and Indian jewels. Dionysus offered Ariadne the crown as a gift on the occasion of this, their first embrace. Sing of perfection, “herald of propitious silence,” the crown was a circle of seduction. But to seduce also means “to destroy” in Greek: phtheirein. The crown is the perfection of deceit, it is the deceit that circles in on itself, it is that perfection which includes deceit within it.” Ch 1, pg 19-20.

The use of perspective of a secondary character, often a woman, to see the tale from a different angle is a common one for Calasso. In this section he expands on how both Theseus and Dionysus abandon Ariadne, and both provide her with crowns. The crown, or necklace, or garland, or fetter, or ring, but most often a crown, is a common motif in TMOCAH.

There are sections on the most famous heroes of course, but never in the way that you expect. When Calasso touches on well known topics, like Homer, it is always in broad strokes. He never concerns himself with the heart of those great works, the animosity between Achilles and Hector, or Odysseus adventures, instead choosing episodes peripheral to the main action.

In chapter 11 which contains much about Odysseus, Calasso chooses episodes from the beginning and end of the hero's story. The first being the trick Palamedes played on Odysseus to get him to join the war: throwing the baby Telemachus in front of raving Odysseus’ plow, forcing him to reveal his sanity. The second being from during the sack of Troy, and after that, sections from Odysseus return to Ithaca and reunification with Penelope. Some of these are familiar, but not even close to the most familiar myths about Odysseus. And why the beginning and end comparisons?

Beginnings and ends are significant in Greek mythology due to the way many of the famous stories have come down to us. The oral poetry of the Homeric Epics have a notable chiastic structure, meaning that events in the story form a ring. If someone in the beginning of the story makes a sacrifice, then someone at the end will as well. The Iliad goes far to preserve this structure. There are 12 days of waiting in book 1 while Zeus is off feasting before Thetis can entreat him with Achilles’ plea, and in book 24 there are, for no other reason at all, 12 days between the death of Hector and Achilles ransoming the body back to king Priam. This ring structure is pervasive in all oral poetic tales, and is thought to be a structure upon which the bards would sing their story. They didn't need to remember every detail, just that certain actions would be reflected in the second half of the story.

This emphasis on beginnings and ends from Calasso is evident in a couple of ways. There is the phrase he often interjects with, “But how did it all begin?”, and also his consistent discussion of the origins of things. There are long musings on the origins of Greek tragedy, the origins of the cosmos, the origins of the Trojan war, the origins of the troubles of the house of Atreus. The book takes as its start the origin of the house of Cadmus: the abduction of Europa that caused the hero Cadmus to search for her and eventually found Thebes. This thread runs through the whole book and is ostensibly the only one.

But what about endings? Well that brings me to the alternate thesis I originally had for this review. TMOCAH heavily plays with the idea that the introduction of writing to ancient Greece, thought to have been introduced by the hero Cadmus, brought about the end of our close relationship with the Gods and thus ended Greek myth. Throughout the book we take the viewpoint of a character situated right at the turning point from myth to history; the alter boy Ion of Delphi, based on the Euripidean play; the oracle Alexander of Abonuteichos, of whom we know existed from some coins and one pamphlet; and many myth-informed juxtapositions of historical Athens and Sparta. I won't get into this idea of writing as the end of myth, mostly because I want to focus on the magic of TMOCAH, but if you read this book it will be apparent.

Between the myths, Calasso enjoys tangents on whatever topic strikes his fancy. Remember his book writing strategy of recording random thoughts on notecards? With this in mind, observe this paragraph from chapter 11, which up until this point had been about events around Troy, until he suddenly switches gears and begins discussing Oedipous and the Sphinx.

“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.

Resolving an enigma means shifting it to a higher level, as the first drops away. The Sphinx hints at the indecipherable nature of man, this elusive, multiform being whose definition cannot be otherwise than elusive and multiform. Oedipus was drawn to the Sphinx, and he resolved the Sphinx’s enigma, but only to become an enigma himself. Thus anthropologists were drawn to Oedipus, and are still there measuring themselves against him, wondering about him.” Ch 10, pg 343-344.

