The Poems of Hesiod

by Hesiod

  With the Hundred-Handers’ help, the course of the war was turned. Zeus cast the Titans into black Tartaros. Poseidon fixed gates of bronze in a wall that imprisoned them, and the Hundred-Handers bound the Titans and kept guard. Thus Zeus relegated to primal darkness the forces that threaten to disrupt the world order. Zeus placed the Titan Atlas, a son of Iapetos and an Oceanid, at the edge of the world, ordering him to hold up the heavens (see fig. 9). Thus Zeus guaranteed the lasting separation of Sky and Earth.

  But Zeus’s struggle was not over. Earth had directed Zeus to muster the Hundred-Handers in his fight against her own offspring, the Titans, but she now regretted Zeus’s triumph and became his greatest adversary. Having sex with her child Tartaros, she gave birth to Typhon (tī-fon), a gigantic monster. Typhon would have taken over the entire earth, but Zeus attacked with his lightning bolts, melted the lands all around, and defeated the monster, imprisoning him beneath the earth.

  Although he had been victorious against the Titans and against Typhon, Zeus was still insecure in his rule. The logic of the Succession Myth required that he too would be overthrown. Kronos was craftier than Sky, and Zeus was craftier than Kronos. Who would outwit Zeus? To forestall his own destruction, Zeus swallowed his pregnant first wife, the Oceanid Metis (mē-tis), “mind.” Zeus had learned from Sky and Earth that Metis’ second child after Athena, with whom she was already pregnant, would depose him. Sky had maintained ascendancy by thrusting his children down in a hiding place of their mother. Kronos gobbled up his offspring. Zeus simply swallowed the mother before the baby was born. Metis, “mind,” “cleverness,” thus became a part of his own being.

  According to later tradition, Zeus suffered a severe headache. Either Prometheus or Hephaistos smacked his head with an ax. Out leaped Athena fully armed, shouting the war cry. Athena is female, but she has masculine qualities, and she is wholly Zeus’s child, owing loyalty to him alone. Thus the child predestined to overthrow Zeus was never born. Zeus flouted the prophecy by defying the biological principle by which only a female can give birth.

  The theme of Zeus’s possible overthrow—like his grandfather’s and his father’s—is not confined to the prophecy attached to Metis. The “wily” Titan Prometheus possesses in his epithet the essential requirement for an enemy of the king of the gods. Using a trick similar to that practiced on Kronos by Rhea, Prometheus disguised the best part of the sacrificial offering in the dispute over its division. Zeus chose the bones, hidden in fat, over the rich flesh, which is now reserved for men. Hesiod says that Zeus saw through the trick, but the poet only explains a tradition degrading to the king of the gods, who here acts like the stupid ogre.

  Playing the role of tyrant, Zeus inflicts retribution on men for Prometheus’ trick by withholding fire. But Prometheus outsmarts the evil lord for a second time, stealing fire from heaven in a fennel stalk. The enraged Zeus devises a terrible punishment. He orders Hephaistos to make a woman (named Pandora in the Works and Days). Athena gives the girl clothes and a crown. She is beautiful, a wonder to behold, but “a great affliction for men.” The poet’s conclusion—a pious “So nobody ever gets around the king of the gods”—hardly accords with the two deceptions that Prometheus has practiced on Zeus.

  Prometheus does not overcome Zeus and replace him, as earlier protagonists in the Succession Myth had done, but he does limit Zeus’s prerogatives in the unequal distribution of the Greek sacrifice. Prometheus shows Zeus’s power to be maleficent, an enemy of goodness, in the great king’s fashioning of Pandora. There is no escaping the harm that her descendants—women—will bring to men. Zeus may be great, the subject of Hesiod’s hymn, but his power can work to man’s disadvantage.

  Prominent Themes in Hesiod’s Theogony

  Hesiod’s story of the creation of the world and the gods owes much to folktale. Gods act as villains (Sky, Kronos) and tricksters (Kronos, Zeus); goddesses are sexual victims (Earth, Rhea), dangerous females (Earth), and helpful guardians (Earth, Rhea). Typhon is a fearsome dragon; Zeus, his slayer. Rancorous dispute within the family motivates the narrative: Wives scheme against husbands (Earth against Sky), sons against fathers (Kronos against Sky, Zeus against Kronos), and fathers against children (Kronos against the Olympians). Olden stories have been reshaped to fashion a stirring tale that solves the question of how Zeus became lord of the world.

  Hesiod’s world is not a fixed construction, created by God all at once and for all time. Rather, the creation arises from continuous growth, from constant progression away from an initial unity. First came Chaos/Chasm, then Night and Darkness, which engender their opposites, Brightness and Day. Then came Earth, the first living being, a female who without the benefit of sexual intercourse gave birth to Sea and Sky. Eros/Sexual Desire arose too, to drive the growing creation. Later, Earth had sex with her own offspring, and after this, with rare exceptions, procreation was through sexual means.

