Episode 8: Before Orthodoxy

Hesiod’s Theogony

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 8: Before Orthodoxy. This program is on the Theogony, an ancient Greek poem likely produced during the late 700s BCE – a story about the origins of the universe and the gods.

Most of us know some Greek myths. There is the story of Perseus, son of Danae, who defeats Medusa and frees the Ethiopian princess Andromeda from the Kraken. And there’s the story of Theseus, who, after defeating the Minotaur with the help of the Cretan princess Ariadne, abandons her on the way home to Athens and thereafter leads a rather checkered life. There’s Bellerophon, the impious Corinthian hero who beats the monster called the chimera with the help of a winged horse that we call the Pegasus. The myth of Persephone, kidnapped by Hades, and thereafter brought back for part of the year by her mother Demeter, was especially well known to ancient Greeks. The Trojan War saga is biggest bundle of Greek myths. It includes not only the Iliad and Odyssey, which survive today, but also the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou persis, Nostoi, and Telegony, a group of lost epics that used to frame the works of Homer into a much longer story.

There are hundreds of Greek myths, and they form a neverendingly complicated web of gods, people, and creatures; grandparents, parents, and children; prequels and sequels. No collection can ever include all of them, and as we follow them into the remote past of Mycenaean Bronze Age, things only become more complex. Linear B tablets show that Dionysus was once di-wo-nu-so-jo, and that he once existed among gods with strange names, like Manasa and Rimios, in addition to the more familiar Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon.¹ Like the name of Dionysus, the role of Dionysus changed over time in the ancient Mediterranean imagination, and more generally Ancient Greece’s gods experienced rises and falls in popularity over time and in different geographical regions. We can’t master all of that informations, any more than we could master the whole span of all the tales told by English speakers for a thousand years. The web of stories is too enormous, and much of it is lost in the shade of its Bronze Age prehistory, like a deep well made up of many disparate, small bricks that descends into darkness.

But at a few moments in ancient literary history, there were some major figures who worked to synthesize entire culture traditions into single works. The Biblioteca of a writer we call Pseudo-Apollodorus, dated some time around 100 CE, was one such effort. Much more famously, the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, finished around 8 CE, was a collection of 250 myths, epitomizing Roman literature’s centuries-long effort to enfold and synthesize Greek cultural traditions that had come before it. We know some of Ovid’s sources – Greco-Egyptian poets from the third century BCE, Athenian playwrights from the fifth century BCE, and before all of them the Homeric poems and the works of Hesiod.

Hesiod, again our writer for today, was at work in the late 700s BCE. As we learned last time, he was among the first figures we know of in literary history to ever say anything about himself. Hesiod was also, like others who came after him, a compiler – one who took many disparate strands of Ancient Greek legend, and wove them together into a single story – the Theogony. If the Ancient Greek myths were ever mortared together into a single gigantic volume, a sort of bible of the Eastern Mediterranean, then the Theogony would be its Book of Genesis. And while in writing the Theogony, Hesiod drew on a broad variety of traditions, his compilation was, as Ovid’s would be seven hundred years later, an exercise involving a great degree of personal creativity and innovation, too.

Ancient Greek gods are everywhere in the archaeological record in the Aegean basin. In friezes, metopes, freestanding statues, and black and red figure pottery, from the giant scenes in lofty temple tympanums to knickknacks and jewelry, Zeus and the gang show up all over the place. Their names appear in graffiti scratched into public walls, and in potsherds submitted at the temples of oracles alongside prayers. The Olympians and their broad array of associates, although they evolved over the centuries, were indelibly part of the ancient Greek imagination. To some extent, ancient Greek worship practices are the same as those we still have today. Citizens of the bygone Aegean prayed to Zeus and company, and they revered their pantheon as distant, majestic presences who might grant wishes or offer guidance. But to ancient Greeks, the gods were also fair game for improvised storytelling, appearing in all sorts of surviving tales that range from bawdy and erotic, to action-packed, to reverent and pietistic.

One of the most important lessons for newcomers to ancient Greek history is that it’s important not to confuse the gods in ancient Greek literature with the actual worship practices of various peoples in the bygone Aegean world. From archaeology and a smattering of surviving texts, we have general sense of how ancient Greek people actually worshipped – at the Thesmophoria, centered on the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone; at the Anthesteria in Athens, a much less solemn occasion whose paramount deity was Dionysus, and at the Thargelia, held for Apollo and Artemis in the spring to celebrate first fruits. The ancient Aegean basin was home to many real worship rites, in which goddesses like Demeter and gods like Apollo received the earnest praises and supplications of hopeful worshippers. The ancient Aegean basin was also full of bards – singing storytellers who knew that you could get an audience enticed with a familiar name – listen up everybody, this one is about Hera, or gather around, now, this one is about Zeus and a water nymph.

Homer’s Odyssey contains a famous scene of just such a person. When the hero Odysseus is in the court of the Phaeacians, a Phaeacian bard named Demodocus performs a few narratives for the gathered court. One of them is a tune about the gods. In it, Aphrodite is cheating on her husband, Hephaestus. Hephaestus finds out about it. Aphrodite’s lover Ares comes over, expecting a steamy tryst with the goddess of love. But the lovers are tricked. Hephaestus ensnares them in a fine metal mesh. Poseidon, Hermes, and Apollo all show up to have a laugh at the compromised lovers. Poseidon promises to pay Ares’ adulterer’s fine to Hephaestus, and that’s it – the whole embarrassing experience winds up, and in the Odyssey, the audience listening to this erotic tale, Odysseus included, all have a good laugh.

This tale-within-a-tale about a pair of horny gods is small back corner of the Odyssey. But at the same time, the bardic scene in the Odyssey is an important reminder that from Hesiod and Homer around 700 BCE, all the way down to the epic poet Nonnus a thousand years later, ancient Greek poets loved telling stories about the gods. These stories, above all, were engineered to entertain. At annual festivals, like the enigmatic Eleusinian Mysteries, or the solemn Adonia, or the militaristic Boedromia, participants shared a more formulaic and scripted series of rites and rituals, according to the traditions of the occasion. Poetry, however, could be looser, envisioning and revisioning the old stories about the gods according to the whims of any given bard or audience.

