Ancient Greek Myth & Ritual (Week 3 Lecture) PDF

**Classics 2200 Week 3 Lecture: Myth, Ritual, and Religion** Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I've asked you to read a part of Hesiod's *Works and Days*, and I'm going to talk a little bit about myth, ritual, and religion. On **Slide 2**, you'll see that even...

**Classics 2200 Week 3 Lecture: Myth, Ritual, and Religion** Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I've asked you to read a part of Hesiod's *Works and Days*, and I'm going to talk a little bit about myth, ritual, and religion. On **Slide 2**, you'll see that even though the required reading assignment is only a selection of the *Works and Days*, and I'm not asking you to read the whole thing, there's of course nothing stopping you from deciding to read the whole thing if you enjoy it and want to keep reading. I remember a long time ago a student told me that I wasn't assigning enough reading in one of my courses, and my response to him was to ask him why he felt limited by the assignments. In this course, you have access to the entire Loeb Classical Library. If you want to read the introductions to help you get some context for the primary reading---great---go ahead and do that. If something in one of the volumes I've assigned or a different one catches your eye, check it out. One of the outcomes I hope for in a course like this one is that you'll keep being interested in Classical Mythology long after the course is over, and I'm trying to show you things you can read beyond what's just assigned. Don't feel any pressure, but now and in the future, there's a lot more out there for you to read than just what's required. ================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== **Introduction to Hesiod's *Works and Days*** Anyway, since we have a new text this week, the slide also gives you those five pieces of information I talked about last week: the author, the title, the date, the location, and the language. These are almost all the same as they were for the *Theogony*. Just the title is different. For this week, the author is Hesiod, the title is *Works and Days* (we write "the *Works and Days*" or "Hesiod's *Works and Days*," but not "Hesiod's *The Works and Days*") The date is sometime between 750 BCE and 650 BCE. The location is again the same as it was for the *Theogony*: Ascra in Boeotia, a region in Greece. The language is also Greek. You can see the Greek in the Loeb volume, and we're still working the Glenn Most's edition and translation. ====================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================== On **Slide 3**, you'll see right away a passage from the reading assignment. I'm just going to read that passage to you now, and then I'll explain a little about why I think it's significant and why I extracted it as a starting point for this week's lecture. Here's the passage (page 89): I chose this passage not only because it's from very early in the *Works and Days*, but also because it lays out some of the themes and shows us the setting of the poem. At the beginning of the *Theogony*, we got the story of Hesiod and the Muses. The Muses inspired Hesiod to sing this song about the origin and birth of the gods. In this passage, we can see that the setting of the *Works and Days* is a little bit different. We learn that Perses is someone who has a quarrel with Hesiod, and since Hesiod says that they had already divided up their allotment, but Perses took more than his share, we can see that Hesiod and Perses are dividing up an inheritance. In fact, elsewhere the poem confirms that they are brothers, and they're having a dispute over their inheritance from their father. That's interesting for me because inheritance was also a theme in the *Theogony*. I spoke a little bit last week about the importance of inheritance in the early Archaic Period in Ancient Greece and about the centrality of inheritance in early Athenian law. As a reminder, one of the social changes taking place in Greece around the time Hesiod was writing was that more land was being held privately, and the protection of private property and the inheritance of that property was an important social issue at the time. In the *Theogony* we could see the importance of the theme of inheritance in the struggle of the kings of the gods, that is Ouranos, Cronus, and Zeus, to keep their children from inheriting. Here in the *Works and Days*, we can see the struggle over inheritance playing out in the human realm between two brothers. I think it's interesting to note that the theme is common to both poems, but it's in a different realm. The *Theogony* is all about the world of the gods. It's about how they came to be and how their social system is organized---how they relate to each other. The *Works and Days* is about the human world, and about how it came to be how it is and how the social structure of humans is organized. The way the *Works and Days* presents the social organization of the human world to us is in the form of advice from Hesiod to his brother Perses. That's a little weird, because if you're having a dispute with your brother over an inheritance, it's not usually a good strategy to say, okay, here's some advice about how I think you should manage your life. It's not a great strategy for dispute resolution, but I guess it's how a lot of people behave anyway. And so Hesiod in this poem presents himself as an authority on the right way to behave in the world. That's great for us, because it gives us a lot of information about the social norms and values of Hesiod's time in Ancient Greece. And the first of the values or principles Hesiod gives us is, "Don't be greedy." He says that if you have enough, you should be satisfied with having enough. Demeter is the goddess of grain, and Hesiod says she's got to be the first priority. Work at your farm, grow your crops, and make sure you have enough food. And once you have that, you can worry about other things. Strife, disputes, and court cases over things like inheritance distract you from that work, so they're only doable if you already have enough food. This kind of dispute, in other words, is a luxury that hard-working folk just don't have time for. This sets up an important part of the way Hesiod positions himself in the social and economic system of Ancient Greece. He's working class. He owns property, which makes him pretty well off, but he's no aristocrat. He works on the farm. And he tells us that court cases and inheritance disputes are for aristocrats. He wants Perses to settle their dispute right then, on the spot, and not go to court, because who has time for that when you've got real work to do? Those kinds of court cases are only good for what Hesiod calls "the kings, those gift-eaters." Those kind of aristocratic people, those kings, are greedy and they are the ones who can afford lawyers and time for court. Hesiod tells us to be satisfied with less. He says that the half is greater than the whole, meaning that it's better to own less. He also says that we should be satisfied with mallow and asphodel, which are poor crops for poor people. This, he says, is the justice that comes from Zeus---for people to be satisfied with their little bit that is enough and not to grab more than their share like gift-eating kings do. Hesiod is praising the common people and positioning himself as one of them. Even though Hesiod seems to despise the arguments in court, it's interesting that they seem to be a big enough part of Archaic Greek culture that they're so prominent at the beginning of the *Works and Days*. In fact, there's even a court case depicted on the shield of Achilles in the *Iliad*, which we'll talk about later in the course. Hesiod wouldn't be reacting so