Free The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso

sacrificed, of love affairs, duels, desertions, suicides. The human melodrama with its songs and chatter must cover up for the silent substance of the divine pact.

    This changing of the guard, which occurs with Theseus’s expedition to Crete, implies an affinity between Apollo and Dionysus behind their apparent opposition. But it is an affinity they are not eager to bring out into the open, if only because it is not something to be proud of. First and foremost, what these gods have in common in this story is their having been betrayed by mortal women. Ariadne betrays Dionysus for Theseus; Coronis betrays Apollo with the mortal Ischys. To kill the women who loved and betrayed them, Apollo and Dionysus call on Artemis, the divine assassin, with her bow and arrows. And both of them watch in silence as their women are slain. There could be no greater complicity for the two gods than this having both turned, with the same gesture, to the same assassin, to put to death the women they loved.
    Coronis was washing her feet in Lake Boebeis. Apollo saw her and desired her. Desire came as a sudden shock, it caught him by surprise, and immediately he wanted to have done with it. He descended on Coronis like the night. Their coupling was violent, exhilarating, and fast. In Apollo’s mind the clutch of a body and the shooting of an arrow were superimposed. The meeting of their bodies was not a mingling, as for Dionysus, but a collision. In the same way, Apollo had once killed Hyacinthus, the boy he loved most: they were playing together, and the god let fly a discus.
    Coronis was pregnant by Apollo when she found herself attracted to a stranger. He came from Arcadia, and his name was Ischys. A white crow watched over her. Apollo had told the bird to guard the woman he loved, “so that no one might violate her purity.” The crow saw Coronis give herself to Ischys. So off it flew to Delphi and its master to tell the tale. It said it had discovered Coronis’s “secret doings.” In his fury, Apollo threw down his plectrum. His laurel crown fell in the dust. Looking at the crow, his eyes were full of hatred, and the creature’s feathers turned black as pitch. Then Apollo asked his sister Artemis to go and kill Coronis, inLacereia. Artemis’s arrow pierced the faithless woman’s breast. Along with her, the goddess killed many other women by the rugged shores of Lake Boebeis. Before dying, Coronis whispered to the god that he had killed his own son too. At which Apollo tried to save her. In vain. His medical skills were not up to it. But when the woman’s sweet-smelling body was stretched on a pyre high as a wall, the flames parted before the god’s grasping hand, and from the dead mother’s belly, safe and sound, he pulled out Asclepius, the healer.
    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. And in that square danced the Thyiades, initiates of Dionysus. It was one of the places they