I think that in the twenty-first century, surrounded by orthodox creeds as we are, it’s difficult for us to understand the theological climate of Hesiod’s eighth-century BCE. Today, the doctrines of Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and the sects of Protestantism are well established and codified. You can’t go up to a priest and say, “Well, I know what it says in the Book of Acts, but in a version I prefer, Saint Paul rode into Asia Minor on the back of a fire breathing hippopotamus.” Well, you can tell a priest this, but you’ll be gently corrected and he may tell you to lay off the communion wine. The point is that in Hesiod’s day, standard versions of myths and legends had not been consecrated by institutions and authorities. There was still room for exuberant innovation, for variations on themes, and for a lot of imagination and improvisation. While a certain degree of orthodoxy would have been expected, entertainment value was equally important. I’ve titled this episode “Before Orthodoxy,” because one of the main things that the Theogony can teach us is that imagination and innovation have been as central to religious narratives as piety and reverence during many periods of human history.

It’s a strange thing for us to imagine – to think that we could tell a story about Jesus riding a pterodactyl, or Muhammad and Ali tilling a sacred pumpkin patch, and that Christians and Muslims, respectively, would nod appreciatively. The Abrahamic religions have had centuries to mature and accrue canons of theological writings. But Hesiod lived in a time when oral tradition was still the primary means of conveying tales of the sacred past, and tales change with each telling.

Hesiod’s culture, as we discussed in the previous episode, was on the rise. Things were stabilizing after the Greek Dark Age, and Greek speakers had a powerful new alphabet to use to record their oral traditions. Hesiod lived at the cusp between an oral culture still recovering from the Bronze Age collapse, and a literate culture very slowly forming all over the eastern Mediterranean. As in Sumer and ancient Egypt thousands of years prior, writing and reading were specialized trades. Nonetheless, phonetic writing systems are far more accommodating to newcomers than logographic ones with hundreds of symbols. As ancient Greece recovered economically from its previous centuries of comparative hardship, writing, as a means of commercial and legal recordkeeping, and later, a means of preserving cultural traditions, became more and more pervasive. Thus, it’s useful to think of Hesiod’s Theogony as symptomatic of a greater cultural pattern of slowly consolidating traditions. Hesiod didn’t invent the Greek Pantheon – as I said, earlier versions of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon and company all show up in the art of the Bronze Age, preceding Hesiod by seven or eight hundred years. And it follows that Hesiod likely didn’t think of himself as an originator, or prophet, or conduit to divine messages. Instead, Hesiod likely saw his work in the Theogony as something like a musician taking the chart toppers of a decade and making a cover compilation of the greatest moments of the greatest songs, adding in his own contributions whenever he saw fit.

So let’s hear a summary of Hesiod’s Theogony. The Theogony is, once again, a creation story. The basic outline of this poem is that there was first a generation of primeval elementals. Then, there was a generation of titans. And finally, there was a generation of gods. The genesis of these gods, and how they are produced by an elaborate web of incest, cannibalism, and tyranny, and their eventual triumph as the champions of cosmic order and justice, is at the core of the story you’re about to hear – a rollicking tale in which over a hundred divine beings spring from nothingness in just a few generations. So here is the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, ancient Greece’s most famous creation story. I’ll be quoting from a number of translations in this episode, but unless otherwise noted, I’m quoting from the Stanley Lombardo translation, published by Hackett Classics in 1993. [music]

Hesiod’s Invocation to the Muses

Hesiod’s Theogony begins with an invocation to the muses. As students of poetry know, an invocation to the muses is a standard opening move, wherein a poet asks for inspiration and help from the goddesses of literature and the arts and sciences. Hesiod’s invocation is quite famous in literary history, so let’s hear it at length. This is the M.L. West translation, published by Oxford World’s Classics in 1988. You’ll hear the word “Helicon” here, which refers to a mountain and its surrounding territory on the Greek mainland where Hesiod himself lived. The Theogony opens with these words:

From the Muses of Helicon let us begin our singing, that haunt Helicon’s great and holy mountain, and dance on their soft feet round the violet-dark spring and the altar of the mighty [Zeus]. And when they have bathed their gentle skin. . .then on the highest slope of Helicon they make their dances, fair and lovely, stepping lively in time. From there they go forth, veiled in thick mist, and walk by night, uttering beautiful voice, singing of Zeus who bears the aegis. . .and the rest of the holy family of immortals who are for ever.

And once they taught Hesiod fine singing, as he tended his lambs below holy Helicon. . .they gave me a branch of springing bay to pluck for a staff, a handsome one, and they breathed into me wondrous voice, so that I should celebrate things of future and things that were aforetime. And they told me to sing of the family of blessed ones who are for ever, and first and last always to sing of themselves.²

The muses, Hesiod explains, were born in the distant north of the Greek mainland, north of Mount Olympus. There were nine of them. Their father was Zeus, and their mother was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. From their early days, they danced, and sang, and celebrated the gods, making the earth itself ring with their music. The muses, among many other things, were a conduit for Zeus’ power among mortals. When Zeus favored a mortal king, he would send the muses to that king. The king would thereafter have divine dew on his tongue, and when he spoke, it was as though his words were laden with honey, and among other mortals, the king would be wise, prudent, and capable of settling disputes. But, Hesiod says, it’s now time to leave the muses behind. His story, Hesiod tells us, does not begin with the birth of the muses, after all, but with the very beginning of everything.

Gaia, Ouranos, and Kronos

Before humankind, before the muses, before the gods, before the progenitors of the gods – before even the earth and the stars, there was pure chaos, a churning, empty abyss, murky and always changing. Then the earth, Gaia, came into being, her form strong and fruitful. Gaia’s body would be the theater for all human existence. There also rose a region of darkness beyond chaos, a region called Tartaros, far from everything. Alongside the earth Gaia and the darkness Tartaros there came a force called Desire, or Eros, the force that animates all beings, and all things. From these three things – Gaia, the earth; Tartaros, the outer darkness; and Eros, the force of all desire, all other things came to be.