strongly against the court system if it weren't becoming a prominent feature of Greek culture. And that's important for us because it tells us that even though we tend to associate courts with highly democratic societies like that of Classical Athens, it really is a feature of Archaic Greece in general that they settle aristocratic disputes in this kind of collective way. Hesiod talks about people gawking at trials, and this means that there's a public audience present, and that can't help but exert influence over judicial decisions. So even though Hesiod presents this kind of court case in a negative light, I think we can see some positives in it. At this time in Ancient Greece, people didn't immediately resort to violence when they had a dispute, and there was a system of justice that involved not secret trials, but public ones. And that's relevant to a course about Greek mythology because Hesiod's *Works and Days* is a mythological text. It's an important source for mythology for us because it has a lot of mythological stories. So where it includes social issues, that tells us that from a very early period, myth was a way of establishing social norms and confirming community. When a community comes together for a public trial as a means of dispute resolution, it's Zeus who is behind that, and we'll see in this poem that the gods and stories about the gods are behind a lot of the rituals and structures that make the social communities of Ancient Greece work. One of the key points I want to get across this week is that myth is a way of building community. As a side note, another interesting point about this passage is the presentation of Strife with a capital "S" as a goddess who distracts people from their work, and I think that's worth noting in part because it helps us to see that Hesiod probably wrote the *Works and Days* after he wrote the *Theogony*. On **Slide 4**, although the date of the *Works and Days* is just as uncertain as that of the *Theogony*, there are indications that Hesiod wrote the *Works and Days* after the *Theogony*. The most telling is in line 11 (on page 87), "So there was not just one birth of Strifes after all, but upon the earth there are two Strifes." This seems to correct *Theogony* lines 223-225 (on page 21), "Deadly Night gave birth to Nemesis (Indignation) too, a woe for mortal human beings; and after her she bore Deceit and Fondness and baneful Old Age, and she bore hard-hearted Strife." So in the *Theogony*, Hesiod wrote about the birth of the goddess Strife, but in the *Works and Days*, it suits his purpose to have there be two Strifes, and so he corrects himself. Not only does that tell us he wrote the *Works and Days* after the *Theogony*, but it also shows us some of the flexibility of mythology. Hesiod has a new goal or purpose in his new poem, and he changes his story about the gods to suit that new goal or purpose. It's not like even for Hesiod writing this stuff down, there's a fixed set of gods that can't ever be changed. New context, slightly different mythology. The birth of Strife is not the only place where the *Works and Days* revises or reworks material from the *Theogony*. On **Slide 5**, another place where the *Works and Days* interacts with the *Theogony* is *Theogony* lines 535-616 (pages 45-53) and *Works and Days* lines 42-105 (pages 89-95). Both passages tell a version of the story of Prometheus, the theft of fire, and Pandora. As you've read, the story goes like this: Prometheus tried to deceive Zeus when they were dividing up the portions of sacrificial meat, and in retaliation Zeus concealed fire from humans. Prometheus stole fire in a hollow reed and gave it to humans, and Zeus retaliated by creating a woman, Pandora, and giving her to Epimetheus, who unwisely accepted the gift. Pandora brought a jar full of evils, and opened the lid, releasing them all into the world, but she replaced the lid and kept in the jar hope (or, as Most translates it, Anticipation). Zeus punished Prometheus by having a vulture eat his liver until Heracles rescued him. If you're looking at the slide, you'll also see an image of a kylix, which is a cup for drinking wine, and on the inside of the cup is painted a picture of Atlas holding up the Earth, and also of Prometheus being punished. The eagle is eating Prometheus' liver on the interior of this wine cup. A picture containing wall, indoor, plant Description automatically generated c\. 550 BCE. Kylix depicting punishment of Atlas and Prometheus. ceramic. Place: Museo gregoriano etrusco. https://library.artstor.org/asset/SCALA\_ARCHIVES\_10310475447 Prometheus was clever, and his name even means something like "forethought." Epimetheus was not so clever, and his name means something like "afterthought." So Prometheus was able to trick Zeus and bring the gift of fire, the beginning of technology, to humans, while Epimetheus was not able to see that accepting the gift from Zeus might have negative consequences. Oh, and, by the way, Most has a note that explains his decision to translate as Anticipation what is usually translated as hope, the last evil to stay in the jar. He says that the Greek word can mean anticipating negative things as well as positive ones, while hope implies only the positive ones. So in Most's translation, the final, ambiguous gift of Zeus that remains trapped in Pandora's jar is thinking about the future---that is, it's what Prometheus does well and what Epimetheus does poorly. It enables us to make great strides as humans---to be able to think about the future and anticipate what is going to happen---but it also causes us great problems because it gives us worry and anxiety. It's the hope that kills you, but we can't really live without it. **Interpreting the Myths of Pandora and Prometheus** My focus in this course is not going to be on telling you mythological stories, but on interpreting them. I want to give you some tools you can use to interpret and understand the many mythological stories you'll come across. On **Slide 6**, you'll find the first of many strategies for interpreting myth, or theories to apply to myths. One very common way to interpret myth is to argue that it's a kind of etiology (also spelled "aetiology"). An αἴτιον in Greek is a cause, and when that word is Latinized it becomes first "aetium" and then "etium." That omicron nu ending in Greek becomes a -um ending in Latin, as I talked about at little bit last week, because it suits the inflection patterns of Latin to make a relatively minor shift in spelling with very similar pronunciation. And then the "ae" diphthong in Classical Latin gets converted to just a long "e" in Medieval Latin, so the Greek word turns into the Latin "etium." And since the Greek word means a cause, etiology is the explanation of causes. I remember when I was first learning Ancient Greek, one of the first sentences I learned was, "οὐκ αἰτίος εἰμὶ ἐγώ," which means "It's not my fault," or really "I am not the cause." So, an etium is a cause or a reason. Very frequently, Greeks and Romans (not to mention a lot of other people) use myths to offer an explanation of why things are the way that they are. They looked at the world and wondered why it was the way it was, and they made up a story to explain that. When there's thunder, it's because Zeus is throwing his thunderbolt weapon. And this applies to cultural practices as well as to natural phenomena. In the story of Pandora, for example, Hesiod finds a way to explain why his society is patriarchal. Ancient Greek people saw that their social organization was patriarchal, and that their society valued the lives and work of men more than the lives and work of women, and instead of changing that or offering a rational explanation, instead they made up a story about the cause or the reason why society was that way. Originally, all the humans in the world were men, and Zeus gave women as a gift to men, but it was a trick because women only hold back men. And in the image on the slide, another painted kylix shows Pandora being dressed up so she'll be attractive to men. =====================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================  ca. 475-460 B.C.. Vessel (kylix; red-figure).. Place: London: Mus., British; No. D4.. