Feminine Figures of Death in Greece

Jean-Pierre Vernant; Anne Doueihi

Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 2. (Summer, 1986), pp. 54-64.

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TEXTS/CON TEXTS

FEMININE FIGURES OF DEATH IN GREECE

)EAN-PIERRE VERNANT

To speak of death, Greek uses a masculine name: Thanatos. In figural representations Thanatos appears, together with his brother, Hypnos, Sleep as a man in the prime of life, wearing a helmet and armor.' Raising the corpse of a hero fallen on the field of battle, bearing it off to a distant place so that it may receive funeral honors, the two divine brothers can be distinguished from or- dinary warriors only by the wings on their shoulders. There is nothing terrifying and even less that is monstrous about this Thanatos whose role is not to kill but to welcome the dead, to transport him who has lost his life. In visual art and epic representations, virile Thanatos can even assume the form of the warrior who has been able to discover the perfect fulfillment of his life in what the Greeks call "a beautiful death." Thanks to his exploits, in and through his heroic death, the warrior fallen on the front line of battle remains forever present in men's lives and memories: the epic unceasingly celebrates his name and sings his imperishable glory; sixth-century steles present him to public view upon his tomb, forever erect in the flower of his youth, shining with virile beauty.

The masculine figure of Thanatos thus does not seem to incarnate the terri- ble destructive force that descends upon human beings to destroy them, but rather that state other than life, that new condition to which funeral rites offer men access and from which none can escape, since, born of a mortal race, all must one day take leave of the light of the Sun to be delivered to the world of darkness and Night.

In its frightening aspect, as a power of terror expressing the unspeakable and the unthinkable, expressing the radical alterity, it is a feminine figure that embodies the horror of death: the monstrous face of Gorgo, whose unbearable gaze transforms men into stone. And it is another feminine figure, Ker- black, grim, evil, horrible, atrocious-who represents death as a malefic force that sweeps down upon humans to destroy them, and who, thirstingfor their blood, devours them to swallow them into that night in which, according to destiny, they will perish.

Certainly, Thanatos is not "peaceful and ever gentle to mortals," as is his brother, Sleep. According to Hesiod, Thanatos has "a heart of iron, an im- placable soul of bronze," but, as the poet quickly adds, "he keeps forever the man he has taken" [Theogony 763, 765-661. One does not escape Thanatos; one does not return from him. Even cunning Sisyphus, who twice succeeds in tricking Thanatos, finally has to pass through the dire experience. Thanatos i s in-

' For example, red-figured Attic kraters, New York 1972- 1 1 -10, Louvre G 163. See on th~ssublect D. von Bothmer, "The death of Sarpedon,"~n The Creek Vase, Ed. 5. L. Hyatt, 63-80.

exorable, but the picture painted of Ker is altogether different. In the Iliad, the "destructive Ker" is depicted in full action on Achilles' shield: "She carries a warrior, still alive in spite of his fresh wounds, or another still unhurt, or one already dead whom she drags by his feet through the carnage, and on her shoulders she wears a robe stained red by the men's blood" [Iliad 18.535ffJ. When the author of the Shield, generally considered to be Hesiod, describes this same scene, he embellishes the description:

Their white teeth clattering, the black Keres-grim, terrifying, frightful, dripping with blood -fought over the fallen corpses. Greedy, they all wanted to inhale the dark blood. They would dig their huge claws into the flesh of the first warrior they snatched, either as he lay dead, or as he collapsed from his wounds, and his soul would immediately fall to Hades, into icey Tartarus. Then, when they had had their fill of human blood, they would toss the corpse behind them and rush back in their fury to the clash of battle. [Hesiod, Shield, 284ffl

We are no longer in the register of an "irremediable lot," like Thanatos, from which no mortal creature can escape, but which by the very manner in which he encounters it the hero makes the occasion for a glorious survival in human memory. We are, rather, in the realm of evil forces, sinister furies assuaging their bloodthirsty hatred.

Thanatos is male, Gorgo and Ker are female; does the opposition of the sexes corre- spond to the two faces of death to which I referred in a recent study? [Le Debat, 12 May 1981 51-59] Thanatos i s closer to the beautiful death that, as the ideal of the heroic life, guarantees a glorious immortality. Gorgo and Ker are nearer to all the repulsion and horror that can be mobilized by the transformation of a living being into a corpse and of a corpse into carrion. But one can go a step further. The funerary ritual, the status of the dead, the beautiful dead, the figure of Thanatos- these are all various means by which the living make the dead present, more present even, among the living, than are the living themselves. They constitute a social strategy which, in making the dead and particularly a certain few of the dead into the city's very past, a past made continuously present to the group through the mechanisms of collective memory, attempts to domesticate death, to civilize it -that is to say, to deny it as such. Gorgo and Ker are not the dead as the living remember, com-memorate, and celebrate them, but rather they are the direct confrontation with death itself. They are death proper, that beyond-the-threshold, the gaping aperture of the other side that no gaze can penetrate and no discourse can express: they are nothing but the horror of an unspeakable Night.