Over the course of an unknown period of time, the fundamental mechanisms of the universe sprang into being – some from intercourse, and some appearing spontaneously. Darkness and night were born, and then brightness and daytime. Gaia, the earth, gave birth to Ouranos, the shimmering heavens, which rested perfectly over her, encircling her far boundaries. Gaia birthed Mountains, and Nymphs, and great rivers, and finally the Ocean. Chaos, once empty, became populated with the children of Gaia and Ouranos, the heavens. Soon, the earth and heavens coupled to produce a race called the Titans. There were eleven titans to begin with, strong boys and beautiful, gold-crowned girls. But the twelfth titan born to Gaia was not like the others. He was a wicked being, and his deeds would prove to be terrible. His name was Kronos.

The children of Gaia the earth, and Ouranos the heavens, increased in number. As young Kronos grew older, he watched as his parents’ coupling produced the race of Cyclopes, a crafty, vigorous race of beings with only one eye. But far worse than the Cyclopes, Kronos concluded, were his final three siblings, unspeakable creatures, each with a hundred hands and fifty heads, all terrifyingly powerful. As the spawn of Gaia the earth and Ouranos the heavens grew, Ouranos grew disgusted and afraid at his brood of children. Ouranos began to cram them into a hollow in the earth as soon as they were born, forcing his children underground, down into depths from which they could not escape. The titan Kronos, who already loathed his prolific, lustful, and domineering father Ouranos, was charged anew with hatred.

The earth, Gaia, was in excruciating pain over the titans, cyclopes, and hundred-handed giants that had been lodged under her mountains and valleys. She vowed to do something, and created a new mineral that had never existed before – flint. Out of this flint she fashioned a vast sickle, and with this fearsome weapon created, she summoned her sons. And this is what she said: “Listen to me, children, / [W]e might yet get even / With your criminal father for what he has done to us. / After all, he started this whole ugly business.”³ Gaia’s many sons, even the fifty-headed giants, looked at one another uncertainly. Crammed together in subterranean grottos, the sons of heaven and earth worried what punishments disobedience might bring. But not Kronos. He had hated his father for a long time. Kronos said, “I might be able to bring it off, Mother. / I can’t stand Father; he doesn’t even deserve the name” (65). Gaia smiled, her vast earthen heart stirred with new warmth, and she handed Kronos the sickle. [music]

Kronos Confronts Ouranos

Kronos, freed from the bounds of the earth, lay hidden in ambush. He saw his gigantic father Ouranos approaching. The vastness of the night sky followed Ouranos like a cape. Filled with his characteristic lust, he settled himself over Gaia, but instead of finding her, he experienced sudden pain. Kronos, swinging the sickle, had cut off his father’s exposed genitals. Gore splattered everywhere, and in each place where blood dropped there arose beings – Furies, Giants, and nymphs.

The genitals of Ouranos, sliced off with such fierceness, flew all the way into the sea. There they landed and floated, and floated, and floated, collecting around them foam from the white caps of the ocean. Out of this foam, there arose a goddess, Aphrodite. This moment of this text, by the way, is the source of Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting, The Birth of Venus. To return to Hesiod’s Theogony, Aphrodite floated to an island, shining and beautiful, so lovely, in fact, that when she came to shore and began walking, new fresh grass appeared beneath her bare feet. Aphrodite, joined by Eros, or Desire, would have no small role to play in determining the lives and fates of gods and men thereafter.

The triumph of Kronos over his father Ouranos seemed like it might hearken in a period of prosperity. Though Ouranos had cursed his many children, they were now free from the confines of the earth, and Gaia no longer had to contain such multitudes of beings. Castrated, Ouranos could no longer continue to produce such crops of monsters and abominations. Yet in spite of Kronos’ victory, peace and prosperity did not descend over the cosmos. For one, Kronos, as we’ll see, was his father’s son, capable of the same lusts and cruelties. And additionally, the once empty universe was becoming populated with legions of beings, beings whose very natures were opposed to one another.

Soon the creatures on Gaia, or the earth, began producing other creatures. From Night descended Doom, Fate, Death, Sleep, and the world of Dreams. Night issued Blame, Grief, the Destinies, and the ruthless sisters of the Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who decide the events in the lives of all beings. Night also birthed Deception and Old Age, and worst of all, the horror called Eris, or Strife. From Strife came the privations of existence – Toil, Forgetfulness, Famine, Pain, Battles Fights, Murder, Lies, Lawlessness, Recklessness, and Oaths.

The children of the Sea were not so baneful. Fifty girls, goddesses and nymphs, with flowing hair, were born to the Sea, diligent in their unique abilities and crafts. The Sea and Ocean’s descendants generated beautiful Dawn, the sun Helios, the forces of Strength, Victory, and Vying, the winds Zephyros and Boreas. From the Sea and Ocean descended the various creatures of ancient Greek myth – harpies, gorgons, Geryon, Echidna, Kerberos, the Hydra, the Chimaera, and the Sphinx. From them also gushed the world’s rivers, dozens in number. And as the universe became populated with such a plurality of beings, Kronos began to reveal his true nature.

The Birth of the Olympians

Kronos raped his sister Rheia. From such an ignominious beginning arose the core six figures of the Olympian pantheon. Hestia was born, the virgin goddess of the homestead, state and family. Next came Demeter, goddess of the harvest, law, and sacred cycle of life and death. Then, Hera was born, goddess of marriage and women. Hades came next, the lord of the underworld. After Hades came Poseidon, the lord of the sea, who made all shores shudder with his might. Rheia then became pregnant with Zeus, the wise and judicious god of thunder, the aegis of the Greek pantheon.