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953\_35953\_31684779 **Slide 7** continues discussing the etiological interpretation of myth. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski coined the term "charter myth" in a 1926 book called *Myth in Primitive Psychology*. He argued that the main purpose of myth is to offer a justification of present social practices by rooting them in the ancient past. Myth, in this view, serves an important social function. In fact, Malinowski argued that no social practice or custom survives unless it has a useful function. We sometimes say that Malinowski was a functionalist. What he was interested in was the function of social practices, including myth. And I think the idea of charter myths is really interesting. Here's an example of how they might work. I grew up Catholic, and we have this ritual in Catholicism where in church we eat a little wafer and we take a sip of wine. We call it "taking communion," and it's there to build community. And we have this story that explains the etiology or origin of the ritual practice. That story is the Last Supper, where Jesus broke up some bread and said to his dinner guests that it was his body and they should eat it, and he poured some wine and said that it was his blood and they should drink it, and that they should keep doing that in the future. That story is a charter myth. It offers an ancient explanation and justification of a modern practice. An ancient story tells us how to behave in the present. In fact, you can get people to believe all kinds of things are right if you can tell a story, even an obviously made up one, that has sufficient ancient authority. It's not just in religion. You can get people to do all kinds of political things if you have a charter myth that says this is what we're supposed to do in the present. The past exerts an extraordinary influence over social practices, and whoever controls social memory of the past can use that control to justify present power relations. This is very visible in modern nationalism, which uses stories of past origins to justify present social and political systems. I grew up in the United States, where I learned in school and from various other sources a bunch of stories that I now recognize as charter myths. For example, I was told a story about how George Washington, when he was a child, cut down a cherry tree he wasn't supposed to cut down, and then when his father asked him about it he confessed and told the truth because, as he put it, "I cannot tell a lie." And because he told the truth, George Washington's father didn't punish him. Americans tell that story to children to inform them that telling the truth is an important value and to instruct them in how to behave. And we also tell each other the story of the Boston Tea Party, in which Americans threw a bunch of tea overboard in the harbor to prevent it from landing and being taxed, as an indication that Americans are supposed to protest against unjust taxes, so for a while a particularly anti-tax group of politicians called themselves "The Tea Party," using that charter myth as a guide for and a justification of their policies. Even really fundamental stuff feels more solid when it has a charter myth. Why does Canada have a parliamentary democracy? Why do we vote in the ways that we do and organize the government in the way that we do? To explain and justify our system of government, we turn to the past and tell stories about the origin and foundation of the government of Canada. Because the past has a kind of authority, we accept in the present the version of government and social norms we have in the present. The idea of charter myths shows us the power of stories. Stories about the past tell people how to behave in the present. It's weird, but it's almost universally accepted that if you want to explain a set of values or practices of a society, you can do that by telling stories about the past. And of course it's necessary that the past have some kind of authority, because we can't just wake up and reinvent the world and a whole society on the spot. To be a community, we have to have some kind of continuity in our norms and practices, otherwise nobody would know how to behave with anybody else and we wouldn't have a community at all. So, for example, the university has traditions and rituals and stories about its past because we can't just come to campus every day with no roles or guidelines about what we're supposed to do and how we're supposed to interact. We need tradition and continuity, but that need for the past to guide present behavior means that even obviously made up stories like myths give us a very deep, very subtle, and very powerful force for controlling society and people's behavior. In this way, myths are not just fun stories. They have real power that affects real people's lives. There's a lesson here about why it's important to study the past. You often hear that George Santayana quote from *The Life of Reason* that those who cannot understand the past are doomed to repeat it. I think there's a less pithy but much more important reason to study the past, and that is that the people who control the past and who tell persuasive stories about the past are the ones who have the power in the present. The ones who tell the charter myths exert power. Listen to political speeches and campaign speeches and it's amazing how often they'll tell a story about the past that's meant to guide policy decisions in the present, because controlling the stories of the past is how people maintain and guide power relations in the present. So one of the reasons myth exists, and one of the reasons it's worthwhile to study mythology, is that myths have real power in the present. And if they didn't, Malinowski tells us that they wouldn't survive, because no social phenomenon survives without a function. In the *Works and Days*, Hesiod presents himself as giving advice to his brother about how to live a good life, and that advice is really not just for Perses, but for us---for all of Hesiod's readers. He wants to guide our behavior in the present, telling us not to be greedy and not to overuse the court system, but to settle disputes ourselves and to be satisfied with enough instead of what we think we deserve. And he backs that up and justifies that advice with mythological stories, because those ancient stories are etiological---they're explanations for why things are the way they are and why we should value what we do. The more we believe that Hesiod's mythological stories are right and authoritative, the more he can persuade us to hold the values he wants us to hold and to act in the way he wants us to act. So, let's see that in action with the Prometheus myth. **Slide 8** takes us back to the *Theogony* (pages 45-47). It says: The first thing to note about this story is that it works like my previous example of the Last Supper. There's a sacrificial ritual in Ancient Greek society in which everyone gets together, and a priest slaughters an animal. The inedible parts get burned on the altar as a way of dedicating them to the gods, and the edible parts get roasted, and everybody gets to eat some. It's like a weird and gross barbecue party where everyone watches the butchery first. And this myth is a