The Story of Aglauros and Mercury

A Primer on Envy

O my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter

I am a dilettante and a coward who in his hubris – not even, his wish to avoid having to try – believed he could safely skip the Greeks, the Romans, that he could somehow absorb all he needed through osmosis, by reading that which is more “modern”, more exciting. I didn’t take physics in high school, I barely passed calculus, I had to take linear algebra twice. In an iron age I would be thrown from the academy: let none but geometers enter here. In an age duller still than iron I write blog posts about it.

You have been reading your Ovid, haven’t you, anon?

The story of Aglauros comes a little before Teiresias, Narcissus and Echo – Book 2 of Metamorphoses. We have the advantage that it isn’t well known, not like Narcissus or even Cadmus, which means we don’t already have a defense against it. It opens with flight – Mercury-Hermes, the swift messenger of the gods, is taking a lazy, circling flight over Athens. He’s sightseeing, gazing at the Munychian fields, at the Lyceum, when he spots some young women travelling in a holy procession towards the Parthenon. They are three priestesses of Minerva-Athena, the daughters of Cecrops: Herse, Pandrosus and Aglauros.

Herse in particular is the pride of the festival procession; she outshines all the rest of the holy virgins in Athena’s temple. It’s the Panathenaea, Athena’s yearly festival in her favourite city and the girls are adorned in their most beautiful robes. Mercury is bricked up. He can’t take his eyes off Herse. He circles over them in the air lazily like a greedy bird of prey. As he watches her, he is consumed with flames of desire: he must have her. So he acts. A quick smoothing of hair, adjusting his cloak to make sure it shows off his pecs – he even makes sure his feet are clean and his famous winged sandals are gleaming – and he abandons the sky for the earth, plunging towards Herse. He assumes no disguise but shows up in his full unabashed godhood – unlike other times when the Gods try to seduce mortals – he is “justly assured of his charms” and needs no disguise.

Mercury goes to the apartment of the three girls with the intent of a drunk frat boy. He runs into Aglauros, Herse’s sister. She asks who he is, and he’s frank with her – “look, you’re going to get to be the aunt of Mercury’s child. I’m here to seduce your beautiful sister Herse.” For Mercury, it’s a fait accomplit.

But Aglauros blocks the door. She’s greedy. In a prior story we find out that Athena entrusted to the three daughters of Cecrops a basket containing a secret with strict instructions to never open it. Herse and Pandrosos listened, Aglauros did not. She was curious, she had to know Athena’s secret and against Athena’s orders she opened the basket.

“Auglauros regarded the god with the same avaricious eyes
with which she had recently peeped at the secrets of fair haired
Pallas. She asked for a mass of gold in return for the service
he craved, then forced him to leave the palace until he could bring it.”

Athena watches this happen, heaves a heavy sigh and decides that Aglauros must be punished. She will not allow Mercury to be beholden Aglauros, she who had already broken her solemn promise to Athena. Athena sinks down to the cavern of the god Envy, a filthy dwelling infested by black corruption. Buried away in the depths of a valley it never is blessed by the warmth of the sun, or the draught of a wind – a gloomy, numbingly cold domain, forever without any fire, forever enveloped in darkness. Athena stands at the threshold, she can’t bear to enter, and beats on the door with the point of her spear. Inside is Envy.

“Seeing [Athena’s] handsome looks and her splendid armour,
[Envy] uttered a groan and contorted her face with a deep-drawn sigh.
That face is constantly pallid; her body is totally shrivelled;
her eyes are both at a squint, while her teeth are decayed and discoloured;
her nipples are green with gall and the poison drips from her tongue.
She never smiles, except when excited by watching pain,
nor can she sleep, there are so many torments to keep her awake;
she loathes the sight of human success, which adds to her constant
wasting away; she is gnawed herself, as she gnaws at her victims,
by torture that’s self inflicted.”

The first part is easy. Envy doesn’t want what others have; she isn’t jealous – she loathes the sight of success. She never smiles except when excited by watching pain. A jealous person wants what you have and will act to get it: the jealous friend wants your girlfriend, so he tries to seduce her. Envy doesn’t care about the prize, she is gnawed by the sight of another succeeding. She resents, hates, those that have. Envy wants not what you have but only resents that you have it. Why does this difference matter? What is the logical conclusion of envy? If I resent what the other has, I must… deprive them of it.

The nuance between jealousy and envy isn’t as silly as it looks, in fact I would wager it is one of the greatest problems we face today. Ovid was a poet, an economist with words, he chose Envy very specifically because he didn’t mean jealousy. Thankfully Envy is a proper name in this context, or translation would have turned envy into jealousy as defense, because that’s what we would rather it be.

