2024-02-28 21:24:53
by FRANCO MANZONI
Giulio Guidorizzi’s essay on primordial Chaos and the Olympian divinities will be published in the newspaper from February 29th. In a month, on March 29th, another volume by the same author
An engaging journey into the thought of the ancient Greeks through the narration of the events that led to the reign of Zeus, ruler of all divinities and men. A fascinating and incessant journey into Greek mythology, which transcends historical eras and has accompanied the constituent elements of Western civilization for approximately three thousand years. Analyzing a maze of works and popular tales in their various variants, Giulio Guidorizzi (Bergamo, 1948), one of the greatest Italian Greek scholars, acutely explains the genesis of the evolution from an archaic religiosity to the construction of the rationality of mythical thought. And he does it by combining erudition and inexhaustible narrative ability in the volume The Tale of the Gods. The origin of the world and the divinities (348 pages), on newsstands Thursday 29 February with the «Corriere della Sera».
Student of Dario Del Corno, translator of numerous classic texts, university professor, in the epigraph the author dedicates this work to Pietro Citati, a writer who passed away in 2022. Divided into thirteen chapters, the volume starts chronologically from the origins of the cosmos to reach the dominion of the Olympic deities. Guidorizzi underlines that Greek religion lives through mythos, a term that literally means “word, speech, story”. A religion that does not possess the sacred book typical of monotheists, nor a community of fideistically incorporated believers, nor a creator God.
In a civilization of purely oral tradition, such as that of the bards of the Homeric poems before the diffusion of writing, men reflect themselves in the gods, to whom they assign exceptional feats experienced among passions, vices, violence, feelings and destiny. In the beginning there was Chaos, the void of the primordial, the confused and indeterminate set of material elements that pre-exists the cosmos and the ordered whole. In the Theogony, a poem composed in 1022 hexameters, Hesiod (8th century BC) manages to testify to a unitary and coherent, albeit fantastic, representation of the physical and divine worlds. Chaos is replaced by the feminine principle par excellence, Gea, mother Earth, then Eros, the impetus of pleasure that guides reproductive energy, and Tartarus, the most extreme abyss.
In search of the male element, through parthenogenesis Gaea is able to give birth to Uranus, the Sky. At this point here is the first divine generation: Uranus, lying on top of Gaea, continually fertilizes her. Thus are born the twelve Titans, the Hundred-handed, the Cyclopes. Gea invites her children, enclosed in her womb, to get rid of her father. For this reason she herself builds a toothed scythe and Crono, the last born, emasculates her father. After his victorious feat, the titan Cronus marries his sister Rhea and becomes the main deity, but no better than Uranus. After learning from an oracle that one of his sons, if he grew up, would overthrow him, Cronus begins to devour newborns. When Rhea becomes pregnant by Zeus, she decides to save at least the last of her children. She secretly gives birth to him on the island of Crete and instead gives Kronos a large stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which the Titan eats in one bite.
Having become an adult, Zeus saves his swallowed brothers, making their father vomit them with a stratagem. Subsequently, by winning the Titanomachy, the war unleashed against his father and the other Titans, Zeus becomes the lord of the gods. She chooses her sister Hera as his official wife. The incest taboo does not concern deities, it was accepted because it aimed at maintaining the purity of divine blood, while for men in Greece it was considered an impious relationship. From their union are born Hebe, the cupbearer of the gods, the furious Ares who supervises wars, and Ilitia, goddess of childbirth. But Zeus’ sexual activity is non-stop. She joins Metis, the wisest, Themis, the shining, Eurynome, goddess of meadows and pastures, her sister Demeter, divinity of the harvest, Mnemosyne, Memory, with whom Zeus manages to copulate for nine nights of line up to give birth to as many Muses, as Hesiod recalls in the Theogony.
In short, Zeus is in constant metamorphosis in order to satisfy his own erotic pleasures and his function as a father: he transforms into a swan to possess Leda, into a golden shower to conquer Danae, into a bull to unite with Europa, into an eagle to grab Ganymede, the beautiful kidnapped and possessed young man, placed in Olympus as cupbearer of the gods. This relationship constitutes the mythical model of the homoerotic relationship between an adult male and a passive youth, according to the ancient Greeks an example worthy of imitation even for men.
Guidorizzi delves into the stories of the other Olympic gods. From Poseidon, god of the sea, to Apollo, the fascinating ephebe, god of music, medical arts, sciences, intellect and prophecy; from Hades, the invisible, who governs the kingdom of the dead, to Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love and procreation. To get to the most “pop” and craziest of deities, Dionysus the wanderer and the foreigner. Ubiquitous, mysterious, irrational, god of the vine, of theater and of mystical delirium surrounded by a dancing procession of Satyrs and Maenads. A sensual male divinity but of a feminine nature, androgynous manifestation of sexual vitality, who supervises the collective rite of the symposium, the offering of wine and drugs, the loss of reason, the inebriation, the promiscuous orgies.
Guidorizzi highlights: «He is the god who takes man outside of himself». With wine and theatre. In fact, tragedies and comedies were performed in Athens during the festivals in honor of him, a terrible and sweet divinity “with infinite forms, infinite disguises”. The volume does not lack the stories of Hephaestus, the divine blacksmith, and Ares, the warlord. Furthermore, monsters and other special beings such as the Harpies, the Erinyes, guarantors of blood revenge and unwritten laws, the Arabian Phoenix, Hermaphrodite, the bisexual being par excellence, and the Sirens with the beautiful face of a girl with the body of a bird of prey, endowed with a melodious voice that enchanted.
Two volumes on classicism: both on newsstands for 9.90 euros
Giulio Guidorizzi’s book The Tale of the Gods will be released on newsstands with Corriere della Sera on Thursday 29 February, and will remain on sale for a month at the price of €9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. In a month’s time, on March 29, another volume by the same author, The Tale of Heroes, will be on newsstands with the Corriere, again at the price of €9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. The two essays, published at the time by Mondadori, offer readers a journey through the complex articulation of Greek mythology, drawing from the oral narratives of the archaic era and from the most important works of classical literature. Born in Bergamo in 1948, Giulio Guidorizzi taught at the University of Milan and Turin. Greek scholar, translator, scholar of classical mythology and anthropology of the ancient world, he edited several works and won the Viareggio Rèpaci prize for non-fiction in 2013 with The Companion of the Soul (Raffaello Cortina, 2013). Among his books: The myths of the stars (Raffaello Cortina, 2023); Pity and terror. The Greek tragedy (Einaudi, 2023); The Greeks and the soul (Raffaello Cortina, 2023); The great tale of ancient Rome and its seven kings (il Mulino, 2021); Sophocles. The abyss of Oedipus (il Mulino, 2020). With Silvia Romani he published La Sicilia degli dèi (Raffaello Cortina, 2022), Il mare degli dèi (Raffaello Cortina, 2021) and Traveling with the gods (Raffaello Cortina, 2019).
February 28, 2024 (modified February 28, 2024 | 9.14 pm)
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