charter myth for that sacrificial ritual. It explains that gods and humans got together to decide which parts of animals would belong to each side, and Prometheus tried to trick Zeus by wrapping up the bones in fat so that the inedible parts would seem attractive. Zeus knows everything, so he wasn't really fooled, but he picked that part anyway, and so humans now burn the bones and fat so that the smoke goes up to heaven for the gods. We can interpret that story, just like the myth of Pandora, etiologically as an explanation of the origin of the Greek sacrificial ritual. The Greeks saw their sacrificial ritual, and they wondered why it was that when they performed an animal sacrifice, they got to eat all the good meat and organs and stuff, and the gods got the crappy bones. So they made up this story of the negotiations at Mecone that explains why they did the ritual the way they did. **Further Interpretation: Myth and Ritual** On **Slide 9**, the story of Prometheus in the *Theogony* includes an etiology of Greek sacrificial ritual. This is a particularly significant etiology because myth and ritual are closely linked. Some definitions of myth include the idea that myth is not myth unless it's religious. What I'm going to do for the next part of this lecture is to talk about the connections between myth and ritual, and how we can use those connections to help us interpret Hesiod's *Theogony* and *Works and Days*. Over the course of this year, I'm going to talk about a few theories of myth or approaches to myth. There's not enough time in the year to be comprehensive, but if you're not satisfied with the selections I've made, I can recommend Eric Csapo's 2005 book, *Theories of Mythology*. The approach I've talked about so far is the etiological approach, but there's a vast amount of stuff written about myth and how it functions and how we should interpret it or read it. There's really no end to it, and that's good because it means that if you enjoy learning about mythology, it doesn't have to end when this course ends. I'll periodically recommend secondary sources to you in case you want to learn more than this course has time to teach, and I think Csapo's book is a great place to start if you want to learn more about how to interpret mythology. But I'm not going to test you on things in that book that I don't talk about in my lectures, and I'm not assigning you any reading from it. You certainly don't have to read it. I'm just saying that if you feel like you want more, it's there. And that book has some stuff in it about the connection between myth and ritual, or what's sometimes called the ritualist theory of myth or the ritualist approach to myth. On **Slide 10**, theories of mythology that explicitly link myth to religious and/or sacrificial rituals have been around for a long time, but they became especially prominent following Jane Harrison's 1912 book *Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion*. Harrison became the central scholar in a group known as the Cambridge Ritualists. The book is well out of date by now, but it's still really interesting, and Harrison was a super interesting person. Among many other cool stories, I like that after the death of her husband, she befriended and then moved in with Hope Mirlees, who in 1926 wrote an influential, early fantasy novel called *Lud-in-the-Mist*. Mary Beard, the Cambridge professor and author of Classics books for a general audience, wrote a really good biography of Harrison. I wish we had more time for her, and especially to look at the first chapter of *Themis*, which shows the origin of the myths of Zeus and Zagreus on Crete in an inscription that records a ritual song. I also don't have time this year to talk a lot about Zagreus, but I do want to take just a minute for him now. He's a really minor figure in Greek mythology, but he's become popular recently because of the video game *Hades*, in which Zagreus is the main character. We only know Zagreus at all from fragmentary sources that we typically associate with an area of Greek religion that we call Orphism but is really a kind of amorphous subfield of Greek religion, and from these fragmentary sources we get the story of Zagreus that he's very closely associated with Dionysus. Sometimes he's called the Orphic Dionysus. Anyway, Zagreus was torn apart by the Titans and then put back together and resurrected. As punishment for killing Zagreus, Zeus destroyed the Titans with his thunderbolt, and from the ashes of the Titans, humanity was born. This is a version of the origin of humanity that we don't find in the major sources of Greek myth and religion, and it's not one that caught on to become really mainstream in Ancient Greece. It was, however, popular enough to survive in fragmentary sources. Harrison picks it up as an example of a significant pattern in mythology. The main idea of that first chapter of *Themis* is that myths arise as explanations of religious rituals, so, for example, an initiation ritual that enacts the taking away of the childhood self might give rise to a mythical story about a child, like Zeus or Zagreus, being hidden away. Remember that when Rhea gave birth to Zeus, she hid him away in a cave on Crete instead of giving him to Cronus to swallow. Harrison argued that coming-of-age rituals take away the childhood self, and myths dramatize that by hiding away children like Zeus. This idea of myths arising as an explanation of rituals can help explain the Prometheus myth too. Harrison would argue that the Ancient Greeks had this ritual, and the myth arose as an etiological explanation of the ritual. For Harrison, that's where myths come from and that's the purpose they serve or the function they have. I think that's a really powerful explanation and interpretation of the myth, but since 1912, scholarship has moved on, and I think most people would say that there's not a defining connection between myth and ritual. It's just not possible to explain every myth as a story that explains some ritual. Harrison would say that a story that doesn't explain ritual behavior just doesn't count as a myth, and that even myths that don't have a clear connection to a ritual must have had that connection in Ancient Greece, but we just don't have evidence of the right rituals. But I think there are lots of stories that are clearly myths that have no connection to a ritual. For me, this ritualist interpretation works for some myths, but not all of them. And that's a big lesson for interpreting myth. It's tempting to try to come up with one big interpretation that works for and explains all myths, but for me, different theories explain different myths, and we have to be eclectic in our approach. And even within the ritualist interpretation, we've moved on and refined the approach a lot since Harrison. On **Slide 11**, a more modern version of theory of the origin of myth and ritual, and one that has more currency among contemporary scholars, is the approach Walter Burkert explains in his 1983 book *Homo Necans* (originally published in German in 1972). The title of this book is an interesting one. It's in Latin, and it literally means "the killing person" or "the person who kills." So, the subspecies of humanity is homo sapiens. We use the Latin word for person, "homo," and then we add the "sapiens," which means wise, clever, or sapient. There were other species of humans, like homo habilis, or the handy person, the person who uses tools. And Burkert plays on that by writing his title as though he were describing a species of humanity called the person who kills, or homo necans, as though our defining characteristic is that we kill things. And the book is largely about the sacrificial ritual, and how much sacrifice is defining for humanity. He wants to point out how much killing, and how much anxiety about the morality of killing and violence is central to the development of human societies. Humans formed communities, according to Burkert, originally because hunting in groups gave them enormous advantages, and this means that as much as belonging to a group is important to us, to that extent, killing is also important to us. Killing animals was the core around which our communities developed, and that's why the sacrificial ritual is so important. It builds a community around slaughtering animals. