Windbags and Skinsongs 3: Aegis

Windbags and Skinsongs

3. Aegis

Athena’s aulos attempts in sound to repair the affront and terror of the sound of the Gorgon’s cry. The weaving of what in the 12th Pindaric Ode Athena somewhat puzzlingly dubs the ‘many-headed’ melody [ônomasen kephalan pollan nomon] of the flute seems similarly to attempt to reconstitute the body that has been torn apart. This weaving is perhaps an attempt to recreate the integrity of the body severed by Perseus’s sword, and to turn the sound that gushes from that gashed body into something more tolerable (Pindar 1915, 310-11). Jenny Strauss Clay suggests that what is woven together are the two very different sounds of the Gorgons’ lament and Perseus’s shout of triumph (Clay 1991, 523). The capture and regularising of the sound of the Gorgon in music is paralleled by the capture of her head and its incorporation into the breastplate or the aegis of Athena, on which the Medusa’s head came usually to be depicted. Like many other such magical skins, the aegis, variously represented as a cloak, shield or breastplate that protects Athena invincibly, is not her own, but is shared, inherited or appropriated. Some myths have it that she has stripped the skin from a giant, Pallas, whom she has defeated in battle, or some other adversary, even the Medusa herself. Other accounts represent her as sharing in the aegis of Zeus, who has in turn inherited it from his mother, the goat Amaltheia, who nursed him and kept him safe from the wrath of his father. In some versions of the story of Perseus, it is Athena’s highly-polished shield, the double of her aegis, which enables Perseus to despatch the Medusa without meeting her gaze. Françoise Frontiri-Ducroux argues that the literal unspeakability of the Medusa’s face, which is rarely described in Greek writing, produces a synaesthesic displacement of image into sound (Frontiri-Ducroux 1995, 66). But the importance of the aegis is to ensure that the opposite also takes place. For the capture of the roaring Medusa, either in the bag of skin in which Perseus will transport it, or on the magic skin of the aegis, as though in a flash photograph, also stabilises sound by displacing it into image, and specifically an image borne on the skin. The skin which both repels and holds together in one place the terrifyingly formless image of the Medusa parallels the sound of the flute. The stilling of the image by the skin is the equivalent to the distilling of noise into melody.

Striking confirmation of the power of the aegis to temper immoderate sound is provided by a comic glimpse of the goddess Athena provided at the end of Brachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and Mice, once attributed to Homer. Asked by Zeus to interfere in the battle, Athena gives the following reasons for refusing to help either side:

I would never go to help the Mice when they are hard pressed, for …this thing that they have done vexes my heart exceedingly: they have eaten holes in my sacred robe, which I wove painfully spinning a fine woof on a fine warp, and made it full of holes… Yet even so I will not help the Frogs; for they also are not considerate: once, when I was returning early from war. I was very tired, and though I wanted to sleep, they would not let me even doze a little for their outcry; and so I lay sleepless with a headache until cock-crow. (Hesiod 1977, 555)

The tattered aegis makes Athena vulnerable to the encroachments of sound, in the broken and disturbed cacophony of the frogs. A more literal acoustic aegis is reported by Pliny, a statue of Athena known as the ‘Murmuring Athena’, because the dragons on her gorgoneion ‘sound with a tinkling note [tinnitu ] when a harp is struck’ (Pliny 1942-52, 9.182-3).

