Presenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers the distant origins of secrets and tragedy, virginity, and rape. "A perfect work like no other. (Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our world."--Gore Vidal. 15 engravings.
Reading "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" by Roberto Calasso renews our relationship with classical myth, which had become an ancient catalog of infantile fables, reinterpreted thousands of times to adorn every form of art, antithetical to any religious sense. All that remained of it was the awareness that it expressed the grand idea of the divine, truly present everywhere, a faith we had lost forever, as the poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote: "The flowers and the herbs lived, the woods lived once"... but no longer "...since the rooms of Olympus are empty."
Calasso follows a tradition of Greek mythology different from the more common Dionysian one: scandalous, merciless, and therefore marginalized to the point of "damnatio memoriae," the ancient censorship. The author's stylistic and dialectical virtuosity, at times, almost ties new knots rather than unties existing ones, but in the end, the innate simplicity of myth always prevails. The Greek soul was simple and clear because it chose to represent the truth, not retreating by hiding or repressing the forces of life and death. Like a loving and unrestrained mirror, it reflected our entire reality and exalted it, saying: "We are made this way and we are beautiful." A humanity with such a degree of acceptance of itself and the world was a humanity that had already saved itself, and its culture could do nothing but spread throughout the inhabited world like an incurable infection of freedom.
Myths represent universal psychological and anthropological archetypes, recounting the origins of epochal social changes such as the cultivation of the olive tree or the vine with fantastical and naturalistic reconstructions of an emotional and refined beauty; and when tragedy strikes, unjust and cruel death promises not rebirth or resurrection but transformation.
Living nature in archaic Greece was dynamic, characterized by multiplicity and contradiction, seen not as a defect or a flaw but as a richness of reality and the words that interpret it. Odysseus's polytropia, his "multifaceted genius," is the hallmark of versatile human nature and its joyful success.
Humanity's epochal turning points can become stories of love and death, where delicate refinement and sensual beauty overcome pain, grateful for a sublime transformation. Dionysus's dearest friend, Ampelos, had been killed by a bull. The loss caused excruciating pain in Dionysus, and he, the god who could not weep, shed warm tears for the first time. It was a sign that something important for the world was happening: Ampelos would be transformed into vine (in Greek, àmpelos). "He who had brought tears to the god who does not cry would also bring delight to the world." Then Dionysus recovered. When the grapes born from Ampelos's body were ripe, he picked the first bunches, gently squeezed them between his hands, with a gesture he seemed to have always known, and looked at his red-stained fingers. He licked them. He thought: Ampelos, your end proves the splendor of your body. Even in death you have not lost your rosy color." Dionysus's lover had provided what life lacked, what life awaited: intoxication.
Yet Calasso, who so happily follows the myth in its minority version, falls into the mainstream version of ancient Greek bisexuality, which holds it heavily limited by cultural prejudices. To believe this goes against the evidence of the myth and against reality. In this regard, I recommend everyone to read the results of James Davidson's great and beautiful research: The Greeks and Greek Love.