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For right now, I'll just say that this is another book worth reading if you're into mythology, but for which we have only a little time. Some of you, if you read the book, will be nodding your heads and think, "Wow, he's totally right, this explains so much!" I think more of you will be made angry by some of his assumptions and arguments, which are not always based in the best science. It's a polarizing book. But whether you end up agreeing with it or not, I think it's fascinating to read. To give you an idea, after the introduction to the theory in the first chapter, the second chapter elaborates with an example. The chapter is called "Werewolves around the Tripod Kettle." It gives a few examples of evidence that we have for Ancient Greek rituals where the accompanying myth involved people turning into wolves. It starts with the worship of Zeus at Mount Lycaon, which means Wolf Mountain. The story was that the priests would cook up a stew in big pot and put a little bit of human meat in it. Everyone at the ritual would eat the stew, and whoever ate the bit of human meat would turn into a wolf and run off into the forest. If, after a certain number of years, that wolf refrained from eating people again, then the wolf would turn back into a human. Burkert has a whole argument about how we see this kind of story again and again, and the cultic image of the Greek kettle is often about who counts as human and who doesn't. Who gives into the wolf inside of them and leaves the cooperative community of humanity, and who restrains the wolf inside of them and resists the urge to do violence to other people. Humans constantly have to acknowledge the antisocial impulses we all experience, and we have to continually reestablish community, cooperation, and shared humanity in the face of that violence. For Burkert, sacrificial ritual, and the myths that go with it, are all about enacting the violence that is core to humanity, but doing so in a situation contained by the boundaries of ritual so that we can acknowledge the violence without it spilling over into killing other people. On **Slide 12**, Burkert's two greatest influences were Konrad Lorenz, the ornithologist and key figure in the beginning of "ethology" (the study of animal behavior) who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, and Émile Durkheim, the sociologist who wrote in 1912 *The Elementary Forms of Religious Life*. Drawing from biological approaches, like Lorenz's, that argue that social behavior like ritual and religion is determined by evolutionary psychology, and from sociological approaches, like Durkheim's, that argue that social behavior is determined by cultural constructions rather than innate instinct, Burkert's approach is sometimes called sociobiological. So biological approaches to studying human behavior usually try to universalize and say that humans behave in a certain way because those behaviors are genetically encoded and instinctual. Sociological approaches to studying behavior are often the opposite, and they look at how people in different societies behave in totally different ways, and that means that our behavior is determined by social customs instead of biological impulses. As usual, the most satisfying explanations are somewhere in between extremes, and Burkert tries to fuse the two types of approach into a theory that explains the human behavior of myth and ritual. Why do we have myths and rituals, and what functions do they fulfill? On **Slide 13**, Burkert starts with Lorenz's definition of ritual as a behavior that has lost its original function but is maintained because it has found a new function. Lorenz's most developed example was the victory celebration of the greylag goose, which performs the celebration even when there has been no real victory in order to establish social bonds and social order. So, it used to be the case that a goose would get into a fight and then celebrate winning the fight by doing a little victory dance. And being able to do the victory dance meant the goose was awesome and other geese should be like, "That goose is awesome. I want to follow that goose." But then the victory dance started to be its own thing. Why bother with the fight, when the victory dance is what makes other geese think you're awesome? So now the dance is there for the goose to make a claim to a social position. Or maybe you have a ritual where you read a few pages of a book before you go to bed. Maybe originally the reading had a purpose like you had an assignment for school or something, but then, after that went away and you didn't have to read for homework right before bed, you found that you had to read before bed because otherwise you couldn't sleep. The reading started as homework, but it became a ritual when it lost its original purpose (homework) and survived because it found a new purpose (helping you relax enough to fall asleep). We all have these small, private rituals, but Lorenz and Burkert were especially interested in public, collective rituals. These are actions that have lost their original purpose but survive because they help to establish communal connections and social hierarchies. The graylag goose victory ritual survives because its new purpose is to establish social hierarchy. If we think of it in terms of Malinowski's functionalism, the ritual survives because it has a function, and that is the recreation and reenactment of a social order. Ritual, as Lorenz and Burkert describe it, survives in animals and humans because it creates and affirms social interaction. On **Slide 14**, Burkert points out that in Ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, the ritual of animal sacrifice is central to anything serious in the society. For a long time in Greece, for example, no contract or treaty was complete without an animal sacrifice. Even in the Roman Empire, meetings of the Senate began with an animal sacrifice. When you signed a contract, the signature wasn't the most important part---it was the sacrifice that sealed the contract. And you think about Roman Senators in their nice clothes being all civilized, but they started every meeting getting dressed up in their best togas, like the Roman version of business suits, and slaughtering an animal and eating its meat and organs right there. Animal sacrifice was just everywhere. For us, not so much. Eating together is still an important social bonding experience with a lot of ritual, but we keep the slaughter hidden and we don't do it in our Sunday best. It\'s hard for us to imagine how publicly killing animals could be such an important part of a culture. Burkert traces the origin of animal sacrifice to a ritualization of hunting behavior, in which strong social bonds formed because people undertook a dangerous and violent activity together. People would go hunting, and it would be exhilarating. It would involve lots of exertion, and danger, and triumph and tragedy. People would celebrate victories and mourn losses. And success or failure and skill or lack of it would establish social relations in the group. Moreover, to be successful in hunting as a group, people have to subordinate their own individual