The jealous want to have, the jealous desire, but the envious want to deprive. The logical conclusion of jealousy is action, the logical conclusion of envy is deprivation. The envious don’t care about the prize, the object of desire – money, gold, a woman – they just want that the other person, their rival, is deprived of the object of desire. This is what satisfies. The object of desire is mere pretence for deprivation. So Aglauros blocks the door.

Why does she ask for gold? She’s talking to Mercury after all – a literal god, and not only that but Jove’s personal message boy – i.e., direct access to the king of all the gods. She could have anything at all. Maybe she asks for Mercury to fuck her instead, maybe she wants to become queen of Athens, what about a shiny new trireme – she can have anything at all. In the story prior Mercury steals an entire flock of holy cattle from Apollo, why wouldn’t she want that?

She wants gold because she doesn’t actually want anything. She isn't jealous, she doesn't want to get fucked herself, she doesn't want to be the mother of Mercury’s child – her only motivation is that she cannot stand that her sister is getting something. You may think its Mercury that she’s depriving, that would make sense, but its not. Mercury isn’t her rival. Herse is.

All that Aglauros cares about is depriving her sister because her sister is her rival, this is a sibling rivalry. “My sister? That stupid bitch is going to get piped down by Mercury? Not on my watch.” So she blocks the door. Nothing else can explain why she would even care – why isn’t her reaction to a god wanting her sister awe or even actual jealousy? Does she have some sort of prior beef with Mercury, does she dislike him for some reason? I’ve read the sources and I can tell you she does not. Aglauros would have reacted the same way to a normal suitor. Aglauros knows that Herse is beautiful, Herse is desired, and this isn’t fair. Her instinct is to block the door, to deprive Herse of being desired, and she comes up with a reason for her reaction after the fact, she covers up the slip: “well, actually, I want some uh… gold.”

The prize is of no interest to her, it may as well be anything. “5000 drachma so I can build a pool onto Athena’s temple” would be a desire. “A mass of gold” is meaningless. She picks gold because its what others would want. She doesn’t want anything except to deprive, so she desires how she thinks others desire. She is incapable of wanting.

But the gold serves another need. The gold is how Aglauros steals a little bit back from those with power. To Mercury this is nothing more than an annoying trifle, but to Aglauros it is huge: “look how I make the god run around! Look how I make him collect coins for me! Look at the fool!” The fact that it is a god that desires her sister makes things all the worse, but if the god is beholden to her, powerless Aglauros, then the ledger is balanced. The powerful Mercury is being tricked by the powerless but knowledgeable Aglauros, so the ledger says that Aglauros wins. Athena knows this, she sees it all right before she goes to visit Envy:

“The warrior goddess, Athena, now turned her threatening gaze
on Aglauros. She heaved such a troubled sigh from the depths of her heart
that, in line with her powerful feelings, the goddess’ breastplate, the aegis,
was heavily shaken. To think that this creature, with hands profane,
had uncovered her secrets and broken a solemn promise when taking
a furtive look at the motherless baby whom Vulcan had fathered!
A god as well as her sister would now be beholden to her,
and she herself would be rich with the gold she had greedily asked for!”

Why didn’t Athena punish Aglauros in the first place, for looking in her basket? Because what requires punishment is not Aglauros’ greed or curiosity, it is the fact that she is keeping a ledger, it is her resentment. The basket alone wasn't enough to tip Athena off, but between that and the gold Athena has realized that Aglauros keeps a ledger. She knows Aglauros intends to make Mercury beholden to her purely so she can steal back a little power, so she can have a little satisfaction against the master because she resents him. Aglauros peeps into the secret basket that Athena had given her for the same reason: to steal a little bit back from the god who has power, because that is what satisfies. Athena won’t have it.

“If you doubt you are this sinister, note that the form of this theft matches the form of your defense: God is the master, to you he is omnipotent but not omniscient, he doesn't know he's being robbed, in his ledger the theft doesn't even register but in yours it counts as gigantic, not because of what you gained from him but how much your ledger records he was deprived of.  It's very easy to deliberately misunderstand this so I'll state it explicitly: you want an omnipotent master so you can manipulate him into declaring you to be something-- this is ok, you accept the shame of it; but the purpose of having an omnipotent master is to be able to steal from him.  It is the only satisfaction that's possible.” – Sadly, Porn, section 26

You’ll notice the order of events: Aglauros looks in the basket, Aglauros asks for the gold from Mercury – Aglauros already keeps a ledger, Aglauros is already resentful – and then she becomes Envious.