A lot of the time when I am searching online for topics around the Greek myths, they rarely extend beyond the beginner level, but here Calasso decodes the riddle of the Sphinx in a profound way: it reveals the enigmatic nature of man. This book does this sort of thing very well. There are many sections that illuminate these stories like I had never encountered them before, that made me see them as if brand new. Calasso tucks these nuggets between the larger, looser narrative of myth weaving that he is undertaking, but they are there! And they are marvelous.

Besides the asides, this book is chock full of D-list Greek myths. If you came looking for the mainstays: the theogonous myths, the Trojan war, the Ovidian myths, they are there, but my gods does Calasso truly have all the myths covered. If you are a Greek myth nerd like me, you probably thought you had heard it all, considered it all; no myth could be beyond your Googling ability. Calasso has you trounced. Though for most of the myths he takes a rather different approach in his retellings. For example, I can guarantee you never dwelt on the feelings of young Erichthonius, tucked behind the Aegis, flying with his adoptive mother the virgin Goddess Athena.

“Erichthonius felt happy, at home, a snake among snakes. Through the dried pelt of the Aegis, he felt the hidden warmth of his adoptive mother.” Ch 8, pg 235.

Calasso expounds on the strange virgin-mother and snake-child relationship in an honestly endearing way. You may vaguely recall that the anguiform Erichthonius became the king of Athens, but not how he felt about the Goddess who raised him. I don't blame you. Hephaestus’ rape-attempt-on-Athena-turned-autochthonous-snake-child-spawning escapade is not one of the more well known myths.

Ok, but that’s just an expansion on some weird side character you say. What about some popular stuff, let’s hear what Calasso has to say about Cosmology! Well, surely you remember Zeus swallowing Phanes, the firstborn God, and then swallowing the other Gods, the earth, and the universe, becoming the only one, right?

“Everything grew together inside him, clutching his innards as a bat clutches to a tree or a bloodsucker to flesh. Then Zeus, who had been just another of the Titans’ children, became, alone, the beginning, the middle, and the end. He was male, but he was also an immortal Nymph. Then, in his overflowing solitude, he saw the life that had come before his birth as a child of Kronos, the father who had immediately threatened him and wanted to swallow him up. And he understood why his father had been so fierce. In the end, Kronos had only tried to do what Zeus alone had now succeeded in doing. But everything seemed luminous and clear to him now, because everything was in him. With amazement he realized he had become the only one. He lived in a state of perfect wakefulness. He went back to the times preceding his father, Kronos, further and further back, until he reached a point that was furthest, because it had been the first.” Ch 7, pg 199.

Don’t feel bad about this one, the Fragmenta Orphicorum was never translated out of Greek and Latin. Calasso: ‘Literary institution of one’, remember. If you were looking for Greek myths off the beaten trail, you’ve found them, Calasso has apparently absorbed them all, swallowing the entirety of Greek myth a la Zeus and Phanes.

The treatment of myth in TMOCAH feels unique, because for all the actual story telling going on, there are equal measures of pontificating on the nature of myth. The structures of the tales are of as great an interest to Calasso as the contents themself. The numerous diversions from the myths are filled with digressions on them, perhaps so that we may understand his book more completely. Take this one for example.

“For centuries people have spoken of the Greek myths as of something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is it is the myths that are still out there waiting to wake us and be seen by us, like a tree waiting to greet our newly opened eyes.” Ch 8, pg 280.

This paragraph stands as its own on the page, which is about as much of a hint as Calasso seems to be willing to give readers. If we take it as instructional then perhaps Calasso means for us to rediscover Greek myth through his book. I will say there is something different about the way TMOCAH tells the myths, and a feeling of rediscovery/reawakening is not far off.

But let me test your knowledge some more. Do you know the story where Typhon stole Zeus’s thunderbolts, and then subdued him and cut out his sinews? I thought not. It’s not a story Rick Riordan would tell you.