No doubt this dichotomy i s too harsh and it should be nuanced with refinements, or at least with some additions. There are feminine figures of death -Sirens, Harpies, Sphinxes and others- in whom attraction, pleasure, and seduction are combined with anguish and frightfulness; there are zones in which Thanatos interfaces with Eros and where the warrior's fight to the death shares a hazy boundary with the attraction and sexual union of man and woman.

It will be necessary to pursue several paths in order to discern those regions in which Thanatos and Eros, Death and Desire, are neighbors, in order to locate among the Greek figures of death those that borrow from a woman, and most especially from the face of a young girl, the power of strange fascination and the disquieting charm of her beauty.2 The first of these paths takes us back to the origins. In the Theogony, the birth of Aphrodite im- mediately precedes a catalog of Night's children, whose three first-born have three names for death: odious Destiny (Moros), black Ker, and Thanatos [Theogony 190-2061,

Hardly is she born when Aphrodite is flanked by Eros and Himeros, Love and Desire, who thereafter never leave her side [Theogony 2011. From the first day her lot and her privilege are, together with pleasure's gentle sweetness, the whispers of young girls, par- thenoi oaroi [oaros, oarismos mean tender babbling, whispering; oaristos, a lover's meeting; oarizein, intimate whispering; all these terms are related to oar, the feminine bed-

2Sorne of these paths have already been indicated by L. Kahn-Lyotard and N. Loraux; cf. art. M in the Dictionnaire des Mythologies edited by Y. Bonnefoy.

diacritics/ summer 1986 55

companion, the wife with whom one exchanges, among other things, confidences on the pillowl-the whispers of young girls, then, but also lies, deceitful talk [exapatio] and the union of lovers [philotes]

Let us now look at the children of Night, dark Nux who seem to be completely opposite to shining, golden Aphrodite. The feminine figure of death, Ker, holds a special place among this brood. Night is the power that first arises, with Erebus, directly out of Chaos, the original void, when nothing exists in the world but an immense dark abyss, an opening without end and without direction. Chaos, abyss, is related to chaino, chasko: to open up, gape open. Now, in the Iliad, Book 23, line 78, the phantom of Patrocles, appearing suddenly to Achilles, refers to the death destiny has resewed for him in the form of "horrible Ker who opened her mouth to swallow me." The verb that is used, arnphichaino, reveals that when Ker opens her mouth to swallow someone, she returns him to the original abyss; Night and her progeny are like the trace and the continuation in today's organized cosmos of that obscure primordial indistinction. Whom do we see in this lineage which, barely having emerged from Chaos, Night engenders from herself, without uniting with anyone, as if she fashioned her progeniture out of her own shadowy cloth? Next to dark, negative forces in- carnating death, misfortune, privation, and punishment, there appear the beautiful young girls known as the Hesperides [Theogony 21 51. In the extreme west, at the edge of the world where each evening the Sun is swallowed in order that it too may disappear into the night, these virgins guard the golden apples confided to their care. The apple: a fruit which a lover offers his beloved in declaration of his love, symbol of erotic union, promise of eternal mar- riage. But the young girls' location in an inaccessible garden, beyond the Ocean that marks the frontier of the world, guarded by a ferocious dragon, tells us that while Zeus and Hera may have been united there, in order for mortals to reach it-as they may sometimes dream of doing- they have to pass beyond death.

More significantly still, among Night's progeny, among the atrocities engendered by the ancient goddess, there appear Philotes and Apate, Loving Tenderness and Deceit- the two beings who are Aphrodite's honor [time] and her lot [rnoira]. But that is not all. In connection with the sinister squadron of Clashes, Battles, Manslaughters, and Murders- all forms of violent death-the Deceitful Lies [pseudois logoi] also present themselves. These bring to mind the love-talk of young girls, with their deceitful ruses [exapatail-all the more so since other passages in Hesiod are explicit on this point: Hermes places pseudea th'airnulious te logous, "lies and deceitful words," in the breast of the first woman, Pandora, from whom issued "the race of feminine women" [Hesiod, Works and Days 781. Hesiod also warns his male readers not to let a woman dupe his senses with deceitful babbling [Works and Days 373, 7881. Furthermore, is it necessary to point out that when women did not yet exist- before Pandora was created -death did not exist for men either. Mingling with the gods, liv- ing like them, in the Golden Age men even remained young like the gods throughout their existence, and a kind of gentle sleep took the place of death for them. Death and woman arose together.

That Hesiod's image of woman - her seductiveness, the attraction she exercises over men, her Aphroditean nature - is thus in complicity with the nocturnal Powers of death may be attributed to what has been called Hesiod's mysogyny. However, this would mean both simplifying Hesiod, whose "mysogyny" must be relocated in its cultural context, and also neglecting the details of the exchanges that connect Eros and Thanatos and the contamina- tions of each by the other, details that are specific but have a wider bearing.