But the Olympians were just kids, and Zeus was not yet born. And all of them were subject to the abuses of a despotic father – a father who’d heard that he’d be overthrown by his own children. Kronos believed this prophecy, and he acted to prevent it from coming true. As soon as each child was born, he devoured it. Such was the fate of Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. On the verge of giving birth to Zeus, poor Rheia could not stand losing another child to the ravages of Kronos. She conspired with Gaia and Ouranos. She would make Kronos pay for devouring his children, and for castrating his father. The earth and heavens agreed. When Zeus was born, he was hidden in the earth, and brought up on the broad and beautiful island of Crete.

Kronos knew that his mate had given birth again, and expected to devour the offspring, but Rheia tricked him. She gave him a stone, wrapped up in a baby’s clothes. Kronos ate the stone, none the wiser, content that he’d be safe from his son. Only, Zeus was free, and he was growing older and stronger. He prepared for battle, first by freeing the Cyclopes, long ago bound by Ouranos. These one-eyed creatures, grateful for their liberation, gave Zeus the power of thunder and lightning. With these new weapons, Zeus was ready to make war on his father, just as Kronos himself had once faced Ouranos. [music]

The Titanomachy

At the start of the war between the gods and titans, Zeus was able to make Kronos regurgitate the other five Olympian gods. When the sides were drawn, the Olympians, the Cyclopes and some other powerful gods stood against the Titans. Neither side prevailed. Ten years passed, and the war was cataclysmic. But Zeus had a secret weapon. Three of the hundred handed, fifty headed giants were on Zeus’ side, since he’d freed them, as well. At a key moment, ten years into the fighting, Zeus released these juggernauts. They were so large that they could rip chunks out of cliffs and hurl them at the titans.

At the apex of the fighting, the world was almost ripped to pieces. The ocean screamed. The sky creaked and groaned. The slamming of feet and bodies on the surface of the earth made even the eerie, mist-covered lands of Tartaros shake. Zeus held nothing back. He knew that he would either win victory for his brothers and sisters, or be devoured and digested by their infernal father. His lightning bolts ripped through the air, blazing with white fire, liquefying continents and boiling the vast waters. He covered the Titans with a calyx of blazing fire, and the heat was so intense that even Chaos, the oldest of things, felt its pulsations. The winds were so strong that they caused earthquakes.

The trio of hundred handed giants saw that Zeus’ fire had turned the tides of the battle. They charged the cowering titans and bound them, and the titans were cast down into the outer darkness of Tartaros. Tartaros was far from the earth – a lump of metal falling from earth to Tartaros would take nine days. And from Tartaros, Hesiod tells us, the titans have never budged. “There the Titans are concealed in the misty gloom / By the will of Zeus who gathers the clouds, / In a moldering place, the vast earth’s limits” (81). Girded by bronze doors that Poseidon fashioned, and guarded by the hundred handed giants, the Titans still rest, to this day, confined to endless, musty night. In the Inferno, when the Italian poet Dante Alighieri created his own theological compilation two thousand years after Hesiod, Dante recorded seeing the titans in one of the lowest basements of hell. Dante wrote, “As, when mist dissolves, the gaze little by little makes out the shape of what the vapor-thickened air had hidden, so, boring through the thick dark atmosphere, drawing closer and closer to the edge. . . my fear grew.”⁴ And Dante saw a titan there, “a chain wrapped about him from the neck down, so that on what we saw of him it made five full turns.”⁵

The Rise of Typhoios

To return to Hesiod’s Theogony, the banishment of the Titans did not go unnoticed. Gaia, shocked at the wholesale defeat of her immediate relatives, had one more child. This child was the spawn of Gaia and Tartaros, the outer darkness, and its name was Typhoios. Hesiod describes Typhoios as:

A god whose hands were like engines of war,
Whose feet never gave out, from whose shoulders grew
The hundred heads of a frightful dragon
Flickering dusky tongues, and the hollow eyesockets
In the eerie heads sent out fiery rays,
And each head burned with flame as it glared.
And there were voices in each of these frightful heads,
A phantasmagoria of unspeakable sound,
Sometimes sounds that the gods understood, sometimes
The sound of a spirited bull, bellowing and snorting,
Or the uninhibited, shameless roar of a lion,
Or just like puppies yapping, an uncanny noise,
Or a whistle hissing through long ridges and hills. (84)

It was again up to Zeus to defend the Olympians from this colossal new enemy. Zeus and Typhoios locked into combat with one another, and once again the earth shook under the strife of divine combat. Fire enveloped the ocean and tidal waves exploded against the shore. Hades shivered at the sounds of his younger brother’s furious combat, and in distant Tartaros, the titans huddled fearfully together. Zeus smashed the monster with his fire until he tore a hole through the earth and sent the menacing creature down to Tartaros. The last hope of the Titans was extinguished.

Yet even in his demise Typhoios was still a bane to mankind. From him came the wet storms – the heavy rains that blast along the top of the oceans. The typhoon, named after its divine progenitor, still topples fleets, floods homes and farmlands, and reminds us of Zeus’ last great enemy. [music]

The Prolific Procreation of Zeus

Through war and strife that nearly destroyed the world, Zeus, youngest of the six core Olympians, came into power. Once the necessity of freeing his siblings from prison, and then fending off titanic opponents had passed, Zeus’ primary interest changed. Aphrodite might officially be the goddess of love and sex, but Zeus deserves a very honorable mention in the same category. Because in the Theogony, in particular, Zeus goes from being the champion of the gods to being sort of sexual nuclear reactor – one who would occasionally pull his pants up in order to go and fight someone.

Zeus first took a wise and cunning deity as his bride, Metis, but, she was too cunning, and Zeus had to eat her. He then married Themis, who gave birth to the seasons. He married the fates, Clotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos. He married the nymphs Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene, and the beautiful daughter of the ocean, Eurynome. Four nymphs. In the purest sense of the word, Zeus was becoming a nymphomaniac. Zeus bedded his sister Demeter, and Mnemosyne, mother of the nine muses, and then Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis. Finally, he married Hera, with whom he had three children. Perhaps because he was finally sexually satisfied, Zeus paused for a moment, but he was still so virile that on one occasion, he couldn’t even wait for a woman to be around in order to make a baby, and simply hatched forth the goddess Athena out of his own head. Another story for the way this happened was that by eating his very first wife, the clever Metis, Zeus somehow became filled with the spirit of Athena, and this was why she was born from Zeus’ head. Now, while the Theogony starts to wind down with the tales of Zeus’ many lovers, the story still isn’t quite over.