“Olympus was uninhabited now, a museum in the night. And in a cave a few yards from Cadmus, although he hadn’t found the palace yet, lay Zeus, helpless. Wrapping himself around the gods 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.” Ch 12, pg 378.

Cadmus, the Phoenician prince sent to wander the world in search of his sister Europa happens to be near this cave where the world was about to end. Calasso, never afraid to speak for a character in a scene, describes Cadmus in that moment.

“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.” Ch 12, pg 379.

Very cool I must admit. Cadmus then plays his panpipe, and Typhon challenges him to a contest. Cadmus admits that his pipe cannot compete, but if he had a Lyre then that might be good enough. But not just any lyre, one strung with real tough sinews. Because Cadmus is the clever Protagonist and Typhon the hubristic Antagonist, he gives Cadmus the sinews. Cadmus promptly reunites Zeus with his sinews, he takes back the lightning, and saves the day, huzzah!

Reading this particular story was quite jarring to me because it is far more detailed and long than the most popular account of the battle between Zeus and Typhon as told by Hesiod. I had assumed I knew all the biggest battles and betrayals in Greek myth, so to read this for the first time was shocking. I had to hunt down where exactly this version of the tale came from.

The cumbersome to use ‘Sources’ at the back of the book has quotations from this section listed under a Nonnus and his Dionysiaca. I had literally never heard of Nonnus before, and I was absolutely struck to learn that he authored a 20,426 line (48 book) epic poem about the god Dionysus some time in the 5th century AD. For reference, the Iliad is 15,693 lines long (24 books), and the Odyssey 12,109 (24 books), and Nonnus puts them to shame. This is where Calasso draws the story of Cadmus, Zeus, and Typhon from, and he takes several other myths from Nonnus as well judging from the ‘Sources’.

The Dionysiaca entails the life of Dionysus, including his birth, adventures to India, and triumphant return to Greece. It is written in epic dactylic hexameter, like the Iliad and Odyssey, but has an extremely loose chronology and orders the text more by topic, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I tried to find out why Nonnus was not more well known. He even has another extant work, the The Paraphrase of John, a retelling of the Gospel of John in epic meter. The consensus is that his approximating imitation of Homer's style, the length, and the strange subject matter make him much less accessible than just reading Homer. There are also far fewer translations available. Before a group translation was released in 2022, the only previous English translation was from 1940! It seems a self perpetuating cycle. Few people have heard of Nonnus, so few people read him, and then fewer people translate him because no one reads him.

But is it actually bad? There is lots of stuff from antiquity that is, well, not great. This doesn’t make it not worth reading, but it does limit its widespread appeal. Calasso no doubt greatly admired Nonnus, and devotes several pages to discussing him. According to Calasso, the number of poets who have understood Nonnus could be counted on one hand. An Italian poet from the 1600’s, Giovan Battista Marino, is said by Calasso to have,

“... had no doubt about it: Nonnus was the only one who could compete with Homer, the only poet who could empty his work of all heroic sobriety and encourage every possible twirl and caprice while still preserving a quite vast frame all around.” Ch 10, pg 332.

This isn’t a quotation of Giovan, it is Calasso’s impression of Giovan’s reverence for Nonnus. On the previous page where Calasso untangles the enigma of whether Nonnus wrote his pagan epic or his Christian epic first he says,

“This great writer, who has often been disparagingly dubbed “baroque,” but in the same spirit could equally well be described as rococo, encrusted his poetry with voluptuous idylls and cosmological secrets. The Dionysiaca are an overflowing summa of the pagan world, a world that should have been on the brink of extinction but that here opens up before our eyes like a meadow of narcissi.” Ch 10, pg 330.

and,

“The Dionysiaca are the most sumptuous celebration imaginable of the redundant variant and the rampantly superfluous.” Ch 10, pg 331.

I think this is admiration, he does say ‘this great writer’, and voluptuous idylls sound nice. It is most definitely a compliment if you consider the quality of rampant superfluity in a redundantly various poem to be a good thing. Besides such compliments, there is other evidence that Calasso greatly admired Nonnus, such as that TMOCAH and the Dionysiaca take the abduction of Europa as their starting point. Interestingly, Nonnus invokes Proteus the shapeshifting sea god in his proem, which anticipates the ever changing shape of his narrative, and Calasso seems to have taken note, except Calasso’s ‘Proteus’ seems to be his fluid system of note taking.