Amorous whispers, a tender meeting of a boy and a girl-these we find again in a passage of the Iliad [22.122-291 in which they have been considered inexplicable and in- congruous. The passage in question occurs at the culminating point of the story. Alone at the walls of Troy awaiting Achilles who is approaching to confront him, Hector overhears his parents beseeching him to return to safety like the other Trojans. If he accepts hand-to-hand combat, they tell him, his death is certain. Hector questions himself, arguing with his heart. For a moment he dreams of an impossible accord that would allow the warring confronta- tion of the two men to be avoided. He would be able to lay down his shield, his spear, take off his helmet and his arms, walk toward Achilles and offer him Helen and all the riches that the Achaeans could wish for. However, if he approached the Greek without his warrior's equipment, gymnos, a term which in this military context means "unarmed," his enemy

would kill him without mercy. But the text does not merely say gymnos; it adds a com- parison that displaces the word's meaning: "gyrnnos, exactly like a woman."

This evocation of a meeting with the enemy in which one of the warriors, Hector, would feel he was in the position of a quasi-woman in relation to the other, Achilles, presents the Trojan with an occasion to make a remark that has not failed to intrigue com- mentators. "No," Hector says to himself, "it is not the moment to talk to him gently whisper- ing like a young man and a young girl, in the way a young man and a young maiden whisper together. Better to bring on the fight with him as soon as possible to end our quarrel." In this passage there is certainly an opposition between the hand-to-hand combat of male warriors under the sign of Thanatos and the amorous encounter of a boy and a girl under the sign of Eros, but to be expressed and in order to make sense, this opposition presupposes an analogical relation [un fond d'analogie] between these two ways of "getting close," or "union."

Several proofs of this can be found. First of all, on two occasions the term oaristus, "in- timate rendezvous" (which is thus less out of place in Hector's mouth than has been sup- posed) is used in the Iliad to designate the direct confrontation of hand-to-hand close combat of fighters on the front line: oaristus prornachon [Iliad 13.2911; and, in a more general sense, "to perish or survive, this i s polernou oaristus, the intimate rendezvous of battle [ I 7.2281."

In the second place, the feminine values of gyrnnos underscored by Hector find themselves confirmed at the end of the duel in which neither of the adversaries had wanted to touch the other. "Come closer," Achilles had said to Hector in the course of another en- counter, "come closer and die more quickly" [Iliad 20.4291. Once the Trojan hero is dead, Achilles, according to custom, takes off Hector's armor. Hector, stretched out on the ground, is gymnos-disarmed, denuded, as he had for a moment considered becoming in order to avoid the trial of combat. The Achaeans crowd around him. Each one strikes a blow at him, saying to his neighbor, "See now, this Hector is much softer to handle [rnalakoteros arnphaasthai] than he was when he set fire to our ships" [Iliad 22.373-741. Malakos, soft, limp, refers to the feminine orthe effeminate. In the background of murderous hand-to-hand combat, the latent presence of images of carnal union is also indicated by the manner in which the heroic warriors attribute to their weapons of virile combat, the spear and the sword, a desire to satisfy themselves with the enemy's flesh. "My long spear," Hector says to Ajax, "will devour your white flesh -chroa leirioenta dapsei" [ I 3.8301. White as the lily, Ajax's flesh? On vases, as is well known, male figures are painted brown; it is the women who are white.

An entire series of terms, then, through their convergence, underline the intersection of images of combat to the death with the erotic embrace. Miegnurni, sexual union, is also to join and meet in battle. When Diomedes"joins with" the Trojans [5.143], it means he meets

diacritics/ summer 1986 57

them hand t o hand, he is close upon them, w i th them. In front of Hector, when he invites his men "not to the dance, but t o battle," Ajax says that the Greeks have nothing else t o d o but t o "mixai" ardor and arms, t o d o close battle wi th the enemy, autoschedie, close up, body t o body [15.510].

Similarly, damazo, damnemi, mean t o subjugate, t o tame. O n e subjugates a woman w h o m one makes one's own , just as one subjugates the enemy w h o m one slays. Before combat, each warrior boasts of soon dominating his adversary; but in the Theogony, it is Eros w h o m Hesiod celebrates as having the power of subjugating all the gods and all mortals [122]. Eros' mastery, the yoke he imposes, is the sign of a kind of magic, thelxis. Eros is a sorceror. W h e n he takes possession of someone, he snatches him out of his ordinary con- cerns, out of the horizon of his day-to-day life t o open u p a new dimension of existence for him. And this transformation from within which delivers one totally into the god's power is what the Greeks express in the saying that Eros envelopes one's head and one's thoughts like a cloud, that the surrounds and hides one, amphikaluptein. [Thus at iliad 23,442, Paris says t o Helen: "Never before has Eros enveloped my senses t o such an extent."] Death too, when it seizes a person t o take him from the world of light t o that of night, hides him in the hooded mantle of a dark cloud: it covers his face, delivered t o invisibility, w i th a mask of darkness.