interests to the interests of the group. They've got to be team players, and not everybody can be the star, or the hunt doesn't work. Sometimes, people even have to risk injury or death, to suffer injury or death, so the group can succeed. And all of that means that this kind of group activity both requires and creates powerful social bonds. Shared aggression is a strong former of social bonds, but hunting violence threatens to spill over into "intraspecific violence," or violence within the same species or group. We kill animals, and that makes us killers. When we celebrate or valorize people who engage in violent behavior and who are able to successfully kill big animals, we also celebrate and valorize the kind of people who are capable of doing violence to other people. What stops us from killing other people is strong social structures that keep the violence and killing contained. Those structures are imperfect, and violence does spill over into killing people all the time, but they work well enough to keep us going. The ritual beginnings and ends of hunts and sacrifices help to draw boundaries around what violence is acceptable, and what violence is unacceptable. If you have a ritual around hunting and killing, you start to say that there is a defined boundary. In one space and time, violence is good and celebrated, and in another it's bad and condemned. The collective killing of a sacrificial animal, for Burkert is a recreation of hunting in that it creates powerful social bonds, and also in that it draws boundaries around the violence that might threaten those bonds. So, on the one hand, you can see that Burkert is telling a kind of story that is common in evolutionary psychology. It says that even the most civilized people have behaviors that evolved for primitive, pre-civilized, hunter/gatherer life, and that we can explain human behavior, including weird things like ritual sacrifice, by describing it as a development of this kind of instinctual behavior that gave early humans an evolutionary advantage. But, on the other hand, he\'s also telling us a story about the formation and development of civilized group dynamics that move us away from the kind of primitive behavior he describes. He is trying to show how social systems help humans to overcome and move beyond the violent behavior that is no longer necessary or desirable. Instead of embracing or valorizing the primitive violence of early humanity, Burkert valorizes the ways in which the social bonds and structures of human civilization, including ritual and myth, contain that violence. On **Slide 15**, for Harrison's ritualists, once the original function of ritual was lost, people invented myths, especially etiological myths, to explain why they performed the rituals they did. People started doing things like the sacrificial ritual for a clear purpose, but then they forgot that purpose, and they kept doing this weird thing for reasons they didn't understand. So, says Harrison, they invented a myth to explain why they were doing it. Burkert argued, however, that finding the origin of myths or rituals does not explain at all what is important about them, and it is probably impossible anyway. Think about Malinowski here. If the purpose was gone or forgotten, people should just stop doing the thing. They wouldn't invent a story to keep them doing the thing unless there was a real function to it. And what Burkert wants to know is what that function was. Why were rituals like the sacrificial ritual so important that they had to keep going and people had to invent a story to justify them? His answer is that they establish the social order. He turns to Durkheim, quoting on page 24 of *Homo Necans* from *The Elementary Forms of Religious Life*, "It is through common action that society becomes self-aware." What is important for Burkert is the traditional aspect of myth and ritual. We perform rituals because we have been taught them by our community, and by performing rituals we affirm our membership in a community. So, Harrison wondered where myths come from, and she argued that there were rituals, and myths are an effort to explain those rituals etiologically. Burkert argued that actually finding the origins of myths or rituals was at best speculative and in a lot of cases was simply impossible. We just don't have enough evidence from Ancient Greece to explain the origin of every myth in a ritual, and even if we did, it wouldn't explain what's really interesting or important about myths and rituals, and that's the deep function that they fulfill. And for him, what ties myth and ritual together is that they serve the same function, which is to create and reinforce the social order. When we perform the ritual of the Eucharist in church, and we eat the bread and drink the wine, sometimes that's called "communion." We do it because in doing so we affirm our membership in a community. And this is Burkert's key point about mythology. He says that myths are tied to rituals, and that myths serve the same purpose as rituals, which is establishing community. On **Slide 16**, myth, for Burkert, is a kind of verbal ritual. Harrison wanted to explain the origin of myth, but Burkert wanted to explain the function of myth. Both rely on a close connection between myth and ritual, but they use that connection to draw different conclusions because they have different goals. At this point it's worth quoting at some length from *Homo Necans*. First, I'm going to show Burkert distinguishing his approach from that of psychoanalysis---from the idea that we can understand myth by thinking of it as an expression of inborn, human, collective psychology. Here is Burkert on page 32: So here Burkert is talking about the roots of myth in the origins of humanity and the Paleolithic Age, which literally means the Old Stone Age. So, for Burkert, in the Old Stone Age, in the early days of cooperative hunting parties, ways of life and cultural practices were structured by and determined by rituals, and because myth and ritual are closely connected, those ways of life and cultural practices were also shaped by myths. That means that myth can give us some understanding of the ways of ancient humanity. I think it's probably obvious to you at this point that whatever conclusions you can draw about Paleolithic culture from later myths are going to be highly speculative and not at all reliable. The only reliable evidence we have of prehistoric life is archaeological and not mythical. And Burkert totally gets that. He's not really after any kind of specific idea that this myth must mean that prehistoric people behaved in this way. Instead, he's interested in the connection itself. How did myth in general shape the life of people? The answer to that question can help us see how myth shapes out own lives. He continues, on **Slide 17** (still page 32): So he says that we can talk about the origin of mythic patterns in the human mind and whether they come from biologically determined, universal psychology or whether they come from social practices, but he says all of that is ultimately going to be speculation. We can, however, be certain of the function of myths, and that is that myths and rituals combine as forms of cultural tradition. Myths are stories about the past, charter myths, to explain how society is supposed to be organized and how it's supposed to function. Burkert says, look, Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists and their really strict definition of myth would tell you that myths are always a part of a ritual, but actually it's not the case that whenever the Greeks told a myth, it was part of a ritual, and that whenever they performed a ritual, they also told a myth. That's not the real connection between myth and ritual. The stories