The origins of dozens more Greek gods are set out in the closing hundred lines of the Theogony – a chain of who begat whoms that includes more famous figures from Greek mythology, like Persephone, the reluctant wife of Hades, the smith god Hephaestus, war god Ares, the herald and messenger Hermes, and the wine god Dionysos. And then begins the origin stories of half human and fully human Greek heroes – Ariadne, Herakles, Perseus, Phaethon, Jason, Achilles, Aeneas, Circe, and some of the nymphs Odysseus encounters in his voyages.

Zeus had been victorious over the titans, and was now the father of dozens of divine and semidivine beings. He was thus the natural ruler of gods and humans. While in the Greek myths we often meet Zeus in mid-career, already a lightning-wielding patriarch, we must remember that he spends a fair amount of time in the Theogony as an underdog, the youngest of six children, harrowed by a cannibalistic father. By the end of Hesiod’s poem, however, Zeus is the center of it all, the defender of order and justice, the wise and righteous, the occasionally disputed, but always victorious sovereign of the gods.

The end of the Theogony is an overwhelming catalog of births. The final threat to Zeus has been squelched, and the epic war between the generation of gods is supplanted by epic breeding and childbirth. It’s easy to giggle a little at the sheer spectacle of such prolific lovemaking at the culmination of the grave and serious story of the origins of the world. But in the long, loosely organized list of begats that wraps up the Theogony, Hesiod is attempting to inscribe into his poem all of the major figures of Greek narrative and religion, so that from the flux of primeval chaos, his listener would travel all the way forward, into the realm of the populous present, with the origins of all things explained. The brisk baby boom that caps off the Hesiod’s poem might sit a little awkwardly atop the dark war story that comes before it, but both halves of the poem are equally important in the mythological tradition. So that takes us through Hesiod’s Theogony, the most prominent creation story from ancient Greece. [music]

Hesiod and the Performance Culture of Ancient Greece

The Theogony is part of a genre called cosmogony, or creation stories. Antiquity loved creation stories, and more generally, tales that explained how things came to be. Last time we heard Hesiod telling the story of Prometheus and Pandora as a general explanation for why things on earth are often tough for us. And while Works and Days contains that inset explanatory tale, the entirety of the Theogony is one sprawling explanation for how the world and everything in it came to be, with the impersonal forces of nature anthropomorphized into various shrieking, feuding, lusty, magnificent gods. We’ll discuss the Theogony in literary history a bit more in a moment. For the present, I want to travel back in time to the 700s BCE, and talk about what the very first audiences of the Theogony might have actually heard when they listened to Hesiod performing the poem.

We don’t know exactly when Hesiod lived, but he and Homer are both very roughly dated to around 700 BCE. Over the course of the 8th century BCE, ancient Greek speakers were adopting phonetic alphabets. The poems of Hesiod and Homer are very special because they were written down at the cusp between a much older culture of oral tradition, and a newer culture characterized by writing. The earliest surviving Greek literature, then, although it was written down around 700 BCE, was made of stories and songs that had developed over earlier centuries by many different performers. Let’s spend a minute thinking about those performers – about bards, and lyres, and poetry sung by torchlight on warm Aegean evenings.

Throughout antiquity, most people who encountered long poems like the Theogony and Homer’s Odyssey would have heard them recited, rather than read them, and they would have heard excerpts of them recited, rather than the full works in their entirety. In the archaic period, bards just made sense. It’s hard work to copy stories that are thousands of lines long. Scrolls that contained enormous stories were expensive to produce, and fragile to store and transport. Considering the costly and unwieldy nature of physical manuscripts way back in 700 BCE, and also, the fact that there were different dialects of ancient Greek, and that the alphabet was spongy and unstandardized in different regions, there were good reasons to stick with centuries old traditions of memorization and recitation. Plus, there was decent money to be made from public performances. Only a few people could read. But everyone could listen.

If you were an ancient Greek speaker during the archaic period, poetry would be a substantial part of your culture’s entertainment industry. At a party, you might sit down with other guests, have some wine and cheese, and watch various kinds of performances. You’d observe dancers, and musicians, and these dancers and musicians would work in concert with bards. A bard would tune up a simple lyre and sing a poem. Bards sang their stories in a rhythmic cadence while playing a musical instrument, being storytellers, singers, and instrumental musicians all rolled into one, using a combination of memorized content and improvised content. The core of their skillsets was memorization.

Oral cultures had some amazing and unique capacities. One of the great mistakes we make when we presume history as an upward slope leading to the present is that we dismiss oral tradition as some blundering forerunner to written language. Not to romanticize the distant past, but oral cultures require a degree of mental vigor, imaginative improvisation, and linguistic energy no longer demanded of us quite so much. As one of Plato’s speakers suggests in his dialogue Phaedrus, “this invention of [writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”⁶ Plato, in that dialogue, isn’t actually attesting that writing is bad – he’s simply emphasizing that in antiquity, writing had its dissidents, and that oral culture has its benefits, the most paramount of which is training human memory. In the invocation to the muses of Hesiod’s Theogony, the mother of the muses, and thus wellspring of all literature, was Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Thus, poetry’s taproot, in ancient Greek culture in the 700s BCE, was not individual genius, or wild creativity, but instead, memorization. But poetry, in Hesiod’s archaic Greece, was of course not just memorizing things and reciting them. One of the many benefits of oral cultures, in addition to training our memories, was the exercise of excellent improvisational skills when memory fell short.