In a tribute he pays to Eros, Hesiod names him using the epithet lusimeles, he w h o tears apart, w h o dismembers. In the lover's joust, desire breaks the knees: at the sight of Penelope, the suitor's knees waver - luto gounataunder the magic of love" [Odyssey 18.21 2; see Theogony 120; 91 1; Archilocus, fr. 212 (Tarditi); and Sappho, Poet. Lesb. frag. 130 (Lobel Page)]. W h e n a fighter falls and does not rise again, it is said his knees are broken [Iliad 5.1 76, 11.579, 16.332, 21.1 14, 22.3351. W h y the knees? They are the seat of a vital energy, a virile power related t o the humid element. These reserves of force disappear completely at death; the dead are the Kamontes or Kekmekotes, those w h o are tired, exhausted, empty. But these forces also flow and are spent in the toil of war w i th its exhaustion, its sweat, its tears of pain and grief, just as they are spent in the toil of love in which a man dries up, losing his freshness and his juices whi le the woman, all liquidity, flows all the more. Because of the desire that emanates from her, especially from her eyes and her moist gaze, the mere presence of a woman is enough t o soften and liquify male powers, t o disarm a man and make him weak in the knees. In this difference which sets it in opposition to masculinity . . whi le attracting men t o itself w i th an irresistible force, femininity acts like death. A fragment of Alcman says it precisely [Poetae Melici Craeci 3 fr. 3, col. 21: "By the desire that breaks the body, lusimeles, she [a woman[ has a gaze that is more dissolvant [takeros: languishing, liqui- fying, dissolving] than Hypnos or Thanatos." A woman's gaze more liquifying than death: here Thanatos takes on the face of a woman, no longer the repulsive, monstrous face of Gorgo or Ker, but one that is overwhelming because of its beauty, attractive and dangerous at the same t ime because it is the object of an impossible desire, a desire of that which is other.

Alcman's text opens u p a new path for us. The poet does not call the desire that dismembers himeros, he calls it ~ o t h o s . Plato e x ~ l a i n s the difference between the t w o terms very clearly: himeros designates the desire for a partner w h o is present, a desire ready t o be satisfied; pothos is the desire for what is absent, a desire that is a suffering because it cannot be fulfilled: regret, nostalgia [Plato, Cratylus 420a-b]. Pothos is an ambiguous feeling since it implies the passionate elan of one's whole being towards the plenitude of a beloved presence and at the same t ime the painful shock of absence, the realization of an emptiness, of an unbridgeable distance. As a term, pothos belongs t o the vocabulary of mourning. W h e n a man dies, before the funeral ceremony his relatives ritually deprive themselves of food, drink, and sleep. Overcome by pothos in relation t o the deceased, they remember him continuously, vowing, as Achilles vows t o Patrocles, t o remember him always-to be haunted by him, one would have t o say. By a long effort of evocation they make him pres- ent, but in the very moment in wh ich they see him in front of them in the form of his double, his eidolon, when they speak t o his double as if it were t o him in person, this ungraspable presence disappears. The manner in which the dead are present entails in itself an i r -remediable absence.

A play of absence in presence, the obsession w i th someone w h o is absent and w h o oc- cupies one's whole horizon, and yet w h o m one can never grasp because he belongs t o the

realm beyond: this is the experience that a living person has of his relation with someone dead, with one who has passed on, when he i s in mourning. This is, too, for the lover, the experience of desire with all its incompleteness and in his powerlessness to have his sexual partner always for himself, to make her entirely and forever his own. Funereal pothos and erotic pothos correspond exactly. The figure of the beloved woman whose image haunts and escapes the lover intersects with that of death.

In The Persians, Aeschylus evokes the barbarian women whose husbands, gone to do battle for Xerxes, have fallen in distant lands and will not return. "The beds are filled with the tears of the wives' pothos; each mourning Persian woman remains abandoned, alone. She accompanies her husband with the pothos she feels for him" [133-391. The same theme is taken up in the Agamemnon [406, 7491, but this time it is the amorouspothos for Helen that, having mastered Menelaus' heart, peoples the palace abandoned by his wife with phantoms bhasmata] of the beloved, with her apparitions in dreams [oneirophantoi]. Radiant with charm, haunting and elusive, Helen i s like a person from the beyond, doubled in this life and on this earth in herself and her phantom, her eidolon. A fatal beauty created by Zeus to destroy human beings, to make them kill one another at the walls of Troy, she, more so than her sister Clytemnestra, deserves the appellation "slayer of men" [Euripides, Helen 52-55; Electra 1282-84; Orestes 161. She who is "most beautiful" also incarnates horrible Erinys, the savage and murderous Ker. In her, desire and death are joined and intimately mixed.

One of the chapters of Emily Vermeule's beautiful book, Aspects of Death in Early Creek Art and Poetry from which we have borrowed much, is entitled "On the Wings of the Morn- ing: The Pornography of Death." The subtitle is provocative, but entirely justified both by the visual and literary documents she has collected on the theme of death as abduction by a divinity. An entire aspect of the the Greek imaginary [imaginaire] of earth refers to winged supernatural Powers like Eros, Hypnos, and Thanatos, who, for the love of a mortal whose beauty has seduced them, make their beloved disappear from here below in order to be united with them, carrying them off into the beyond. Such sudden disappearances that leave no trace [aphanismos], such forms of escape by a human being into the beyond as he is lifted out of earthly life and transported to another world, can according to the circumstance lead to a better situation or a worse one, or to one that is both better and worse at the same time. It can be a special advancement that liberates the fortunate elect from the limitations of mortal existence, installing him on the Isle of the Blessed or resulting in a place for him beside the gods on Olympus-as when Zeus abducts Ganymede; when Eos, the Dawn, takes away Tithonos; and Hemera, Orion. It may be quite simply that death, in most cases dreaded as the unknown, is nevertheless desired since through it the soul avoids the ills assailing the individual; one reaches the point where one longs to share in the fate of Orithyia and be carried off on the wings of Boreas the North Wind, or Thuella, Tempest, or of Harpuia, Hurricane. Penelope, for example, in desperation, wishes for such an end in the Odyssey [20.63-811.