Calasso also includes this quote from a German author on Nonnus,

“Nonnus alone pays for the sins of his age; for centuries his poem has been condemned to being a lumber room invaded by dust and corrosion where only the most zealous mythographer might penetrate.” Ch 10, pg 333.

It is strange that Calasso has included this comment on Nonnus. Seeing as he takes the same myth as Nonnus to begin his book, and that he regularly cites Nonnus, if we take a step back and look at this differently, this statement would seem to imply that Calasso himself is the ever-zealous mythographer…

The Turn.

I have a confession to make. Calasso owes more than a few references to the poet Nonnus, in fact, if we were to simplify the situation DRASTICALLY, the only apt comparison would be that Calasso copied Nonnus’ homework but didn’t make it look like he changed it enough. I will not use the P word for this (rhymes with lagiarization), because it is not. Calasso has a point to his borrowing of Nonnus material. But you may be thinking, there aren’t that many references to Nonnus in the sources! You probably even tallied them up and found that Nonnus is only ~3% of all cited material! Surely this doesn’t count as the P word.

While you are correct, the Nonnian influence in TMOCAH is more pervasive and more subtle than first appears. Let us look at each text as a whole. Both works are compendious in their approach to Greek myth. The number of topics, generations, heroes, Gods, and concepts covered in both are remarkable. Nonnus tells the tale of Dionysus, but touches on nearly the whole cycle of Greek mythology. Likewise, Calasso ostensibly starts and ends with the myth of Cadmus, but jumps forward and backward at will through mythological time. Both works are more like a loose collection of tales than a narrative.

In both there is also the strong emphasis on the interconnectedness and recurring similarities within mythology at large. Nonnus does this implicitly through Dionysus who mimics many of the famous heroes (Odysseus, Cadmus, Zeus), and Calasso does this explicitly. Recall his quote, _“No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments. Here the variant is the origin” (_Ch 5, pg 147) and, “Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels … But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo” (Ch 1, pg 22). Calasso is consciously engaging with the themes of Nonnus in a modern way.

Lastly, a large fraction of the myths contained in TMOCAH are actually Nonnus’ version of them, if they are not already myths exclusively found in the Dionysiaca. One Nonnus scholar chronicles the borrowed material in TMOCAH: the story of Cadmus, Zeus, and Typhon I mentioned earlier, as well as the stories of Aura, Pallene, Ampelus, Erigone, Icarius, Semele, Zagreus, and the marriage of Harmony; all the Nonnian version ^[2]. This may not seem like a lot, but each story can make up nearly half a chapter in some cases. And If the connection wasn’t clear enough, the entire first paragraph of TMOCAH is actually a direct translation of a section from Nonnus as well ^[2].

Rereading what has been said by Calasso about Nonnus already, if we slightly alter the wording we arrive at an interesting realization.

“~~The Dionysiaca~~ The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is an overflowing summa of the pagan world, a world that should have been on the brink of extinction but that here opens up before our eyes like a meadow of narcissi.”

and,

“~~The Dionysiaca~~ The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is the most sumptuous celebration imaginable of the redundant variant and the rampantly superfluous.”

These statements describe TMOCAH just as well as they do The Dionysiaca. It appears that Calasso himself is hinting at his book's similarities with the ancient author.

Let me be clear, Calasso does not plagiarize Nonnus, he’s doing this for a reason. Before the trick is revealed though we must look further into the structure of this enigma.

Earlier during the story of Ariadne and Dionysus I mentioned the recurring concept of the crown in TMOCAH. Calasso says some strange things about it, like

“The crown is the perfection of deceit, it is the deceit that circles in on itself, it is that perfection which includes deceit within it.” Ch 1, pg 20.

And,

“Coronis (crown) suggests a beauty that goes beyond diffuse brilliance” Ch 3, pg 57.