In order to be made image, the head of the Gorgon must be reduced to the condition of superficiality or depthlessness that is the essential characteristic of Athena. It is as though she has inherited an allergy to innerness from her mother Metis, who was swallowed by Zeus, but, according to Chrysippus, spent her time in his belly cunningly knitting together the impermeable armour with which Athena will break out from his head (Arnim 1903, 256-7). Nicole Loraux goes even further, suggesting that the terror and the power of Athena come from the fact that she has no body, that she is all skin, or rather, since skin implies a living body beneath it, that she is all surface. Though the aegis is formed of living skin, it is as if it ‘dispensed her from [sic[ having a body’ (Loraux 1995, 222). More even than the capacity to block or defend, the aegis confers a kind of incorporeality: ‘Athena has an incorporeal touch, which makes javelins and arrows glance off the heroes, without any movement on her part’ (Loraux 1995, 224). This incorporeality is reinforced by the two other characteristic features of Athena, her flashing eyes, and her terrifying voice. She is, in fact, ‘nothing but a voice and semblances’. Even the gift of weaving, signified in her peplos, seems held back from the circuit of gift or exchange: ‘the Parthenos wears on her body the product of her work, taking back what her hand had made. The autarchic Athena, the goddess seems to live within a closed circuit, and there is no breach giving access to her’ (Loraux 1995, 225). The fifth Hymn of Callimachus, which tells the story of the blinding of the young Tiresias as a result of seeing Athena naked at her bath, also emphasises the self-enclosed entirety of the goddess. She spurns the second skin provided by gleaming unguents, restricting herself only to the ‘manly olive oil’ (V.29; Callimachus 1955, 115). from the fruit of her own olive tree. The Hymn associates unguents applied to the body with the doubling of the body provided by mirrors, which Athena also eschews:

Bring not, ye companions of the Bath, for Pallas perfume nor alabasters (for Athene loves not mixed unguents), neither bring ye a mirror. Always her face is fair, and even when the Phrygian judged the strife on Ida, the great goddess looked not into orichalc, nor into the transparent eddy of Simois. (V.16-20; Callimachus 1955, 113)

Callimachus contrasts Athena with the self-regarding and self-multiplying Aphrodite, who ‘took the shining bronze and often altered and again altered the same lock’. The Greek - pollaki tan autan dis metethke koman - implies the bringing of the mirror – the diaugea chalkon - repeatedly up to or even amid her hair , lines which suggest not only the multiplication of the face and hair in the mirror, but the mirror-like surfaces of bronze multiplying in the hair (V.21-2; Callimachus 1955, 114-5). With her simple oils, Athena attempts to make of herself a pure, plain, self-reflecting mirror, which hoards its own appearance as it grudgingly gives it out. The mirror of the other’s look insinuating itself into one’s own would introduce by contrast the turbulence of water into the self-image.

Athena has two principal aspects. As goddess of battle, she is masculine and martial. As protectress of cities and the inventor of weaving, she is domestic. These two principal aspects are signified in the two garments with which she is closely identified: the peplos and the aegis. Both have protective functions, though these functions are exercised in different ways. The peplos - soft, complex, vegetable - absorbs threats, where the aegis - hard, uniform, mineral - averts them. These different surfaces have a close relation to birth and generation, as is suggested, not just by the story of Athena’s birth from Zeus’s head, in full clanking combat gear, but also by the story of the rape attempted on Athena by the lame smith of the gods Hephaestus, who, by splitting open Zeus’s pounding temples with his axe, acted as midwife in Athena’s delivery. Hobbling gamely after the goddess, Hephaestus is able to catch her only a glancing blow with his ejaculation, which he sprays over her thigh. She fastidiously wipes the sperm away with a piece of wool and discards it. Nourished by Gaia, the swab becomes her serpentine offspring Ericthonios. Here the wool soaks up and neutralises Hephaestus’s contaminating spray. But the steely thigh of Athena stands for the deflection or warding off of danger, for which Athena requires, not the woven peplos, but the toughened and tempered aegis, which we are told is strong enough even to turn aside the thunderbolts of Zeus.

There are acoustic correlatives to these two defensive functions of absorption and deflection. The weaving of the peplos seems to suggest the coordination of noise into musical measure – Pindar writes of the diaplexais' or interweaving of her flute – in which the noise must be accepted and incorporated in order to be transformed. The deflection or reflection of the aegis seems to be associated not with the mimesis of the flute but rather with the sound of the thrilling trumpet or brazen war-cry. It is striking that this cry is often characterised as echoing, in other words, bouncing or refracting, rather than being assimilated and transformed. Rebounding from her aegis, the very thunderbolt of Zeus becomes Athena’s. Her spear and shield, the latter a sort of doubling of the aegis, are equivalent, in that the shield can return and redouble the blows that rain upon it. Anastasia Serghidou observes that the trumpet is characterised by its redoubling and reverberative powers (Serghidou 2001, 65-7).