These stories of abduction by some winged demon that so pleased the Greeks have one point in common. This is, to use Emily Vermeule's terms once again, that in their eyes, "love and death were two aspects of the same power, as in the myth of Persephone or Helen of Troy." Emily Vermeule, an archaeologist, has collected the most expressive images in which one and the same figure represents the two faces of this ambiguous power, as for instance in the scene of psychostasis found on the Boston Throne, where a young man, his large wings spread out and a smile on his lips, weighs the eidola of two warriors-two naked young men-on a scale in order to decide which of the two who are fighting to the death he must carry off. Who is holding the scales? Is it Eros, or is it Thanatos? The beautiful ephebe, winged and smiling, i s both at the same time [Vermeule 1591.

I will not discuss the dossier of images and texts that Emily Vermeule has established on the winged demonesses with the breast and face of a woman -Harpies, Sphinxes, and Sirens-whom the Greeks, since the archaic age, depicted on tombstones to guard and watch over the dead. Like Dawn, Boreas, Zephyros, and the Tempests (Theullai), the Harpies are powers that "ravish" in both senses of the word. In the Greek, the word for "ravish" is harpazein. The Sphinx is called "Ker, ravisher of men," harpaxandron Ker, in Aeschylus' The Seven Against Thebes [line 7771. These female monsters who combine feminine charm with predatory talons or the claws of a wildcat are at times represented

diacritics/ summer 1986 59

holding a dead persons the way a mother holds her child, carrying him off, perhaps to a bet- ter world; at times they are depicted pursuing a man out of erotic desire or sitting astride him to have intercourse with him; or again attacking him to tear him to shreds and devour him. The dead, writes Emily Vermeule, are their victims and their lovers at the same time.

Vermeule's demonstration suffices; I would like to add to it only by juxtaposing two episodes of the Odyssey. The first relates to the Sirens, the second to Calypso.

It i s Circe who warns Odysseus and teaches him the ruse that, if he wishes to "escape" death and Ker, will save him and his men. The problem is to "escape" the seductive song of the Siren's divine voices and their flowering meadow, leirnon anthernoeis. In the manner of Eros the magician, they charm and bewitch [thelgousi] all human beings who approach them; they charm them with their melodious song, but none who listens to them returns to his home. Rather, they remain fixed in place in their meadow encircled by a piled mass of whitened bones and putrefied corpses with dessicated skins. In order not to hear them, the sailors must therefore plug their ears with wax. As for Odysseus, if he wants to hear their song he must choose either to be lost like everyone who is caught by these creatures' spell, or let himself be tied up by his hands and feet to the ship's mast.

Up to this point everything about these bird-women seems clear. Their cries, their flowering meadow (leirnon, meadow, is one of the words used to designate female genitalia), their charm (thelxis) locates them in all their irresistibility unequivocally in the realm of sexual attraction, or erotic appeal.3 At the same time, they are death, and death in its most brutally monstrous aspect: no funeral, no tomb, only the corpse's decomposition in the open air. Pure desire, pure death, without any social adjustment from any side.

But the story becomes more complex. The boat advances. As it passes close by the Sirens, the breeze that pushed it suddenly dies down. There isn't a Greath of wind. There isn't a wave. A god has put the sea to sleep. It is the galene, the flat calm, the serenity of the port, of safety after the storm, or of a land where all life is forever fixed. The crew is deaf and Odysseus bound up. The Sirens watch the boat as it rows by. What do they do? They intone a harmonious song (entunon aoiden), as does a bard before his audience. This song is

3 0 n the erotic value of leirnon, which can designated the feminine genitalia, see AndrP Motte, Prairies et jardins de la Grece antique. O n its funeral or macabre value, see loc. cit. pp. 250-79. The flowering meadow where the bewitching Sirens are encamped is strewn wi th bones and the rotting flesh of human debris [Odyssey 72.45-461.

especially addressed to Odysseus, for whom it is composed. "Come here, come to us, Odysseus Odysseus, the pride of the Achaeans." Poluainos, mega kudos Achaion: the for- mula i s the same as the one that the Iliad puts into Agamemnon's mouth when he praises Odysseus [Odyssey 6.73; cf. P. Pucci's analysis, "The Song of the Sirens," Arethusa 121-321. To seduce the Odyssey's navigator, holding on to life, tossed from one ordeal to another, the Sirens celebrated in front of him the Odysseus whom the song of the lliad immortalizes: the virile male warrior whose glory is indefinitely repeated from rhapsody to rhapsody and re- mains imperishable. In the mirror of the Siren's song Odysseus sees himself not as he is, struggling on the surface of the sea, but as he will be when he is dead, as death will make him, forever magnified in the memory of the living, transmuted from the suffering and misfortune of his actual, miserable existence to the glorious brilliance of his fame and of the story of his exploits. What sparkles in the Siren-women's tempting words i s the illusory hope for the listener to find himself living as a mortal under the light of the sun, and at the same time surviving in imperishable glory with the status of a dead hero. It is as if the boundaries of human existence were opened up by their charming bodies, their flowering meadow, their soft voice, and as if one could through them pass beyond those boundaries without at the same time ceasing to exist.