  Hesiod’s tale reports the climb to power of male over female. Originally was female Earth, the all-mother; in the end is the male Zeus, lord of the creation. When evolutionary growth began, Earth produced children without sex; in the end, Zeus acts likewise when Athena leaps from his head fully armed. For Greeks it was normal that a well-ordered creation, like an organized home or town, was one governed by a wily and formidable male. This was the prevailing model, and yet the sway of Earth is never totally gone. Earth remains the fundamental basis of the world.

  Earth, wife and mother of Sky, plotted with her son, the crafty Kronos, to maim Father Sky and destroy his power. Sky was an ogre; he was against life and what was to come. He heeded only his own passion. Like the hero in folktale, crafty Kronos leaped from a hiding place to destroy the monster who like the dragon of folktale sexually imperiled the woman. Kronos unmanned his own father with an adamantine sickle, a distinctive weapon like those that folktale heroes use to defeat their adversaries. As in many folktales, the story takes place within the ambiguities of the family: A father produces a son in the hope that the son may succeed him, not destroy him!

  Sky, a nasty father, got what was coming to him; but Kronos was scarcely any better. Sky kept his children down in the womb of Earth. The flesh-eating Kronos took them into his own stomach. (The Greek nêdys means both “womb” and “stomach.”) Sky and Earth, now acting together, informed Rhea how to outsmart her husband. The onetime-crafty Kronos has become the foolish ogre, confusing a stone with his own offspring. Rhea, a doublet of Earth, takes the baby to a Cretan cavern, the womb of Earth, where a fresh champion grows up, the crafty Zeus.

  In the feature of Zeus’s childhood on Crete, folktale is shaped by historical cult. On Crete there was an old religion of a youthful male god, evidently the associate of a mother goddess venerated in caves on Crete. When the conquering Greeks discovered the male god of the native, non-Greek people of Crete, they associated him with their own male god, Zeus, although as a dying god of nature the Cretan god was wholly unlike the Greek storm god. The Greeks called this god the Cretan Zeus, in order to distinguish him from the Olympian god. Cretans even pointed out where the Cretan Zeus was buried. According to Cretan myth, Rhea gave the baby Zeus to a group of young men called Curetês, “youths,” who danced around while noisily banging their spears against shields to conceal the baby’s cries from Kronos. The Curetês were not simply players in myth but in history actually worshipped the mother goddess in this way.

  The Titans, whose name is mysterious, came to stand for the wild powers of nature. Their offspring are the seas, the rivers, and the stars in the sky. Crafty Zeus, the entirely anthropomorphic god of the Classical period (during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), could not overcome them without the help of the Cyclopês and the Hundred-Handers. Only with their help could he cast the Titans and Typhon into Tartaros. He freed the Cyclopês and the Hundred-Handers from Tartaros. The Cyclopês became Zeus’s armorers; the Hundred-Handers, his mercenaries. Fashioning a new order, Zeus behaved as a politician, correcting the mistakes of earlier days.
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br />   The ambivalence of the female is a hallmark of Hesiod’s tale. At first Earth encourages change; then, bitter because of the Titans’ defeat, she works against it. She gives birth to Typhon, adversary of the new order. Zeus cannot in truth slay Typhon any more than he can overcome Earth herself, so he imprisons him beneath the earth. Typhon is still in our world, in the savage winds that shake the sea. As a prize for defeating the dragon, Zeus becomes king, marries, and fathers many children. Many folktales end in just this way.

  In Hesiod’s creation myth, the motifs of separation, succession, and dragon combat are ingeniously melded to tell the story of the fashioning of the ordered and diverse world from the disordered and homogeneous one that preceded it.

  Theogony

  The Muses of HELIKON—let us begin with them, who live on the great

  and mystical mountain Helikon, and dance around the violet

  spring on light feet, and the altar of the mighty son of Kronos.3

  Bathing their tender skin in the spring of Permessos, or the Spring

  of the Horse, or in sacred Olmeios, they make their dance on the highest

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  peak of Helikon—lovely, desirable!—and they dance with power.6

  Leaping up from there, hidden in a thick mist, they go

  forth at night, sending forth their most beautiful song, singing

  of Zeus who carries the goatskin fetish, and divine Hera of ARGOS,

  who walks in golden sandals, and the daughter of Zeus who carries

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  the goatskin fetish, flashing-eyed Athena, and Phoibos Apollo,

  and Artemis who thrills to shoot arrows, and Poseidon, who holds

  the earth, lord of earthquake, and holy Themis and Aphrodite,

  who twinkles with her eyes, and golden-crowned Hebê, and beautiful

  Dionê, and Leto, and Iapetos, and crooked-counseling Kronos,

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  and Dawn, and great Helios and shining Moon, and Earth, and great

  Ocean, and dark Night, and the sacred race of the other deathless

  ones, who never die.18 These Muses once taught Hesiod beautiful

  song while he looked after his sheep beneath sacred Helikon.