The head of Medusa which mysteriously appears on Athena’s breast seems to combine these absorptive and reflective modes. Is the image to be imagined as being a representation on the aegis, or as in some way buried in it? Is it a flattened, heraldic insignia, or a kind of encrustation or cyst? Depicted, or attached? The face-on frontality which is a feature of many images of the Medusa suggests the former, as does the fact that the Medusa and Athena coupling was common on the front and reverse of coins. On the other hand, the power of the Medusa seems to lie in the fact that it is a head, which Perseus must keep enclosed in a bag, and a head that has the power to envelop the viewer. In a certain sense Athena has swallowed Medusa up, and yet she keeps her displayed upon her surface, as image. This ambivalence about depth and volume survives in the characteristic tassels of the aegis, which are said to be the heads of the serpents from Medusa’s hair. At its fringe, the emblematic aegis curls into three-dimensions, recalling the swarming, centreless multiplicity of the Medusa’s hair of the aegis. Not only are there many serpents in the Medusa’s hair, but snakes are traditionally taken as symbols of the renewal of life because they go through many skins in a lifetime. Is there one aegis, or many? Does it speak with one voice, or with forked tongues?

I have suggested that when Medusa is stilled into an image, magical skin trumps horrifying roar, just as the music of the pipe knits noise into melody. So far the profile of the aegis would seem to confirm François Pasche's reading (1971) of the shield of Perseus as the gift of perspective. But the aegis has sonority as well as perspicuity, and is not simply an antidote to the sound of the Medusa. Remarkably, the aegis of Athena is also sonorous. The Homeric Hymn to Athena relates how, when she emerges shaking her spear, the heavens shake and moan at her birth:

great Olympus reeled
In a fearsome tremor, the earth all around with a dreadful scream
Rang out, and the deep was stirred in a mass of seething waves (Homeric Hymns 2001, 88)

All is tumult, chaos, reverberation; yet everything is suspended in some blending of tumult and astonishment:

But the salt sea suddenly checked, and Hyperion’s splendid son
For a long-drawn moment kept still the swift hoofs of his chariot’s team,
Untl from her deathless shoulders Pallas Athena took off
That armour fit for a god (Homeric Hymns 2001, 88)

No sooner has the terrible cry been uttered than it is frozen, as though the aegis were the very form of the sound itself, the means both of generating and of suspending the shock wave. Indeed, it is not clear whether this stilling of sun and wave occurs subsequent to the terrifying birth-scream, or in its raging midst. The aegis which furnishes protection against the piercing or dissolving trauma of sound seems also to prompt it, for it is only when the aegis is removed that the Earth is still. But, just as Athena’s aegis is not wholly her own, so also her cry is shared, with the shaking power of Zeus’s voice, and with the earth itself, which resounds with terror at her birth. There will be another remarkable doubling of her martial voice, in the scene in the Iliad (18. 202-30), when she loans her aegis to Achilles while Hephaetus is forging his new armour. Investment with the aegis is followed immediately by two kinds of emanation – or perhaps one should rather say, it is immediately manifested in them. As the aegis drops around Achilles’s shoulders, obscuring him like a cloud, a gleaming flame seems to blaze from his head, like the beacons that flare up at nightfall from a besieged city. Remarkably, Achilles does not take his place in the Greek lines, but stands in a conspicuous position and shouts at the Trojans. The flaring out of light from his divinised head is accompanied by the blaring out of a voice, that is halved or doubled between Achilles and the goddess, as though their twinning in the aegis had also twisted together their throats:

There he stood and shouted, and from afar Pallas Athene called out; but among the Trojans he raised unspeakable confusion. Clear as the trumpet’s voice when it sounds aloud when a city is pressed by murderous foes, so clear was then the voice of the grandson of Aeacus. And when they heard the brazen voice [opa calkeon] of the grandson of Aeacus, the hearts of all were dismayed. (18.219-23; Homer 1999, 302-3)

