ANTAEUS WAS THE son of Poseidon and Gaea. To put it gently, not a very harmonious couple. What else could be expected from the elements of sea and earth, fighting each other fiercely? It is probable that Antaeus was a neglected, abandoned child—but how difficult it is to imagine the childhood of a giant! The savage quarrels of his parents certainly had a negative influence that shaped his character.
All sources agree that Antaeus grew up to be a crude, violent man, with more than human strength. His intellectual resources were modest, but his body was exuberant. Although he never went to any school, he drew a logically correct conclusion from this disproportion: he became a sportsman.
It is difficult to place Antaeus on the map of the world. In the old myths his home was Libya, it was there that he met Heracles. But later, with Greek colonization of the northern shore of Africa, this fairy-tale-like figure was pushed farther west, all the way to Mauritania where Punic merchants drove the Greeks away. Colonizers do not create myths, but instead labor tirelessly on their geography. They simply locate monsters on terrain occupied by their competitors. This procedure has survived commendably to our own times.
We know little about Antaeus himself, except that he was nourished with the meat of lions he killed with his bare hands. He scorned modern civilization—the cudgel, the spear, the trap dug in the ground. His favorite occupation was challenging wanderers he met to a wrestling match. The adversary was forced to fight, and these struggles inevitably ended with his death.
Such a way of life cannot awaken our sympathy or our approval. But a poet—this is unusual—hurried to Antaeus’s rescue. The eminent poet Pindar defended him from the accusation he was simply an ordinary assassin, a repulsive murderer. In one of his Isthmian Odes, Pindar1 tried to discover a meaning in the criminal activity of Antaeus, or at least to make it comprehensible.
The region where Antaeus lived was poor in stones, and only the wind sometimes erected deceptive monuments of sand. Imaginary cities of marble sometimes appeared on the dry horizon. Pindar wrote that Antaeus dreamed of erecting a temple to honor his father. He humanized Antaeus, and endowed him with the praiseworthy virtue of filial love. The only solid materials at his disposal were the terrestrial remnants of his unfortunate adversaries; there was nothing to do but take advantage of this building material. The idea—rather macabre in itself—is not, after all, so far removed from baroque aesthetics.
So Antaeus collected the bones of those he killed just as a good builder lovingly collects stones, bricks, and wood. He took care to preserve them safely from the sun, the omnivorous sand, and humidity.
He changed the plan of his edifice many times. He wanted the mausoleum honoring his parents to have the ideal proportions of the human body.
The apses were made of ribs, he also used ribs for the temple’s vault. Beady wrist bones hung down, creating an illusion of lamps and chandeliers.
The columns were made from the bones of spines. He tied several together to give necessary strength to the building.
Each year, during the season of winds and rains, the temple would collapse. All the builder’s labors recalled an abandoned camp of hyenas. Bones lay in disorder on the sand. It was as if the gods sneered at those who try to become higher, destroying them.
And every year Antaeus began anew with the same stubbornness, piety, and hopeless love.
Seen from a distance, and illuminated from above, Antaeus resembled a boulder slowly moving through the wilderness. His gait was like the mannered way actors move in Westerns, but in the case of the giant it was a hard necessity, not a mannerism. He drew all his energy and strength from the earth—from physical contact with rock, with clay, even with dust.
If he were not a child of the gods—no one dared question this—one would think that nature treated him unfairly, refusing him a definite spot in the chain of being in a moment of distraction. Who knows whether the form of a tree, a cedar for example, would not be the most appropriate shape for his existence. But Antaeus was an above-ground creature; he was deprived of roots, and marked by fear of the abyss of air surrounding him on all sides. The birds and stars suspended above filled him with revulsion. Each jump or leap made his head turn, and he would feel faint.
Antaeus did not have a home or permanent stopping place. Nights in the desert fall fast: the gray lightning of dusk, and then—right away—darkness. When the sun was about to set, Antaeus would build a shelter: a deep underground corridor so narrow there was only room for his supine body. He would squeeze into this murky, humid refuge like a huge worm, falling into blissful, nourishing sleep.
One can explain these nightly practices of Antaeus symbolically, as a nostalgic search for origins or a return to the mother’s womb. But why multiply hidden meanings when everything can be explained in a simple way: by cycles of vegetation.
Everyone who has been in the dessert has noticed clumps of twigs and leaves that appear completely dead, rolled by the wind. At first glance they seem like the trash of creation, crumbs from Mother Nature’s table. But as soon as the first rains come, a sudden metamorphosis takes place. What seemed to be forever thrust away from life sends down roots, blooms, intoxicates with fragrance, bears fruit—in a word, lives wonderfully in a powerful, lavish way.
There are reasons to believe that the encounter between Antaeus and Heracles was accidental. This is why it was not engraved on the bronze tablet that describes the main labors of Heracles. It was not planned on the hero’s calendar—well, it was one of his guest performances.