And similar to crowns in that they are both complete circles, the book also has much to say about necklaces. On the first page during the abduction of Europa she says, “Tell my father Europa has been carried off by a bull … Please, give this necklace to my mother” (Ch 1, pg 3). This exact necklace from the beginning makes an appearance in the final chapter of the book when Harmony is presented with a necklace as a wedding present, “Was it the wonderful necklace Hephaestus had wrought to celebrate the birth of Eros, the archer? Or was it the necklace Zeus had given to Europa, when he laid her down beneath a plane tree in Crete?” (Ch 12, pg 386).

It’s not just necklaces that appear at the beginning and end either. The first paragraph opens with a bull and so too the last: “On a beach in Sidon a bull was aping a lovers coo” (Ch 1, pg 3), and “But no one could erase those small letters, those fly’s feet that Cadmus the Phoenician had scattered across Greece, where the winds had brought him in his quest for Europa, carried off by a bull that rose from the sea” (Ch 12, pg 391). Calasso has this to say about bulls and ring composition, “In any Cretan story there is a bull at the beginning and a bull at the end” (Ch 1, pg 21).

Why does Calasso suggest that his story is a ‘Cretan story’ with a bull at the beginning and end, and what could that possibly mean? Well, a Cretan story refers to the scene near the end of the Odyssey where Odysseus spins a false tale to his loyal swineherd Eumaeus about how he is actually from Crete and fell into poverty after a botched expedition against the Egyptians. The tale in the context of the Odyssey is fake, but gave rise to the concept that Cretans are liars. This idea is corroborated by the logical paradox by Epimenides the Cretan, who stated that ‘All Cretans are liars’. The concept also appears in the New Testament in Titus 1.12, “One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway [sic] liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.” Calasso refers to his own story as a Cretan one because, much like the myths involving Crete, his story has a bull at the beginning and at the end, and also in some sense he is a liar ^[3]. He is hiding something from us.

As I mentioned earlier, the connection between the beginning and the end is pervasive in Greek myth. It arises out of the oral poetic story telling method that created the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as many of the famous Greek myths, and Calasso has woven his tale in the same way. He includes a crown, a necklace, and a bull (among others) at the beginning and end of his story. It is even more striking when we realize that he has fashioned his tale in a ring, and literally includes a ring (the necklace) at the beginning and the end, binding it together.

Now the comments on the crown begin to make sense, ‘The crown (ring) is the perfection of deceit … it is that perfection which includes deceit in it’. Calasso structures his work this way, and then has you accept his own praise for it! “Coronis (crown/ring) suggests a beauty that goes beyond a diffuse brilliance”. Don’t believe me that this is intentional? The quote on the cover of the book by essayist/novelist/screenwriter Gore Vidal reads, “A perfect work like no other. [Calasso] has re-created, in a blaze of light, the morning of our world.” Gore Vidal understood TMOCAH. He saw the perfect ring structure ‘which includes deceit in it’, the deceit of appropriating Nonnus, he saw the ‘beauty that goes beyond a diffuse brilliance’ into a blaze of light, and he may have also seen that Calasso ‘re-created’ it; the final sneaky piece to the puzzle.

The Prestige…

It is clear that Calasso tries to hide his debt to Nonnus, and we have seen that the debt goes beyond mere inspiration. But the final piece to the trick that Calasso is playing is the hardest to detect. I would venture to say it is virtually undetectable, because several strange conditions would have to be met for you to find it. First you would have to have read Nonnus’ Dionysiaca in the original Greek and translate the first paragraph, and second, you would need to read this book. The Venn diagram of people who meet these conditions contains one person at least ^[2]. Not even yours truly was aware, because again, who the hell has heard of Nonnus.

But to adequately explain the final trick and simultaneously clear Calasso’s name of any question of plagiarization, the work must be situated in its proper genre: a work of pure mythography ^[4].