Ancient Greeks had different words to describe what we call “bards.” The simplest was aoidos (ἀοιδός), or “singer.” The most basic criteria for telling a story was that you had to sing it. As we’ll learn in many upcoming programs on ancient literature, from Judahites singing Psalms to Greeks choruses singing lyric poetry to Romans performing their plays in iambic senarius, in the ancient world, literature and music were more often than not the same thing. While aoidos, or “singer,” is the most common word for “bard” in ancient Greek, another common word is rhapsoidos (ῥαψῳδός), which we can translate as “song-stitcher.” This essentially means that ancient Greek bards performed medleys, piecing together blocks of prefabricated poetry to keep the energy of any given set as entertaining as possible. Finally, some ancient Greek bards were called poetés (ποιητής), which means “maker,” which means that they were offering original material to their audiences.

These would not have been exclusive categories. Like jazz musicians, ancient Greek performers of narratives did (1) standards, (2) medleys, and (3) originals, and improvisation within formulaic frameworks was the glue that held it all together. Hesiod and Homer were understood as poets, or makers, due to the fact that much of their work was original. But much of their work was not original. It fit into the grooves of very old narrative traditions, both in its content, as well as its form. Let’s talk about the form of ancient Greek poetry.

Lyre, Aulos, and Dactylic Hexameter

Hesiod and Homer, again, were singers, and musicians. From their earliest years, they would have grown up with the sounds of specific musical instruments, and specific meters, and when they thought about telling stories, the very act of narration was interwoven with rhythm and melody. [music] Those two sounds you just heard are the main instruments that ancient Greek poets used to accompany themselves when they performed – the lyre, and the aulos. The lyre is a small harp. It has a modest range, but great performers, through advanced techniques and understanding of music theory, can get a lot of different sounds out of it. [demonstration] And the aulos is a reed flute, often played in pairs by the same person. [demonstration] The double aulos performance is quite a sight, actually – the person playing looks kind of like a walrus fingering two tusks at once. [demonstration] One of the flutes can hold down a tone, and the other plays a melody on top of it. [demonstration] The lyre and the aulos, which later became the tibia in Roman culture, were literature’s best friends in the ancient Mediterranean basin, accompanying the poetry of Hesiod, Homer, and Sappho, and the plays of Sophocles, Aristophanes, and later Roman dramatists like Plautus and Terence.

These musical instruments played specific rhythms during different periods of antiquity. A good deal of ancient Greek poetry, Hesiod’s included, was composed in a meter called dactylic hexameter. Dactylic hexameter was the epic meter, and everyone knew its sound. Six hundred years later, when Roman writers began to create satires of epics, they used dactylic hexameter, telling silly stories in the same meter that had once been used in the grandiose tales of Homer and Hesiod.

I’ve taught literature enough to know that most of us don’t know our meters and feet. Since this is a podcast, I can demonstrate what dactylic hexameter sounds like without too much jargon. The dactyl is a poetic foot – a single metric unit, that goes stressed unstressed – stressed unstressed, or, conveniently, dactyl dactyl dactyl dactyl. And all hexameter means is that there are six of those – six of those metric feet, or dactyls. Dactylic hexameter is a structure that sounds exotic to our ears. I rewrote the first few lines of the Theogony – that invocation to the muses – so that you can hear what it would sound like in actual Greek meter, with ancient Greek instrumental accompaniment. So here it is.

WE will now SING of the MUses of HElikon HIGH holy SMILing there.
FEET soft as PETals in PURple springs DANcing on Altars of KRONion.
JUST after BATHing their SILKen skin SINGing on HELikon’s HIGH summit.
SO lovely IT’S painful POWer in ALL their steps CLIMBing through MISty air.
SWIMming through DARK night and CHANTing in VOIces so ACHingly BEAUtiful. . .
ONCE they taught HESiod SINGing as I pastured MY flocks on HELikon.
THEY gave me A staff of LAURel so FRESH so that I might sing POetry.
THEIR breath passed INto me SO that I COULD sing of GODS and of LINeage.⁷

There is some dactylic hexameter, with lyre and aulos, and Hesiod’s invocation to the muses of Mount Helicon. Poetry in English is much more often in shorter meters – tetrameters or pentameters, and is less likely to use feet with three parts, like dactyls, dactyls, dactyls, so the structure of Hesiod sounds strange to us. If there are any specialists on ancient Greek listening, they know that I have simplified epic meter, and that the sixth foot of an epic line is generally a spondee or trochee, and there are variations within the rest of each line. But rather than dwelling on the details of ancient Greek meter, the main thing I wanted to emphasize was simply that epic poetry was written in a mostly regular meter, and even by the 700s BCE, speakers of ancient Greek knew its sound. Like all poetic meters, dactylic hexameter placed considerable demands on epic poets.

Composing within a tight metrical structure is challenging. In fact, when you first think about metrical structure, it seems merely to be confining. Why in the world would Shakespeare compose all those sonnets in such a strict fourteen-line, iambic pentameter form, with an identical rhyme scheme? Why would Dante use the challenging, interlocking rhyme structure of the Divine Comedy? Why has poetry historically had such a tendency to impose limits on itself?

The main answer is that if you go way back into the history of poetry, before our contemporary misunderstanding of it as merely a way of wooing coy mistresses, before Shakespeare’s sonnets, before Dante’s writings, before, even Hesiod, one of poetry’s predominant purposes was recordkeeping. Oral traditions were passed down in verse so that the deeds of ancestors and the traditions of peoples would be preserved. Meter and rhyme weren’t there to impede the flow of free expression so much as to serve as a memory device. When you’re writing in, for instance, iambic tetrameter, and you’re using predictable end rhymes, it’s far easier to lock clusters of lines together in your memory. I might say, for instance, “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,” as a first line. If you know the meter, you already know a lot about the next line. You know its exact syllabic structure. You know that the line that follows “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” is also going to be in iambic tetrameter. Even if you don’t know what the heck iambic tetrameter is, you know that the line that comes after Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater is going to be a thingy that goes “DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah DAH dah.” And in addition to the rhythm of the next line, since we’re using rhyming couplets, you know approximately what the final word of the next line will sound like. It’s going to sound like “Eater.” So you’re much more likely to be able to remember the two lines together – “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater / Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.” You wouldn’t say, for instance, “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater / Believed in paying his taxes on time.” So, the first reason poetic meter and rhyme have always been with us, beyond merely that they sound cool – which is important, also – is that they help us remember – praise Mnemosyne, the goddess of remembrance, and the mother of the muses.