All sources agree about the results of the duel, but the way it took place has been reported differently. Diodorus Siculus2 describes it as a wrestling match combined with a wager that required the loser to forfeit his life. (But he does not say if it was by his own hand or that of the victor.) This is a flat, vulgar version, bringing to mind the rules of gladiators’ fights or—even worse—Russian roulette. Other accounts, not very edifying either, say that Heracles blocked the entrance to the underground refuge with his own body, what might be called “starving out the city.”
Antaeus was humanized not only by Pindar but by Plato himself, who endowed him with professional intelligence and the invention of certain wrestling grips. Thus poetry, time, and philosophy all labored to endow the fight with the features of a real agon in which adversaries had statistically equal chances.
In reality it was an open, manly duel: mano al mano, and murderous.
Heracles understood right away that he was engaged in a fight without precedent. Battles and wrestling matches are based on the attempt to deprive the enemy of an upright position—to reduce him to a supine object. But each time Antaeus was thrown on the ground he sprang up more and more vigorously, ready and raucous, aggressive.
The hero had to abandon normal tactics. He had to overcome the concept, deeply rooted in us all, of what we call high and low, the elevation of the victor and the throwing of the defeated down into the dust. For every time Antaeus was lifted up, it meant death for him.
Literary accounts of the encounter are few and this is why it is difficult to recreate the course of events. By their nature, mosaics, sculptures and paintings record a moment, not a sequence of events. I believe that the content of the duel—its raw essence—was best represented by the Renaissance painter Antonio Pollaiuolo3. His painting is small, almost a miniature that can be covered by the hand, but has such an amount of pent-up energy that its power of expression surpasses yards of garrulous frescoes.
Pollaiuolo did not succumb to the temptation of presenting Antaeus as a giant. The rules of humanism forbade such expressionistic whims, so both adversaries have human proportions. They also lack classical beauty; instead they are a well-matched pair of similar broad-shouldered, long-haired savages. This was an accurate intuition, for in reality the duel was brutal, its ending naturalistic, ordinary, without a trace of noble simplicity or quiet greatness.
The hands of Heracles tighten around the hips of his adversary like iron clasps. Similar to a peasant with legs apart, struggling with a sack and trying to lift it over his back, he tears him from the ground and raises him to the level of his shoulders.
Antaeus no longer defends himself. He presses his clenched fists against the elbows of Heracles—he throws his head back, drawing his legs up. His helpless defense recalls a big fish thrashing in a net, flinging his entire body backward and flinging it forward, until the pendulum becomes completely still.
His mouth is wide open, but he does not shout. Asthmatics, breathing in crumbs of air with difficulty, do not waste strength on screams and curses. In a moment, it will be the end.
Heracles will carefully wait for the moment when his adversary’s arms fall along the body and his legs dangle limply like the legs of a hanged man. Then he will listen attentively to Antaeus’s silent heart. With relief he will throw the burden to the ground. For a moment he will stand above him. Perhaps he will think with a bit of melancholy that Greek mythology does not know the word resurrection.
Yet Antaeus keeps returning. He strives after our memory. No longer savage and elementary but devoid of violence, almost nostalgic.
In upper Egypt Antaeus was given the posthumous title of a god. A city was baptized in his name. Who would have thought that from a chthonic4 monster, he would be completely transformed into an apostle of civilization and the middle class?
A mound was discovered near the Mauritanian city of Tingris5, and it was generally believed that the terrestrial remains of the giant lay underneath. It was a tomb but also a place of witchcraft. It was enough to dig up some dirt from the topmost layer, and it would produce atmospheric precipitation. An amazing career indeed—from a brigand to a conjuror of rain.
It is possible to risk the assertion that the meaning of the myth of Antaeus is attachment. It is a feeling rather than an ideology, and surely this is why it is impossible to communicate it to others. It is extremely difficult to convince someone that it is worthwhile to love a meager plot of land as small as a donkey’s shadow, as the shadow of a poplar, a broken house, or a destroyed city on a dried-up river. In a word, the place where we were born, and which was unable to feed or protect us.
For the nomads of civilization and the tenants of jet planes, Antaeus will remain forever the symbol of a primitive barbarian. They succumb to the illusion that the breaking of ties and a sickly mobility are necessary conditions of progress. But they forget that chasing after the sun and global utopias must end in catastrophe. In the last analysis everything is reduced to the choice, or the assignment by others, of a place in the cemetery.
All those strange refugees who take on the shapes of incomprehensible mutants or even monsters in the pitiless eyes of the natives will find gracious shelter in the shadow of the outspread arms of Antaeus.
They have saved only two minute treasures—their own speech, and names that sound in foreign ears like the bells of a clown. Their land was snatched from them as well as the water in which they saw the faces of their god and of the invader.
Now they are silently dying in the thin air of freedom that belongs to others.