Accounts of Zeus’s wielding of the aegis often suggest that it has a meteorological reference and nineteenth-century meteorological mythography made much of these associations. One of Zeus’s commonest epithets is ‘aegis-shaker’, suggesting a survival of Zeus’s skyey power over thunder and tempest, the aegis being the thundercloud. The shaker of the aegis is the one who causes the rumble of the thundercloud, which seems to be imagined as a kind of skin of wind. Noel Robertson is convinced that shaking the aegis would have featured in ritual as ‘a form of weather magic, an imitation and a cause of strong wind’ (Robertson 2001, 45). The cloud reference lingers in Homer’s depiction of the aegis-clad Achilles, who is like a golden cloud, but with the light of fire breaking from it. There appears to be a synaesthesic link between the ominous sound of this thunder and what is often described as the piercing cry of Athena. The conjoining of thunder and lightening, which, anticipating later confirmation, the ancient world grasped as two different aspects, sonorous and visual, of the same phenomenon, may be a conjoining of a special kind of dazzle or flashing light – a sizzling look that cooks you up – and the ear-splitting effects of Athena’s cry. They are conjoined in the shaking of the aegis, which seems to compound the vibration of the thunder and the rapid zigzag of the lightning. This power to shake the forms and foundations of things, though irresistible and disintegrating, is nevertheless held together, in the image of the aegis. It effects a ‘convulsion’, from con-vellere , meaning to tear apart, to pull into all directions. As I have remarked in a longer discussion (Connor 2000a) of the cultural imagination of shaking, the prefix 'con' works to add the sense of pulling together; convulsion is a way of pulling yourself together, as well as being torn apart. It is the enactment of a dismemberment, the body torn into tiny pieces, that is nevertheless held in one place. Convulsion is a held-together-coming-apart.

Athena bears the image of the Gorgon’s face on her shield. But perhaps she also can be thought of as wearing it like a mask. This creates another striking reversal of the terms we have been employing so far. For, if the Gorgon is a mask, then it is the Gorgon who is flat and depthless. Jean-Pierre Vernant has suggested that the horror of the Gorgon’s image is in part precisely the horror of that which is image, which has no depth, and yet can swallow you up. Françoise Frontini-Ducroux similarly points out that the decapitated head of the Gorgon ‘possesses no profile, or back or volume. It is deprived of the third dimension which belongs to the world of the living…it is presented as a pure surface’ (Frontini-Ducroux 1995, 68-9). As a mask which emits a terrifying sound, a grimace that is the very shape of the horrifyingly formless sound that is the Gorgonic roar, the gorgoneion is an embodiment of the persona, the simulacrum of the person that is born though the sound that emanates from the mask. Though a mask gives the appearance of being the outside of a hidden interior, from which voice surges, gives the appearance, in other words, of being an appearance, it is really only the semblance or apparition of such appearance. The voice comes from the interior of the person behind the mask, and not from the interior of the being represented by the mask. The Gorgon is all mask, all surface, all front. It may display interiority, with its protruding tongue, gaping mouth and its deep wrinkles, but it is the illusory superficial depth of the mirror. The fascinating mimetic effect of the Gorgon’s look makes its victims into mirrors of it.

There is a link between the mimesis of the surface and the mimesis of sound. Playing the flute, which she invented in order to imitate the cries of Medusa’s sisters, Athena finds that she is unconsciously mirroring them. Her desire to keep aloof from the multiplying and perverting powers of mirrors renders her liable to mirroring mimesis. As Vernant observes, the effect of playing the Gorgon (in both senses) ‘is actually to become one – all the more so as this mimesis is not mere imitation but an authentic “mime,” a way of getting inside the skin of the character one imitates, of donning his or her mask’ (Vernant 1991, 125). Nicole Loraux agrees: ‘To play the flute is to make the face of the Gorgon’ (Loraux 1995, 321 n.26). The Gorgon is the double of Athena, therefore, in being nothing but voice and semblance, the semblance of a voice, the voice of semblance. She is a membrane brought into being by the passage of the sound across it, a membrane that then makes the sound possible. She is a mask that howls.