The second reason poetic meter and rhyme are such ubiquitous transcultural phenomena is that in many cases the very strictness of poetic structure does not stifle, nor hinder creativity, but instead inspires it. When you have to work within strict confines, you have to innovate. On some occasions, the confines will, in fact, hinder what you’re trying to accomplish. But on others, the unexpected directions you find yourself taking as a result of the limitations imposed on you will lead you to radically creative steps you would otherwise never have come to.

So, now that we’ve discussed the performance culture of ancient Greece a bit, together with the basics of Greek epic meter, let’s switch topics. In the remainder of this program, I want to discuss the Theogony in its historical context. The Theogony is the most famous creation story from ancient Greece. At the same time, though, the Theogony is a single poem, arranged and written by one person, at a specific moment in ancient history. Let’s take a moment, before class is dismissed today, to consider how its themes might have been particularly relevant to the ancient Greek world around the year 700 BCE. [music]

The Theogony and the Early Archaic Period

Hesiod’s Theogony is ultimately about order arising from chaos. From chaos, and darkness, and the great, vulnerable earth, eventually, after cataclysmic strife, a powerful younger God assumes sovereignty over the earth. This is a story we’ve heard before, and one that the west Eurasian supercontinent was fond of during antiquity. Zeus, like Marduk, and like the Hittite god Kumarbi and the Ugaritic god Baal, fights his way to overlordship, associated with the clouds and thunder. Some of the books of the Old Testament show traces of a similar story. In the Job, one of the Tanakh’s older books, Yahweh tells Job he’s fought the behemoth and the leviathan, just as Baal fought the Litan, just as Marduk fought Tiamat, and just as Zeus fought Kronos and Typhoios. There was probably crosspollination at work between all of these ancient story cycles. The ancient fertile crescent was full of sailors, caravaners, and other itinerant people, and of course they shared tales with one another, and the tales, in all likelihood, went way back to the Bronze Age.

The story of multiple generations of Gods vying for dominance was a useful one. Humanity has cycled through a lot of deities. Ancient Greek polytheists knew this as much as we do today, and maybe more. Population migrations spur changes in religious belief, and wars and imperial conquests do the same. In the ancient Mediterranean and ancient Near East, when people told stories about generations of gods, they were also telling tacit stories about human religious history. From early elemental deities like the ones at the beginning of the Theogony – Chaos, Earth, Desire, Darkness – the populations of west Eurasia were more and more often envisioning gods with larger domains of sovereignty. The story of multiple generations of Gods, then, may have helped explain why there were old gods and new gods.

Hesiod’s Zeus appears as both. On one hand, he’s a pugilist, a philanderer, and the scion of an extremely dubious father and grandfather. Zeus’ father Kronos sliced off the genitals of Zeus’ grandfather. Zeus imprisoned his father and the other titans in the depths of Tartaros, and then dashed off to become theological history’s most infamous sex addict. In short, there’s a lot about Hesiod’s Zeus that does not invite reverence and worship. At the same time, though, Zeus is also the savior of the world, and in both the Theogony and Works and Days, Zeus holds the shield of justice over humanity. For modern readers of ancient Greek myths, it’s tempting to gawk at the philandering of Zeus and ignore something very important. That is that although the ancient Greek world was incontestably polytheistic, even by 700 BCE, the Aegean had an ascendant deity associated with order and justice. As lecherous and obtuse as Zeus can be in ancient Greek poetry, he was still the autocratic capstone of a giant world of gods and mortals, and thus, he reflected the same gradual, transcontinental move toward monotheism that was already taking place over in ancient Jerusalem during Hesiod’s lifetime.

Hesiod’s Theogony, in summation, is ultimately a story about generations of gods evolving into an orderly hierarchy, and it’s an optimistic story. Things, in the Theogony, have gotten better. From cannibalistic Kronos and destructive Typhoios, Zeus has taken charge, and though he’s not perfect, his reign is stable, and he has brought to fruition a beautiful earth teeming with human life and divine beings. The optimism at the heart of the Theogony may have been endemic to the era of ancient Greek history in which Hesiod lived. The eighth century BCE was a time of population growth, greater agricultural production, exploration, and migration. From the scattered subsistence farming of the Greek Dark Age, the Archaic period was an epoch of growing city states, new commercial enterprises, and the intermingling of populations unfamiliar with one another. The Theogony’s ultimately upbeat story about raw chaos rising into an orderly world brimming with all sorts of different gods and peoples was a tale quite suited to Hesiod’s age.

And there’s another reason why the Theogony is a distinctively eighth-century saga. One of the most popular types of stories in the ancient world is called an etiology. An etiology, or an etiological tale, is one that explains the origins of something. As you can certainly understand, the Theogony is an etiological tale about how the world came to be. But within the Theogony, there are dozens of inset etiologies that tell us how all sorts of things first got started. Let’s consider a quick example. Toward the very end of the poem, Hesiod tells us that the Etruscans were the descendants of the hero Odysseus and one of his lovers, the witch Circe. Now, the Etruscans were a population that flourished on the west and northwest of the Italian peninsula from about 900 BCE on down to the period of the middle Roman republic. The fact that Hesiod even mentions Etruscans demonstrates the expanded scope of Archaic Greece’s geography – it’s a long schlep from the Greek mainland all the way over to northwest Italy. But what’s also interesting about Hesiod’s etiology of the Etruscans is that in writing their origin story, Hesiod enfolds a real contemporary population into his own culture’s mythology. As scholar Jonas Grethlein writes,

In the Archaic period, Greek identity seems to have been based on the idea of association, more than polarization. Foreigners were integrated through mythical genealogies, and [myths] helped to create a sense of connection between the Greeks and other populations. For example, according to Hesiod, Etruscan rulers descended from sons that Odysseus fathered with Circe. . .while the Etruscans themselves revered Odysseus as a founding hero named Uthuze. Just as with other peoples, the shared genealogy provided an ideal framework for peaceful exchange. Above all, religion helped [believers] view strangers not so much as a negative “other” than as distant relatives.⁸

The point here is that as kooky and fictitious as cultural etiologies, or origin stories, could be, they could also offer shared frames of references. If you met an Etruscan woman at a party in Greece in 700 BCE and knew absolutely nothing of far off Etruria other than that the Etruscans liked telling stories about a guy named Uthuze, whom Greeks called Odysseus, you had a shared cultural reference. Analogously, if you were an ancient Greek adventurer, outbound to Etruria for a commercial venture or diplomatic mission, you might think of the Etruscans as Odysseus’ folks, rather than a big bunch of strangers through and through.

