The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Roberto Calasso -the first level of a hero's life - at which he competes with other men. -higher level where men meet and clash with gods. To succeed he needs a woman's help. Here Theseus and Heracles divide. Women for H are part of the fate he must suffer. He doesn't realize that it is they who possess the wisdom he lacks. T uses women - Antipe... The heroic gesture of woman is betrayal: its influence on the course of events is just as great as the slaying of monsters. With the monster slain, an impurity lingers to dog the hero. The hero can turn the monster's remains to his advantage (H clothes himself in the skin of the Nemean lion). Effects of woman's betrayal are more subtle. Helen provokes a war. As a civilizing gesture, woman's betrayal is as effective as man's monster-slaying. In betrayal, the traitor suppresses her own roots, detaching her life from its natural context (Antiope dies fighting the Amazons, Helen). It is opposition to ourselves, effacement, in a game that may exalt or destroy or both. Slaying and betrayal are both ways of negation. The first clears a space, the second rearranges the space. The hero is narrow minded, the woman completes the hero's work: she helps hero suppress himself, because the hero is montrous. Hero dies after killing the monster. With the heroes, man takes his first step beyong the necessary: into the realm of risk, defiance, shrewdness, deceit, art, disclosing a new world of love. The woman helps the hero slay monsters. But heroes also usher in a new kind of love: between man and man. H and Iolaus, T and Eirithous, Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades all enjoy what Aeschylus calls "the sacred communion of thighs." Only the heroes could have overcome the obstacle to such a love: the rigid distinction between separate roles, the obstinate asymmetry between lover and beloved, which had condemned love relationships to be short and stifled by the strictest rules. I. e., the beloved was not to enjoy any sexual pleasure, but submit hiself and enjoy vicariously, and at puberty it ended. Only the lover is entheos, says Plato (full of god). Apollos had Hyacinthus and Cyparissus, who died when A accidently killed them (H from discus, C fled A and turned himself into a cypress). But with Admetus, the pattern was reversed. A had to be his servant (get paid => prostitute, humiliation), and then tried to save him from death, but only Admetus's bride Alcestis agreed to take his place, and the gods allowed Heracles to save her from crossing the river Styx, and returned her to the grief-stricken Admetus. So Admetus was saved by a god, a woman and a hero, all because he was hospitable. Alcestis is the only Greek example of a woman capable of philia, a friendship which grows out of love, which should only be for men. There is nothing a lover may not do; he is forgiven all excess. "There are no oaths in the affairs of Aphrodite." But endless difficulties are placed in his way. Tiresias tells Zeus and Hera that woman enjoyed nine tenths of the pleasure in sex. Hera blinded Tiresias for exposing the secret. Not polite to talk of 'pleasure' which is common property - even slaves could enjoy it.