are outside of the ritual. Greeks did give each other etiological explanations of rituals in myths, and at least some myths explained for Ancient Greeks why the rituals happened the way they did. The Prometheus myth about dividing up the sacrificial meat did this, for example. But there are also plenty of myths that are not there to explain any specific ritual, or at least there seem to be. And even though Harrison would argue that for a myth to be a real myth, it has to explain a ritual, there are others who argue that the only true myths are the ones that are not connected to any ritual. Burkert continues on **Slide 18** (page 32): So there are some scholars who say that sure, there are etiological myths that explain rituals, but these only show up late, and the myths that really express deep human psychology are older and more really mythical. Burkert says that there are genuinely old myths that are etiological explanations of ritual, but there are also old myths that don't, and he doesn't want to say that one or the other isn't really myths. Some myths are etiological explanations of ritual and others are not, and both types are genuinely myth. So, obviously the myth of Prometheus and Zeus at Mecone dividing up the sacrificial animal is an explanation of why the ritual is the way it is. On the other hand, the story that Chasm brought forth Darkness and Night is probably not connected to any ritual, and that doesn't make it any more or less mythical. In my first lecture for this course, I resisted the temptation to suggest a definition of myth, because those kinds of restrictions are, a lot of the time, misguided. They're too restrictive. I want to be more inclusive of different kinds of material in this course. By the end, I think I'll have developed some ideas that could be considered a broad kind of definition, but for now it's better just to go along looking at different kinds of things we might call myth and not worrying too much about being strict with a definition of what counts and what doesn't count as myth. Burkert continues on **Slide 19** (page 32): Now we're starting to get to the point that Burkert really wants to get across, and that is that even though he doesn't think it's the case that all myth is an etiology of ritual, there is for him a deep connection between the two, and that connection is that ritual dramatizes the social order, and myth narrates that same social order. But what's most interesting for me in this passage is not just that, but also that the themes that myth and ritual find most common and most powerful are in the realms of sexuality and aggression. Here Burkert is thinking back to the violence at the heart of the sacrificial ritual, in which an animal is killed in front of a group of people. Burkert relates that violence to the violence of paleolithic hunters. But he also notes that myths are very often pretty gruesome too. Zeus sets an eagle to peck out Prometheus' liver and then has it grow back so the eagle can eat it again and again. And myth is also really often sexual. Zeus plans to undermine humanity by sending Pandora to weaken Epimetheus, but we'll see later on this year that sexuality is a huge theme in myth. And Burkert's idea for why that is, for why sexuality and violence are so prominent in myth, is that those are the forces that bond us together most powerfully, and also the forces that most powerfully threaten the social order. The hunting party succeeds and bonds together because of its violence, but when that violence spills over it causes people to fight and kill each other. Sex brings us together more closely than anything else, but it also drives us apart from each other more powerfully than anything else. Humanity needs sex and violence, but we need them within boundaries and under control to keep civilization from falling apart. **Slide 20** skips ahead just a little bit to page 34 of *Homo Necans*: Burkert says that myth and ritual have the same function, namely expressing the order of society and forming a community, and sometimes we can do either one without the other, but language does not seem as reliable to us as ritual does. Myths in words can express more subtlety and they're more flexible and detailed, but ritual is a more powerful tool. So even though we can use either one at different times, any community needs ritual, and can't survive on myth alone. And ritual is everywhere. Even something as simple as a handshake is a ritual. Burkert argues that we shake hands first because it means we can be sure those hands aren't holding any weapons, and second because the handshake can be a representation of or replacement for aggressive action. And some people are pretty aggressive with their handshakes, trying to grip hard or pull your arm, as a demonstration of strength. Even when a handshake isn't at all aggressive, and I think that's most of the time, there's something a little weird about the fact that it's the ritual action of the handshake rather than the words of the agreement that carries the weight. But it shouldn't be surprising. Rituals are a fundamental part of how we relate to other people. I sometimes think about the importance of ritual for community building by thinking about our university. We have all kinds of rituals here. Some are obvious ones, like convocation. You go to a big room all together and some people with authority say some particular words to grant you your degree. And of course those words aren't necessary. You get the degree even if you don't go to convocation. But we still have the convocation because it builds a community. It's about relationships. And there are less obvious rituals too, like homecoming parties or football games or all the million traditions of residences. Those create community by bringing people together, and also by excluding other people. They draw boundaries between the people who belong to the community and the people who don't. That's what religious rituals do too. They form communities by drawing boundaries between who belongs and who doesn't. We are taught the rituals by members of the community, and we affirm our membership in the community by performing the ritual together. And more than affirming our own membership, we also affirm the exclusion of the people who do not perform the ritual. That works for national communities, religious communities, university communities, and all the large and small communities we imagine to structure our relationships with other people. In a different way, stories do the same thing. We tell each other stories about the past of the community and how it formed, and in telling those stories we make relationships within the community and we exclude outsiders. And, Burkert argues, those rituals and myths are especially powerful when they deal with the forces that most closely bond communities and most seriously threaten them. The last quotation I want to show you from *Homo Necans* is on **Slide 21** (page 134): The reason, for Burkert, that myths contain such gruesome content and the reason the key ritual in Ancient Greece and Rome is such a bloody and violent one is that it dramatizes the creation of civilization out of chaotic violence. We exclude the wolf, the evil, the violent, and the deviant from civilized society. In fact, that's what civilization is---it's the exclusion of the uncivilized. But that violence is necessary for us. We can replace hunting with agriculture, but the hunting is always there, lurking deep in the background. So, civilization has to remake itself constantly by admitting and then containing our dark impulses and actions. We let them come up, but within safe boundaries, and we draw those boundaries around civilization. The sacred, says Burkert, is that space of violence and