In effect, they promise Odysseus that after having tasted the pleasure of their song, he will leave again, sailing the sea to his home, but wiser through having learned all that they know. And this knowledge whose secret they are able to bestow is what the bards sing, what happened at Argos and by the walls of Troy, all that took place long ago on earth and which, in order to become the object of a song of praise, had first to disappear and fall into invisi- bility.

When a bard invokes the Muses it i s in order to make the noble deeds of the hero of days gone by live again for the people today. The Sirens are the opposite of the Muses. Their song has the same charm as that of the daughters of Memory; they too bestow a knowledge that cannot be forgotten. But whoever succumbs to the attraction of their beauty, the seduc- tion of their voice, the temptation of the knowledge they hold in their custody, does not penetrate there in order to live forever in the splendor of eternal reknown; instead, he reaches a shore whitened with bones and with the debris of rotting human flesh. If it is given to a living man to hear in advance the song that will sing his glory and his memory, what he discovers i s not a beautiful death and immortal glory, but the horror of the cadaver and of decomposition: a hideous death. Death is a threshold. One cannot pass over it and remain alive. Beyond the threshold, from its other side, the beautiful feminine face that attracts you and beckons to you is a face of terror: the unspeakable. For the man firmly planted in mortal life, the Siren's charm, the seductiveness of their bodies, the softness of their voices, are related to the Gorgo's horrifying grimace and the heart-chilling stridency of her inhuman howling.

And what of Calypso? From the first verses of the Odyssey [ I .11-151, the nymph appears in and occupies the foreground of the scene. The poet begins his narrative with her. The same lines are repeated in the text at the beginning of Song 5 where, as in Song 1, they serve to introduce the assembly of the gods and the decision, this time effective, already taken but not put into action in Song 1, of sending Hermes as messenger to Calypso in order to transmit to her the command to liberate Odysseus. [On the duplication of this episode and on its bearing on the poem's narrative chronology, see E. Delebecque, Construction de I'Odyssee, 12-13.] In front of the gods assembled on Olympos, Athena denounces Calypso as responsible for the misfortunes besetting her protege. It is to her that Zeus then im- mediately sends messenger Hermes with the command to allow Odysseus to set sail and return home. The figure of Calypso, the goddess' love for a mortal, the long captivity in which she holds Odysseus near he r~e l f ,~ this whole episode, by its place at the beginning of the narrative, by being taken up again repeatedly throughout the course of the text [ I .11-87, 4.555-58, 5.1 1-300, 7.241 -66, 8.450-53, 9.29-30, 12.389, 447-50, 17.140-44, 23.333-381,

4As he himselfstates in 7.259-61 of the Odyssey in response to a question posed by Arete, queen of the Phaecians, Odysseus remained wi th Calypso for seven years. Seven years, out of a total time span of about eight or nine years of wandering from the end of the Trojan War until his return to Ithaca, says a good deal about the place that this sojourn occupies in the journey as a whole.

diacritics1summer 1986 61

confers upon the King of Ithaca's wanderings their real significance and reveals what is really at stake in the entire Odyssean adventure: whether the hero will or will not return, by way of his homeland, to the world of mortals. "All the other heroes who had saved their necks from death had reached their home . . . he alone was left still longing to return and longing for his wife because an august nymph held him by force, far away, in the depth of her caverns, Calypso, the all-divine, who burned to have him as her husband" [Odyssey 1.11-15, repeated in Song 51.

Derived from kaluptein, "to hide," Calypso's name, in all its transparency, delivers the secret of the powers incarnated by the goddess: in the depth of her caverns she is not merely "the hidden one"; she is also and above all "the one who hides others." In order to "hide" Odysseus, Calypso did not, like Thanatos and Eros, Death and Love, have to kidnap and ravish him. In this particular she differs from the divinities whose example she invokes in front of Hermes to justify her case, and who, in order to satisfy their amorous passion for a mortal carried him off with them into the beyond, making him suddenly disappear, still liv- ing, from the face of the earth [Odyssey 5.120ff.; on being suddenly "carried off" by a super- natural power see Iliad 8.346-47, Odyssey 20.61, and above all the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, 1, 202-381. Thus Eos, the Dawn goddess, "ravished" Tithon; and Hemera, O r i ~ n . ~

This time, it is shipwrecked Odysseus who himself came to the extreme West, to the end of the world, landing at Calypso's rocky cave, that "navel of the seas,"6 embellished with woods, ravishing springs and soft meadows reminiscent of the erotic and macabre "flowering meadow" encircling the rocky isle where the Sirens sing to charm and destroy those who hear them. [The Odyssey, Song 5, line 72, refers to Calypso's "soft meadows," leirnones malakoi, and at Song 12, line 158, to the Siren's "flowering meadow," leimon anthemoeis.]

