suffering. According to Apollonius Rhodius, after killing the Cyclopes, Apollo was punished by being sent not to Thessaly but to the Hyperboreans in the far North. There he wept tears of amber, even though a god cannot weep. But what really put the story out of bounds was not just the scandalous suffering (and scandalously servile passion) of the “pure god in flight from the heavens.” There was something else behind it. An ancient prophecy, the secret of Prometheus: the prediction that Zeus would one day see his throne usurped, by his most luminous son.
Apollo often plays around the borders of death. But Zeusis watching from on high. He knows that, if ignored, his son’s game will bring about the advent of a new age, the collapse of the Olympian order. Within the secret that lies behind this, and it’s a secret rarely even alluded to, Apollo is to Zeus what Zeus had been to Kronos. And the place where the powers of the two gods always collide is death. Even beneath the sun of the dead, among the herds of Thessaly, Apollo doesn’t forget his challenge to his father and chooses to snatch, if only for a short while, his indomitable beloved, Admetus, from that moment when “the established day does him violence.” The never-mentioned dispute between father and son is left forever unsettled at that point.
The admirable asymmetry on which the Athenian man’s love for the younger boy is based is described in minute detail by that surveyor of all matters erotic, Plato. The entire metaphysics of love is concentrated in the gesture with which the beloved grants his grace (
cháris
) to the lover. This gesture, still echoed in the Italian expression
concedere le proprie grazie
, and again in the passionate intertwining drawn tight by the French verb
agréer
(and derivations:
agréments, agréable
, and so on), is the very core of erotic drama and mystery. How should we think of it? How achieve it? For the Barbarians it is something to condemn; for the more lascivious Greeks and those incapable of expressing themselves, such as the Spartans or the Boeotians, it is simply something enjoyable, and as such obligatory: to give way to a lover becomes a state directive. But as ever the Athenians are a little more complicated and multifarious (
poikíloi
) than their neighbors, even when it comes to “the law of love.” They are not so impudent as to speak of a “grace” that actually turns out to be an obligation. What could they come up with, then, to achieve the beloved’s grace, without ever being sure of it? The word.
As warriors besieging a fortress will try one ruse after another to have that object so long before their eyes fall at last into their hands, so the Athenian lover engages in a war ofwords, surrounds his beloved with arguments that hem him in like soldiers. And the things he says are not just crude gallantries but the first blazing precursors of what one day, using a Greek word without remembering its origin, will be called metaphysics. The notion that thought derives from erotic dialogue is, for the great Athenians, true in the most straightforward, literal sense. Indeed, that link between a body to be captured like a fortress and the flight of metaphysics is, for Plato, the very image of eros. The rest of the world are mere Barbarians who simply don’t understand, or other Greeks with no talent for language, in other words, suffering from “mental sloth.” They too are excluded from that finest of wars, which is the war of love.
As far as the lover was concerned, Athens invented a perfect duplicity, which uplifted him while leaving his undertaking forever uncertain. On the one hand, there is nothing the lover may not do; he is forgiven any and every excess. He alone can break his oath without the gods punishing him, since “there are no oaths in the affairs of Aphrodite.” And again, the lover may get wildly excited, or choose to sleep the night outside the barred door of his beloved’s house, and
Apollo often plays around the borders of death. But Zeusis watching from on high. He knows that, if ignored, his son’s game will bring about the advent of a new age, the collapse of the Olympian order. Within the secret that lies behind this, and it’s a secret rarely even alluded to, Apollo is to Zeus what Zeus had been to Kronos. And the place where the powers of the two gods always collide is death. Even beneath the sun of the dead, among the herds of Thessaly, Apollo doesn’t forget his challenge to his father and chooses to snatch, if only for a short while, his indomitable beloved, Admetus, from that moment when “the established day does him violence.” The never-mentioned dispute between father and son is left forever unsettled at that point.
The admirable asymmetry on which the Athenian man’s love for the younger boy is based is described in minute detail by that surveyor of all matters erotic, Plato. The entire metaphysics of love is concentrated in the gesture with which the beloved grants his grace (
cháris
) to the lover. This gesture, still echoed in the Italian expression
concedere le proprie grazie
, and again in the passionate intertwining drawn tight by the French verb
agréer
(and derivations:
agréments, agréable
, and so on), is the very core of erotic drama and mystery. How should we think of it? How achieve it? For the Barbarians it is something to condemn; for the more lascivious Greeks and those incapable of expressing themselves, such as the Spartans or the Boeotians, it is simply something enjoyable, and as such obligatory: to give way to a lover becomes a state directive. But as ever the Athenians are a little more complicated and multifarious (
poikíloi
) than their neighbors, even when it comes to “the law of love.” They are not so impudent as to speak of a “grace” that actually turns out to be an obligation. What could they come up with, then, to achieve the beloved’s grace, without ever being sure of it? The word.
As warriors besieging a fortress will try one ruse after another to have that object so long before their eyes fall at last into their hands, so the Athenian lover engages in a war ofwords, surrounds his beloved with arguments that hem him in like soldiers. And the things he says are not just crude gallantries but the first blazing precursors of what one day, using a Greek word without remembering its origin, will be called metaphysics. The notion that thought derives from erotic dialogue is, for the great Athenians, true in the most straightforward, literal sense. Indeed, that link between a body to be captured like a fortress and the flight of metaphysics is, for Plato, the very image of eros. The rest of the world are mere Barbarians who simply don’t understand, or other Greeks with no talent for language, in other words, suffering from “mental sloth.” They too are excluded from that finest of wars, which is the war of love.
As far as the lover was concerned, Athens invented a perfect duplicity, which uplifted him while leaving his undertaking forever uncertain. On the one hand, there is nothing the lover may not do; he is forgiven any and every excess. He alone can break his oath without the gods punishing him, since “there are no oaths in the affairs of Aphrodite.” And again, the lover may get wildly excited, or choose to sleep the night outside the barred door of his beloved’s house, and
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