  Figure 4. A Muse playing the lyre. A bird perches on the ground before her. She wears a gown that shows beneath a robe wrapped around her waist. The lyre has seven strings and a wooden sounding box. Written on the rock, beneath her, is the word HLIKON, an explicit reference to Hesiod’s poem. Above the Muse is a kalos inscription, “So-and-So is handsome.” Of uncertain purpose, kalos (“handsome”) inscriptions were part of the culture of sexual love between older men and boys in the Greek symposium and are often found on Athenian pottery between roughly 550 and 430 B.C. This one reads: AXEIOPEITHES [is] HANDSOME [and so is] ALKIMACHO[S]. Athenian white-ground oil jar, ca. 440–430 B.C. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (Photo: Bibi Saint-Pol; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Mousai_Helikon_Staatliche_Antikensammlungen_Schoen80_n1.jpg)

  First of all the goddesses spoke this word to me, the Muses

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  who live on OLYMPOS, the daughters of Zeus who carries the goatskin

  fetish: “You, rough shepherds! Wretched objects of reproach—nothing

  but bellies!—we know how to speak many false things that look like

  the truth, and we know how, when we wish, to speak the truth.”

  So spoke the eloquent daughters of great Zeus. They plucked

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  and gave me a staff, the shoot of a blooming laurel,26 a thing of wonder,

  and they breathed into me a marvelous voice so that I might celebrate

  what came before and what will come after. And they commanded me to sing

  of the race of the blessed gods who never die, to sing of them first

  of all, and last.

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  But why do I talk about an oak or a rock?30 So come you,

  let us begin with the Muses, who delight with song the great mind

  of their father Zeus in Olympos, telling in harmony of how things

  are now, and how they will be, and how they once were. Untiring,

  their sweet voice flows from their mouths, and the house of father

  Zeus, the thunderer, laughs at the delicate voice of the goddesses

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  as it spreads across the room, and the peaks of snowy Olympos ring,

  and the houses of the deathless ones.

  And they, sending forth

  an undying voice, celebrate first of all in their song the holy race

  of the gods from the beginning, those whom Earth and broad Sky39

  first begot, and the gods who came forth from them, the bestowers

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  of good things.

  Second, they celebrate Zeus, the father of gods and men,

  both in the beginning of their song and at its end: how he is the greatest

  of the gods, and most mighty in power. And again, the Muses, the daughters

  of Zeus who carries the goatskin fetish, who dwell on Olympos,

  delight the mind of Zeus in Olympos by singing of the race of men,

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  and of the powerful Giants.46

  For Mnemosynê, who rules over the hills

  of Eleutherai, bore the Muses in PIERIA after sleeping with the son

  of Kronos, to be a respite from evil and a cessation of sorrow.48

  For nine nights did Zeus the Counselor mix with her in love,

  entering her holy bed set apart from the deathless ones. And when

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  a year had passed, and the seasons were turned as the months waned,

  and many days came to completion, she bore nine daughters

  of like mind who care for song in their hearts, their spirits

  without care, a little bit away from the topmost peak of snowy

  Olympos. There are their brilliant dancing places and their beautiful

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  houses. Beside them dwell the Graces, and Desire,56 in joyous festivities.

  Sending forth a lovely sound from their mouth, they sing of the laws

  of all, and they celebrate the cherished habits of the deathless ones,

  sending forth their lovely voice. Then they went to Olympos, rejoicing

  in their beautiful voice, their ambrosial60 song, and the black earth

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  resounded about them as they sang, and a lovely sound rose up

  beneath their feet as they went to their father. He ruled over the sky,

  himself holding the thunderbolt and the flashing lightning, having

  overcome through strength his father, Kronos. And he fairly allotted

  every portion to the deathless ones, and he established their ranks.

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  So of these things the Muses sang, who have their houses on

  Olympos, the nine daughters begotten of great Zeus—Kleio and Euterpê

  and Thaleia and Melpomenê and Terpsichorê and Erato and Polyhymnia

  and Ourania and Kalliopê, who is the foremost of all, for she too attends

  upon respected princes.70

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  Whomever of the god-nourished princes the daughters of great

  Zeus honor and behold at birth, they pour sweet dew upon his tongue,

  and from his mouth words flow like honey. All the people look toward him

  as he settles cases with true judgments. And he, speaking convincingly,

  quickly, and knowingly puts an end to even a great quarrel. For this reason

  there are wise princes, who turn matters around when the people go astray

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  in assembly, persuading them with gentle words. And when the prince passes

  through a crowd, people seek his favor with honeyed respect. He stands

  out when people are assembled: Such is the sacred gift of the Muses to men.

  From the Muses and Apollo, who shoots from afar,
come singers

  upon the earth, and the lyre players, but from Zeus come the kings:

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  That man is blessed, whomever the Muses love—sweet is the voice that flows

  from his mouth. For if someone has recent pain in his breast and groans,

  troubled in heart, but a singer, servant of the Muses, sings of the great deeds

  of men of olden times and of the blessed gods who live on Olympos—

  then quickly that man forgets his troubles, unconcerned with his sorrows.

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  The gifts of the goddesses quickly turn him away from these.

  So greetings, children of Zeus! Give me lovely song! Celebrate