The island on which the nymph and the man cohabit, cut off from everything and everyone, in the solitude of their amorous encounter, their isolation together, is situated in a sort of marginal space, a place apart, distant from the gods and distant from mortals [Odyssey 5.55, 5.80 and 100, 5.101-21. It i s another world that is neither the world of the ever-youthful Immortals, even though Calypso is a goddess,' nor that of humans subject to old age and death, even though Odysseus i s a mortal, not that of the dead beneath Earth in Hades: it is a sort of nowhere-land into which Odysseus has disappeared, swallowed up without leaving a trace, and where he lives a life between parentheses.

Like the Sirens, Calypso, who also sings with a beautiful voice, charms Odysseus by constantly singing litanies of amorous tenderness, aiei de rnalakoisi kai arnuliosi logoisi thelgei. Thelgei: she enchants, she bewitches him to make him forget Ithaca, hopos ithakes epilesetai [Odysseus 5.61 and 1.56-57, repeated in Song 51.

51n his Homeric Problems j68.51, Heraclitus, interpreting the loves of Hemera and Orion allegorically, underlines the connection between Thanatos and Eros: "When a young man of noble iamily and great beauty dies," he writes, "one euphemistically calls his funeral procession, which takes place at dawn, a "kidnapping by Hemera,"as if he were not dead at all but had been ravished because he was the object of an erotic passion."

6iocated where the sun sets, at the extreme limit of the world, the island is nevertheless called om- phalos thallasses, navel of the world 11.50 and repeated in Song 51 and is also designated as nesos ogugie, Ogygian island 11.851, a qualification that Hesiod applies to the waters of the Styx, the infernal river flow- ing beneath the earth, across the black night, at the bottom of Tartarus lTheogony 8061. It is in the same subterranean place that Heslod, contrary to tradition which places him at the extreme west, locates Atlas, father of Calypso, "supporting the vast sky with his head and his arms, without losing strength"/Theogony 7481. When Homer speaks of the "navel of the sea"in relation to the island where Calypso resides, it is in order to also immediately evoke the goddess' father, that Atlas of wrongful mind who "knows the pro- found abysses of the entire sea,"and who, at the same time "holds the high columns that now separate the sky and the earth"[Odyssey 1.50-541. The mythic geography of the Creeks locates Atlas, in his role as deeply-rooted cosmic plllar reaching through the earth up to the sky, sometimes at the far west, sometimes at the very bottom, and sometimes at the navel of the world. These are all ways ofsaying that he is not in this world known to men. In the extreme occident, Ogygian like the Styx, at the navel of the sea, Calypsok island also has no place In human space. It is a figure of the elsewhere.

'The nymph is several times called thea or theos, "goddess": 1.14 and 5 1, 5.78, 7.255, and especially 5.79 where the couple Calypso-Hermes are referred to as two gods, theoi: 5.138 where, before giving in, she admits that no god can oppose Zeus' will; 5.192-94 where the couple Calypso-Odysseus is that of a god and a man, theos and aner. This d~vine status IS confirmed by the fact that, even though they have their meals together, Calypso eats nectar and ambrosia like the gods, while Odysseus eats bread and wine like a human mortal 15.93, 165, 196-2001.

For Odysseus, to forget lthaca means to cut the ties that still connect him to his life and to those who are close to him, to those who are on their part attached to his memory, whether they hope against all odds for the return of a living Odysseus, or whether they are preparing to construct the funerary rnnerna for him if he is dead. But as long as he remains a recluse, hidden on Calypso's island, Odysseus' condition is neither that of the living nor the dead. Although he still has his life, he is already and in advance removed from human memory. To repeat the words of Telemachus in Odyssey 1.234, he has become, by the will of the gods, invisible, aistos, among all men. He has disappeared, "invisible and unknown," aistos, apustos, outside of the range of what human eyes and ears and reach, "hidden" in darkness and silence. If he had at least died normally beneath the walls of Troy or in the arms of his comrades in misfortune, "he would have had his tomb and what great glory, mega kleos, he would have left for the future and for his son"; but the Har~ies took him away. A man who is nowhere, the living have nothing more to do with him; deprived of remem- brance, he has no fame; concealed in the invisible, vanished, effaced, he has disappeared without glory, akleois [Odyssey 1.2411. For the hero, whose ideal is to leave behind him a kleos aphthiton, an imperishable glory, can there be anything worse than to disappear like this, akleois, without glory? [Cf. J . P. Vernant, "La belle mort et le cadavre outrage," La mort et les morts dans les socetes anciennes 46-76.]

