Free The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso Page A

stopped in the long procession that took them from Athens to Delphi to “enact secret rites for Dionysus.” And already we are reminded of the open space where Ariadne danced out the labyrinth. What’s more, Pausanias explains that the inhabitants of Panopeus “are not Phocians; originally they werePhlegyans.” And already we are reminded that Coronis was the daughter of Phlegyas, from Thessaly, a hero who took the same name as his people. It was with those people that Phlegyas migrated to Phocis, where he reigned as king.
    Coronis, Aigle: daughters of a king of Phocis, living near an open square where the initiates of Dionysus danced, along the road that would take them to the temple of Apollo. There is a twinning between Coronis and Aigle, just as there is a twinning between Coronis-Aigle and Ariadne, and both point us in the direction of a more obscure parallel between these women’s divine lovers: Dionysus and Apollo. Wasn’t Coronis the name of one of the Nymphs who brought up Dionysus in Naxos? And, checking through Dionysus’s other nurses, we come across, yes, another by the name of Aigle. And wasn’t Coronis also the name of one of the girls on the ship Theseus came back from Crete on?
Kornē
means “the curved beak of the crow,” but it also means “a garland, a crown.” And wasn’t Ariadne’s story a story of crowns?
Kornē
also means “the stern of a ship” and “the high point of a feast.”
Korōnís
means “the wavy flourish that used to mark the end of a book, a seal of completion.” On an Athenian jar we see Theseus carrying off a girl called Corone, while two of his other women, Helen and the Amazon Antiope, try in vain to stop him. Corone is being lifted up in the air, tightly held in the circle of the hero’s arms, yet still three fingers of her left hand find time to toy, delicately, with the curls of Theseus’s little ponytail. Casting a sharp glance behind, Peirithous protects the abductor’s back. “I saw, let’s run,” the anonymous artist’s hand has written beside the scene. The style is unmistakably that of Euthymides.
    Ariadne and Coronis each preferred a foreign man to a god. For them the Stranger is “strength,” which is what the name Ischys means. And Theseus is the strong man par excellence. Of all the women to whom the gods made love, Coronis is the most brazenly irreverent. Already pregnant by Apollo’s “pure seed,” elegant in her tunics as Pindar describes her,she nevertheless felt “that passion for things far away” and went off to bed with the stranger who came from Arcadia. Pindar comments proverbially: “The craziest type of people are those who scorn what they have around them and look elsewhere / vainly searching for what cannot exist.” In Coronis’s case, what she had around her was a god, a god whose child, Asclepius, she was already bearing. It is as if, out of sheer caprice, the fullness of the Greek heaven were fractured here. The stranger from Arcadia was even more of a stranger than the god, and hence more attractive. The bright enamel of divine apparition is scarred by sudden cracks. But this allows it to breathe with the naturalness of literature, which rejects the coercion of the sacred text.
    All that was left of Coronis was a heap of ashes. But years later Asclepius too would be reduced to ashes. He had dared to bring a dead man back to life, so Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt. And, just that once, Apollo cried, “wept countless tears as he approached his sacred people, the Hyperboreans.” The tears were drops of amber, and they rolled down into the Eridanus, that river at once earthly and celestial where Phaethon had fallen. All around, the stench of his corpse lingered on. And tall black poplars rustled to mourn his passing. Those poplars were the daughters of the sun.
    The destiny of death by burning runs through the stories of Apollo and Dionysus like a scar. Semele is burned to death, and she is Dionysus’s mother;