Pagans & Moderns The beauty and monstrosity of the ancient gods
May 28, 2001, Vol. 6, No. 35 • By ALGIS VALIUNAS EVEN IN THE
DAYS THAT HOMER SINGS OF, sightings of the gods were a rarity.
By the time the Trojan War got underway, Zeus had pretty much
given up making earthly appearances, and it was hard for even
the wisest mortals to identify the lesser gods he sent in his
stead, as Odysseus complained to Athena. As Roberto Calasso, the
noted Italian literary critic, puts it: "Every primordial age is
one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared."
But Calasso's principal concern in Literature and the Gods is
with the gods' reappearance during what he calls "the heroic age
of absolute literature," which began in 1798 with the youthful
trumpetings of the German writers Friedrich von Schlegel and
Novalis and closed in 1898 with the death of the French poet St
phane Mallarm . With bold imaginative leaps Calasso discerns the
important but subtle connections among "the reawakening of the
gods, parody,