What is it then that Calypso's seduction proposes to Odysseus in order to make him "forget" Ithaca? First, certainly, it is to avoid the trails of the return, the sufferings of the journey, all those difficulties which she, being a goddess, knows in advance will assail him before he finally rediscovers his native land [Odyssey 5.205ff.l. But these are only trifles. The nymph offers him much more. She promises, if he accepts to stay with her, to make him im- mortal and to take old age and death away from him forever. Like a god, he will live in her immortal company, in the permanent brilliance of youth: never to die, never to know the decrepitude of growing old, that i s what is at stake in the goddess' love [Odyssey 5.136, 209, 7.257, 8.453, 23.3361. But in Calypso's bed there is a price to pay for this evasion of the boundaries that limit the common human condition. To share divine immortality in the arms of the nymph would be, for Odysseus, to renounce his career as an epic hero. By no longer figuring as a model of endurance in the text of an Odyssey that sings his trials, he will have to accept effacing himself from the memory of men to come, being dispossessed of his posthumous celebrity, sinking into the obscurity of forgetfulness, even if he is eternally alive: ultimately, he will have to accept an immortality as anonymous as the death of those humans who have been unable to assume a heroic destiny and who form the indistinct mass of those "without name,"nonumnoi, in Hades [Hesiod, Works and Days, 1 54].8 The episode of Calyp- so locates for the first time in our literature what one might call the heroic refusal of immor- tality. For the Greeks of the archaic age, this form of eternal survival that Odysseus would share with Calypso would not truly be "his," since no one in the world would ever know of it nor would they remember, in order to celebrate it, the name of the hero of Ithaca. For the Homeric Greeks, as opposed to ourselves, the important thing is not the absence of death -a h o ~ e that seems to them absurd for mortals- but rather the indefinite Dermanence among the living, in their commemorative tradition, of a glory acquired in liie and at the price of life, in the course of an existence in which life and death are indissociable.

On the shore of this isle where only a word would be enough to make him immortal, Odysseus, sitting on a rock, facing the sea, laments and sobs all day long. He melts, he dissolves in tears. His aion, his vital juices flow unceasingly, kateibeto aion, in the pothos, the regret for his mortal life [ I .55, 5.82-83, 151-53, 160-611 just as at the other end of the world, at the other pole of the couple, Penelope on her part consumes her aion, weeping out of sor- row for vanished Odysseus [19.204-9, 262-651. She weeps for someone living who is perhaps dead. He, in his islet of immortality, cut off from life as if he were dead, weeps for his living existence as a creature destined to die.

81n the context ofarchaic Greek culture where the category of the person is quite different from that of today's "me,"only the posthumous glory of death can be said to be "personal," The immortality o fan "in- visible and unknown"person is situated outside that whrch constitutes for the Greeks the individuality of a subject, that is to say, essentially, his reknown; c f 1.P. Vernant, ,'la belle mort et le cadavre outrage," clted above.

diacritics/ summer 1986 63

For all the nostalgia he feels in regard to the evanescent and ephemeral world to which he belongs, our hero no longer enjoys the charms of the nymph; Odysseus' vitality spends itself in tears "because the nymph no longer pleases him," epei ouketi hendane numphe 15.1531. if he goes in the evening to sleep with her, it is because he must. He joins her in bed, he who does not want her, she who wants him. He joins by necessity, ananke, against his will, because she wants him 15.154, 1551.

Odysseus thus rejects the immortality that is a feminine favor, which, in removing him from that which i s his life, finally leads him to find death desirable. No more eros, no more himeros, no more love or desire for the girdled nymph, but only the desire to die, thaneein himeiretai [1.59].

Nostos, the return, gyne, Penelope, the wife- Ithaca, his homeland, his son, his old father, his faithful companions-and then thanein, to die. It is these towards which, in his distaste for Calypso, in his refusal of a non-death that is also a non-life, Odysseus' amorous yearning, his nostalgic desire, his pothos, is directed. It is directed towards his life, his precarious and mortal life, his trials, his wanderings taken up again and again ceaselessly, that destiny of a hero of endurance that he must assume in order to become himself, Odysseus, that Odysseus of lthaca whose name the text of the Odyssey still sings, whose returns it narrates, whose imperishable glory it celebrates. But the poet would have nothing to tell -and we nothing to hear- if he had remained far from his people, immortal, "hidden" by C a l y p ~ o . ~

To the feminine figure who incarnates what i s beyond death, in its double dimension of erotic seduction and temptation of immortality, the Greeks preferred the simple human life under the light of the sun, the bitter sweetness of the mortal condition.

Translated by Anne Doueihi

WORKS CITED Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes. Trans. H. W. Smith. London: Heinemman, 1922. Bonnefoy, Y. Ed. Dictionnaire des Mythologies. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Delebecque, Edouard. Construction de I'Odyssee. Paris: Belles Lettres, 1980. Hyatt, S. L. The Creek Vase. Latham, New York: Hudson-Mohawk Assoc. of Colleges and

Universities, 1981. Lobel, Edgar and Denys Page, Eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955). Loraux, Nicole. L'invention d'Athenes: histoire de I'oraison funebre dans la "cite classique."

Paris: Mouton, 1981. Motte, Andre. Prairies et jardins de la Crece antique. Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1973. Page, D. L., Ed. Poetae Melici Craeci (Oxford, 1962). Pucci, Pietro. "The Song of the Sirens," Arethusa 12:2 (1 979): 121 -32. Vermeule, Emily. Aspects of Death in Early Creek Art and Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P,

1979. Vernant, Jean-Pierre and G. Gnoli, Eds. La mort, les morts dans les societes anciennes. Paris:

Maison des sciences de I'homme, 1982.

9"/t is a maxim among men that when an exploit has been accomplished it must not remain hidden [kalupsai] in silence, What it requires is the divine melody of praising verses" [Pindar, Nemean Odes, 9./3-171.