Let me begin with this example. Imagine yourself in dark age Greece, somewhere around 900 B.C. A bard has come to your town and one evening you attend a performance. The bard begins by invoking the muse, and starts to speak directly of the thoughts and actions of the Gods themselves. He weaves an elaborate tale of the God Hephaestus catching Ares and Aphrodite mid coitus using an invisible net. All the Gods come to look, and this gets peals of laughter from the crowd. He stays for 4 more nights as the pay is good, and weaves a fresh tale each night, some of them you’ve never heard, others old classics. It is clear his knowledge is formidable, but even more apparent is the quality of his tales. Some of the details regarding what the brave hero did or when the Gods intervened are slightly different from the last time you heard this tale, but you pay it no mind, you’re almost definitely illiterate after all and such details are not important to you. In spite of the bard speaking of the gods and possibly your ancestors in an occasionally blasphemous way, nobody bats an eye, and everyone looks forward to this particular bard's return.

This is the mythographer, or back then the poet/bard, at work. The poet/bard creates the myths, both literally as they are composed live in oral-poetic performance, and narratively as they tweak and alter the versions of the stories they have inherited. They are not the originators of these tales, no one is. They use the raw material of myth as the basis for their own versions, and the myths we know today are a product of this. So how did they get away with this? These three things form the basis of the bard's authority: the invocation of the Muse, the breadth of his knowledge, and the quality of his tales.

It is not an accident that the poets invoke the Muse when starting their tale. To avoid saying anything potentially blasphemous about the Gods, the poet would start with the caveat that these are not his words, but the words of the Muse he is channeling. That way he can describe the seduction of Zeus by Hera, or the ensnarement of Ares and Aphrodite by Hephaestus without fear of consequence. With the advent of writing, this invocation was retained and used to imitate the opening of Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems.

So you must be wondering, does Calasso invoke the Muse in his story? No, but Calasso channels his authority from a different source: his ramshackle bibliography. The title of the section in the back containing the locations of the quotations is ‘Fonti’, Italian for ‘Sources’. One would then presume that these are the sources that were used to construct the stories in TMOCAH, but this is not strictly correct. The ‘sources’ at the back are simply the location in the works that he has taken a direct quote from, not where he has used material to build his narrative. It is thus difficult to determine whether he is paraphrasing the work or using it indirectly.

The ‘sources’ also don’t function like regular sources. There is no in-line number referring you to its location in the sources section. On the contrary, one must turn to the end of the book and refer back to the page where one is reading a quote and discover it that way. This is the exact opposite to how academic writing works. And here is the kicker: not all quotes are cited in the ‘sources’. The first page of the book contains quoted text that does not appear in the sources at all!

This is the first way that Calasso becomes a modern mythographer/poet/bard. He has used a veneer of academic writing to imbue his stories with an air of authority that it otherwise would not have. But this is not all he does. Calasso the modern bard dazzles the reader throughout with his encyclopedic knowledge of mythology. Remember the quote in the first section?

“No sooner have you grabbed hold of it than myth opens out into a fan of a thousand segments.” Ch 5, pg 147.

Calasso knows those thousand segments, and presents many of them to us, too many to scrutinize. Like I mentioned before, he has access to Greek myths so obscure that you can only read them in Greek or Latin. He has read and mined all the historical texts for their myths. He has synthesized and cross pollinated the available material and grown this lush, impenetrable garden of myth full of redundant, rampantly superfluous variants. This is the second way that Calasso covers his tracks: the breadth of his knowledge. In the face of so much esoteric material, who are we to question the finer points of translation of obscure poems no one has read? Calasso is the zealous mythographer who has penetrated the dusty lumber room of Nonnus.

And penetrate it he has, as the entire first two paragraphs of TMOCAH are a direct translation from Nonnus that he passes off as his own; there is no attribution to Nonnus in the ‘sources’. In the same way that the dark age poet did not create the stories that he told, neither has Calasso. He has only stepped to the front of a long line of mythographers/poets/bards to reinvigorate and reinvent these old tales, and add his own variations. So what variations has Calasso added then? Remember how I mentioned that the first two paragraphs of TMOCAH are a direct translation from a section of Nonnus’ Dionysiaca. I quote here from the first page of the book, where, having just been abducted by Zeus, Europa says:

“Tell my father Europa has been carried off by a bull–my kidnapper, my sailor, my future bedmate, I imagine. Please give this necklace to my Mother.” Ch 1, pg 3.

