The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony     by Roberto Calasso, Translated by T Parks Original title: Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia Original language: Italian Published by Vintage Books Pub. Date: February 1994 Format: Paperback, 403 pages Dimensions: 0.89 x 7.94 x 5.20 in. ISBN: 0679733485 List Price: $15.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.50 Published by Cape Pub. Date: 1993 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover List Price: £15.99 Not available for ordering Published by Vintage Pub. Date: 1994 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Secker Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 224 pages List Price: £10.95 Not available for ordering

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Roberto Calasso is the editorial director of the respected Milan publishing house Adelphi Edizioni and a well-known intellectual and literary figure both in Italy and abroad. He has been nicknamed ‘l’anti-Eco’ — the ‘anti-Umberto Eco’ — by the Italian press. The Marriage Of Cadmus And Harmony is his third and most successful book; it was a bestseller in Italy, won the 1991 Prix Veillon and the 1992 Prix de Meilleur Livre Étranger in France and has been fêted in America by Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal among others.


Indeed, Vidal says that it belongs alongside the Old and New Testaments as a text it is necessary to know in order to understand Western civilisation. Such a claim is certainly not provoked simply by Calasso’s subject matter, namely classical Greek myths and Homeric tales, but equally by the fact that his book is not so much about these as a brilliant re-creation of them. Although they incorporate immense scholarship, there is nothing antiquarian or detached about these stories. They are extraordinarily fresh and vivid, both as stories and in the accompanying interpretative asides.


These asides are contemporary without being anachronistic. >From the Odyssey, for example, Calasso derives the moral that fortune’s slings and arrows are sent to test us and that ‘the sovereignty of the mind lies in recognising, in dealing with them as such, in getting through with the secretly indifferent curiosity of the traveller.’ Again: his analysis of the genealogy of modern totalitarianism begins with Sparta — the first instance in which ‘the group of initiates becomes the police force.’ Calasso avoids anachronism because he makes no concessions to modern prudishness, squeamishness or soft-centred psychologising. Indeed, these tales may be ‘foundational’ for us as much for their undisguised violence, murder, pillage, rape, erotic mayhem and sacrifice (both human and animal) as anything else.


Yet there are also moments of great tenderness and grace. Calasso notes that for the ancient Greeks ‘Every sudden heightening of intensity brought you into a god’s sphere of influence.’ Insofar as whatever most moved them still moves us — whether because of a shared humanity or cultural ancestry or both — this element can be found in these rich, contradictory tales of the gods and goddesses and their human peers, bearing out Calasso’s claim that all modern civilisation has done is ‘invent, for the powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective...’


He is not afraid to intervene and compare ancients and moderns, pointing out, for example, that while modern atheists believe they control their lives, Homer’s heroes felt themselves ‘being sustained and imbued by something remote and whole, which abandoned them at death like so many rags’ — and he does so in such a way that the attitude of the ancients feels at least as fresh and accessible.


There are many other points to savour: the revealing of the enmity between Homer and Plato, for example — truer and deeper than between the latter and Aristotle or even the followers of Christ. And it is a wonderful paradox that Calasso has produced such an elegant and rational argument against the Enlightenment that bequeathed him its very style and (in a sense) spirit. But then, as he shows, even the chief weapons against myth are themselves mythical: the capacity for objectivity, control and domination is Athena’s, and ‘when it first came into being, system itself was no more than a flap on a god’s cloak, a minor bequest of Apollo.’

‘...when something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fibre and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realises that he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god.’