So Athena visits the dank cave that Envy calls home and tells her to infect Aglauros with her poison. Athena leaves as fast as she can. Envy watches her go with angry resentment and then follows, polluting all she touches. Envy reaches the home of the daughters of Cecrops and breathes her poison on Aglauros while the girl sleeps:

“Breathing her noxious poison, she infiltrated her victim’s
bones and infused the lungs deep down with her pitch-black venom.
Next, to focus her target’s mind on the cause of the malady,
Envy implanted an image of Herse, then of her sister’s
fortunate marriage, then of the god with his beautiful body,
magnifying each picture, so that Aglauros was maddened
and eaten up by her secret jealousy. Fretting by day
and fretting by night, she would moan in her wretchedness, slowly dissolved
by the foul corruption, as ice is melted by fitful sunshine.
Herse’s good fortune rankled; the fire consuming her rival
burned like a bonfire of thorny brambles that’s kindled beneath
but never bursts into flames, just steadily smokes and smoulders.
She often wanted to die to escape the sight of her sister’s
happiness, or to report the affair as a wicked sin
to her strait-laced father.”

Her sister’s success gnaws at her, burns, nothing fills her with greater resentment. It is the success that is the issue, not the prize, it is Herse’s good fortune that causes resentment. The thought of Mercury’s hot body pressed against her rival fills her with rage. The images Envy puts in her head are magnified a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold, they are images of Herse’s desirability. According to the ledger, Herse is now ahead. She is more desirable than Aglauros and thus she must be deprived.

But still, Aglauros cannot act. She does not act towards anything, only... reacts, in both this story and her previous story with Athena. What courses of action does Aglauros come up with to solve this problem? Seduce Mercury? Kill her sister? You may say suicide, but it says right there that she wanted to die, not that she went into the bathtub with a knife. She doesn’t act. All she can think to do is to report the affair to an omnipotent entity, her father. Someone who can actually act.

“But the prize of desirability is pretext only.  You may want it, it's perfectly safe to admit you're a bad person for wanting it-- but even you know the prize cannot satisfy.  This isn't motivated by a passionate desire for what the other has; these are crimes of another class which men commit, not from jealousy, but from the rivalry fostered between equals until they are carried away by blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty.  The envy is over her good luck in what she has, but not because of what she has, but because she has it.  Envy doesn’t want it, envy wants her to be deprived.

Is that a modern insight?  A post modern discovery?  But this was the default understanding of envy for 2000 years until the idea of repressed homosexuality posited a hidden object of desire-- turned envy into jealousy.  “Repressed homosexuality” wasn't the cause of envy but the defense against it being envy: it has to be about wanting something, either you believed this was the deeper desire, or you believed it wasn't and so it was something else; but in both cases, you were immunized from the possibility that your envy wanted no-thing, there was no material prize, that it was purely envy of your wife and will only be satisfied by her deprivation.” - Sadly, Porn, section 20

The reason this story matters at all is because it has nothing to do with two sisters and everything to do with you and your wife.

One afternoon, Mercury shows up at the house to take another round out of his new gf and Aglauros... reacts.

“At last she crouched by her sister’s chamber
to bar the god’s way. When he blithely arrived and attempted to coax her
with honeyed words of entreaty, she said, ‘You can stop all that nonsense.
I shan’t budge an inch from this place till you’ve been sent packing!’”

Remember the gold? Aglauros sure doesn’t because she never wanted it anyway. The gold was just to make her envy about something else. Mercury meanwhile goes back to practicing propaganda, not rhetoric.  The focus of his words is to get her to move out of his way. He isn’t interested in what Aglauros believes, he’ll tell her anything so long as she acts in the right direction: “move out of the door, you weirdo, I have work to do.” And he is blithe, cheerful – Mercury is laughing.

“‘I shan’t budge an inch from this place till you’ve been sent packing!’
‘An excellent bargain!’ the speedy Mercury answered. ‘Let’s keep it.’
One touch of his magic staff and the door flew open. Aglauros
tried to get up, but found that the limbs that are bent when a person
is sitting down were paralysed, gripped by a sluggish inertia.
She struggled hard to straighten her body and land on her feet,
but the joints of her knees had stiffened, a creeping chill had invaded
her fingers’ ends, and her veins turned white as the blood retreated.
And like the malignant spread of a sadly incurable cancer,
creeping on to affect other perfectly healthy organs,
little by little the deadly chill crept into Aglauros’
breast and finally blocked the vital paths of her breathing.
She made no effort to speak, but if she had so attempted,
the passage for words had gone; her neck was encased in rock,
and her mouth had gone hard. She simply sat there, a lifeless statue;
the stone was not even white, but stained by her own black envy.”

Light, quick Mercury, dextrous Mercury, flying Mercury of the winged sandals laughs in the face of the stony weight of envy, rage, resentment. Aglauros heard a laughter that was no human laughter, a laughter not weighed by heavy resentment, a laughter of the heights, of clean, fresh air, of the sun. The last lesson of the story is very easy. What happens to the envious? Those who can act will turn them to stone.

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