Except that Calasso has taken a liberty with the translation here. The Greek word from Nonnus that he has translated as necklace is βόστρυχα. It has no textual precedent to mean necklace, and the word normally refers to ringlets of hair or twisting grape vines ^[5]. Indeed, the W.H.D Rouse 1940 translation of The Dionysiaca renders it ‘ringlets’: it is Europa’s hair she wishes to give to her mother.

The change from ringlets to necklace is a conscious one. Calasso has snuck this tiny revision in, this initial kernel of deceit, because he has created the perfect work like no other. He has added a necklace (ring) at the beginning to reflect the necklace at the end, completing the ring of his story. All throughout Calasso has been reinforcing the idea of circular perfection, the perfect ring with deception at the center, and this is how he has fashioned his story.

“Perfection, any kind of perfection, always demands some kind of concealment. Without something hiding itself, or remaining hidden, there is no perfection. But how can the writer conceal the obviousness of the word and its figures of speech? With the light.” Ch 8, pg 282.

Perhaps a “blaze of light”?

This is the last piece to how the mythographer/poet hoodwinks his audience: the quality of his tales. One question that always comes up when discussing the Greek myths is why do we have these versions? We know of many versions of the same tale even in what has come down to us, so what is it about these ones that made them survive? The simplest answer is that they are good. The bards who told the best tales received the highest prestige, they won festivals and renown and could continue telling their tales, talent compounding talent. The best tales were the ones that spread by word of mouth, the ones that reinforced dynasties, the ones that resonated the most. With the advent of writing these tales were the first to be recorded, and through the chasm of time the monks only copied the best ones, reinforcing the survivorship bias.

Calasso’s work is good. He almost forces us to admit this with all his insistence on the ring as perfection and the fact that the book is composed as a ring. But even without his self reinforcing idea of circular perfection and his kernel of deceit, the book has a magnetic pull to it. The tales he weaves are compelling, full of purpose, and mystical. His imitation of the mythographer/poet/bard has let him write something completely unique in the modern world. Remember he explicitly tells us this book is not a novel. If he wanted to write a modern book then his use of Nonnus would be plagiarizing, because outside of the tradition of oral poetic bards this level of borrowing without attribution would be unacceptable. But luckily for Calasso oral poetic bards cannot plagiarize, that wouldn't even make sense to them. With the tools of the mythographer/poet/bard, the muse’s authority, the breadth of tales, and their quality, Calasso has created something extraordinary: new Greek myths. New in the sense that they were crafted using the same tools, mimicking the same tradition, and that they feel like the original, but we are aware of the differences.

And this is the magic of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

Conclusion

Knowing what we know now, what are we left with after having discovered Calasso’s trick? I would say that the book undoubtedly has practical things to teach us about myth. The emphasis on the variant as the origin, the revealing of the interwoven nature of myth, the etiological accounts of tragedy and mystery contained within. The nuggets of wisdom hidden between the stories are all fascinating in their own right, but what about the ring-like perfection that Calasso insists his work has? Is it now tarnished because we have unraveled his enigma? Again, he provides us with the answer.

“The solution to the enigma is thus itself an enigma, and a more difficult one. Resolving an enigma means shifting it to a higher level, as the first drops away.” Ch 10, pg 344.

We may know how Calasso has captivated his audience with this book, in the same way that we know how mythopoetic bards asserted their stories through time, but by resolving this enigma we only encounter another, more difficult one: the enigmatic nature of myth.

“The Sphinx [Calasso] hints at the indecipherable nature of man [myth], this elusive, multiform being [medium] whose definition cannot be otherwise than elusive and multiform.”

Just as the Sphinx reveals the indecipherable nature of man when Oedipous solves its riddle, so too do we reveal the indecipherable nature of myth when we engage with The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.