This is not to say that everyone in the eastern Mediterranean by 700 BCE had read Hesiod’s Theogony and everyone knew all of its exact etiologies, but instead, that in the burgeoning Greek culture of the early archaic period, stories helped create associational frameworks that made faraway cultures intelligible. The Bible, as we’ll soon see, does exactly the same thing. The infamous “begats” portion of the Book of Genesis is an etiological list of how the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, and so on all came from the first created humans. In the 700s, and 600s BCE, the Bronze Age Collapse was long gone. All over the eastern Mediterranean, civilization was expanding, and populations were merging together. Etiological stories about the origins of various peoples not only helped explain how the world had come to be. They also, often, gave strangers starting points for understanding one another.

Hesiod’s Theogony is the product of a remarkable period of transition in antiquity. Civilization, after the calamities of the Bronze Age Collapse and the relative stasis of the Greek dark age, was on rise. Written language was on the rise. Populations everywhere were growing and moving around, sometimes through militant colonialism, and at other times, through peaceful immigration and resettlement. Stories about gods were taking on similar forms – the old gods of primeval times had been replaced by new deities, and these new deities tended to have kingpins who were the most powerful of all. As Greece solidified into hardy city states, poets like Hesiod sang songs about the remarkable changes everyone could see happening. Parts of these songs were old, built strong back during the Bronze Age, and still pertinent to Greek life five centuries later. Other parts of them, however, were brand new, and charged with the optimism of a civilization that felt wind in its sails after a long doldrum. [music]

Moving on to Homer’s Iliad

So now, if you’ve listened to this and the previous episode, you know the two poems of Hesiod, together with a bit about the time in which he lived. Ultimately, Works and Days and the Theogony both contrast anarchy with justice and order. Works and Days fundamentally emphasizes individual industriousness as the conduit to social order. Plant your crops and orchards at the right time and tend to them well, the farmer poet tells us, and you’re doing your part to help prop up a lawful, tidy society. And the Theogony, also contrasting anarchy with justice and order, tells of how, through the tremendous effort of Zeus, earth was made clement and inhabitable to humanity. The two poems of Hesiod have always been loved in literary history, their appealing combination of grouchiness, realism, sententiousness, and epic storytelling showing a huge range of poetic ability and a sweeping knowledge of the archaic Greek world.

But as you may know, Works and Days and the Theogony are not the most famous works of ancient Greek literature produced around 700 BCE. The next six episodes of our podcast will be on works of one of the most important literary figures ever to have lived anywhere, a person who used to begin European literary history before we started learning about the Bronze Age texts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and elsewhere. But after almost three thousand years of being in circulation, Hesiod’s contemporary Homer is still a shadow, standing with one foot in the early Iron Age, and one foot in the late Bronze Age. Homer may have been a single individual, roughly a contemporary of Hesiod – a citizen of Chios or some other region in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Homeric poems as they now stand may also have been the product of many compilers working together and putting a long history of oral tradition into print, as Hesiod was doing. Whoever, and whatever Homer was, the Homeric epics, for sheer influence and circulation, are almost unparalleled in literary history. To me, the first Homeric poem – the Iliad – is something like a meteor – something so far advanced beyond its own times, in depth of characterization, in narrative consistency, in its devastatingly powerful portrait of the simultaneous beauty and frailty of the human condition – that it seems to have come from another galaxy.

If you happen to remember, one of the ages of man in Hesiod’s Works and Days was called the Age of Heroes. This was the age that concerned Homer. Homer’s gods were not a neatly structured divine hierarchy underneath Zeus. They were a mosh pit. His universe was not an orderly place where justice prevailed. It was fundamentally chaotic. There was no good, nor evil. There was only, as the French philosopher Simone Weil observed in 1939, force. What mattered most to Homer’s heroes was not morality nor civility, nor going to heaven. They believed in distinguishing themselves while they were alive – through immortal acts of bravery, cunning, and violence. Above all, they believed in excellence. If Hesiod’s poems are from a period of blossoming civilization, Homer’s are from a time long before that period, from a time when you kept your bronze sword sharp and slept by your helmet, because nothing else in the world could be depended on. One of my students once asked me which two works of ancient literature he should read. And I told him he should the Iliad. And then read the Iliad again. I was joking. Sort of. In the next episode, we’re going to the northwestern part of modern-day Turkey, to a city called Ilion, and Illium, after which Homer’s Iliad is named. We’re going to the Trojan War. Try a quiz on this program in the notes section of your podcast app, if you want to test what you remember about the Hesiod’s Theogony. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and if you want to hear a song, I’ve got one for you. If not, see you soon.

Still here? So, I got to thinking about Zeus. Zeus is a horny, horny being – both in the Theogony as well as in the Homeric epics and elsewhere. I got to wondering about what it was like for him to fly all over the Aegean world, copulating with anything that had a pulse. And I thought, “What if Zeus travelled forward through time, and got cast in a western?” This seems quite possible to me. Things like that happen all the time. It would be an R-rated spaghetti western, in which the head of the Olympian pantheon galloped around ancient Greece, looking for various objects to satiate his unending lust. I got to thinking, “What kind of a song would Zeus sing, if he were some kind of cowboy in a western, riding out, just after his victory over Kronos?” And I decided that this was the song that Zeus would sing. This one’s called “It is Time for Zeus to Have Sex.” I hope it’s fun, and Homer, Achilles, Hector and I will see you next time.



References

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