transgression, it's the place where everything can go wrong, where nobody cooperates, where things can happen that nobody should do to anyone else. And so, the most important purpose of myth and ritual is to draw those boundaries that determine what's acceptable and what's not, and who belongs and who doesn't. One of the things we'll see when we look at stories of mythological heroes this year is that those heroes are often not very good people. They're exceptional and strong and clever, but they are also violent and uncontrollable. They're not often heroes in the sense that they're good people we should aspire to be like. They're the ones who are most liable to lose control of their violence, and the ones who most threaten the boundaries of civilization. In a couple of weeks, we're going to look at Heracles, and he's a great example of this. He straddles the line between human and divine. He's half god, half human, but he also has these uncontrollable rages. His violence spills over and turns against the people closest to him, including his wife and children. He is the strongest protector of humanity, and he can't protect the humans closest to him from himself. He is, in some ways at least, an embodiment of the sacred. The space where horror and gruesomeness and sexual violation rise up and threaten all civilization, only to be contained. And that threat is the thing that makes civilization. It's what makes civilization necessary and what makes it possible. Heracles is right on the line on the edge of humanity, and he helps to draw the boundary between what belongs in the human community and what doesn't. Heroes---at least mythological heroes---are not shining examples of what humanity should be. They're instead people on the very edge of what humans are. They're the people who embody the threat and the promise of sex and violence. On **Slide 22**, ultimately, we can summarize Burkert's fusion of sociology and biology like this: Evolutionarily, humans gain a great advantage by cooperating in a community. One of the earliest examples of this is in hunting in groups. Ritual, which can be traced back to paleolithic hunting in the archaeological record, and myth, which is probably as old, are both based on activities that had other purposes initially, but they became our primary ways of establishing and maintaining communities. Because of this, myth often includes themes of inclusion and exclusion in communities, and it also frequently includes themes of aggression and sexuality, which are two of the forces that most closely bond communities and most strongly threaten them. **Applying Etiology and Sociobiology to Hesiod** So, that's a brief introduction to Walter Burkert, *Homo Necans*, and the so-called sociobiological approach to myth. What I'd like to do in the next part of this lecture is to see if I can't use the two approaches I've talked about today---the etiological approach and the sociobiological approach---to do a little bit of interpretation of some of Hesiod's poetry. **Slide 23** says that we now have a couple of tools we can use to help us interpret the myth of Prometheus. The more straightforward one is an etiological interpretation. Some Ancient Greek person thought that it was odd that in the sacrificial ritual, the gods got the useless parts and the humans got the good parts. That person invented a story explaining the origin of that practice as a way to help themselves and others accept and perpetuate the ritual. Etiology also works for the Pandora myth. Someone saw that men were oppressing women in Ancient Greece and instead of trying to change society, invented a story that purported to explain an original reason for the behavior as a way to help themselves and others accept and perpetuate it. They made up a story about the past to justify and strengthen power relations in the present. So far so good, but the sociobiological interpretation of myths is a little more complicated. On **Slide 24**, we can start by saying that, broadly speaking, the *Theogony* is not only the story of the origin of the gods, but also their social organization. It tells us how Zeus came to be in charge and what kind of rules and organization he enforces. In this interpretation, myth serves the function of presenting the order of society, and in the case of the *Theogony*, that society is the divine one. It tells us what roles the gods fulfill, who is in charge and what the hierarchy of power and authority looks like, and it defines the boundary of the community of gods by using genealogy. The *Works and Days* is a counterpart to the *Theogony* in that it is the story of the social organization of humans. It tells us how human society came to be the way it is, how hierarchical power works, and how humans should behave with each other. The story of Prometheus, the sacrifice, and the theft of fire is in both poems because it is an interaction between gods and humans. Sacrificial ritual is where gods and humans come together, but it also separates the two communities, and it draws the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion between them. The *Theogony* tells us that at Mecone, humans and gods reached a kind of settlement. This is on **Slide 25** (page 45), "For when the gods and mortal men were reaching a settlement in Mecone, with eager spirit he divided up a great ox and, trying to deceive Zeus' mind, set it before him." Most's note on "settlement" explains that the meaning of the Greek word (ἐκρίνοντο) isn't very clear here, but it does indicate that this is the initial agreement about the relationship between gods and humans, perhaps at the initial separation of them. Burkert (especially in *Greek Religion*, on page 57), emphasizes the separation of gods and humans here. It is formalized with a sacrifice, and it defines who belongs to what community and what each community is entitled to. Gods are immortal and don't need food, while humans are mortal and rely on killing to survive. For Burkert, the most important aspect of this myth is that it draws a line of inclusion and exclusion that separates the human from the divine, and the fact that humans constantly reperform the ritual of sacrifice redraws that boundary and reestablishes the community of humanity every time. So, that's two interpretations of the Prometheus myth. I think we can also use these ideas to interpret the Pandora myth, so I want to take a look at that now. On **Slide 26**, Burkert himself does not interpret the Pandora myth extensively, but we can continue in his style of interpretation. In the *Works and Days*, Hesiod does not tell the story of the animal sacrifice, but instead he focuses on the gift Zeus uses to balance the acquisition of fire---Pandora. One of the defining features of human communities and human civilization in the *Works and Days* is work. We saw this at the very beginning of the poem, when Hesiod was addressing his brother Perses and talking about the value of work. Kings are gift-eaters, but the people who are happiest are the farmers who work and who have enough to live on as a result of that work. The gods, on the other hand, don't have to work. The *Works and Days* valorizes work as the foundation of what's good about humanity, even though it's hard. And labor begins with the arrival of both fire and Pandora, who in this way is the mechanism of the separation of humans from the gods. With the technological advance of fire that enables civilization comes the possibility of work and the end of a godlike, easy existence. Let's take a look at how Hesiod describes the outcome of Pandora opening the jar in the *Works and Days*. This is on **Slide 27** (pages 93-95): Prometheus may have thought he had outsmarted Zeus, but Zeus knows everything and it's not possible to get away with stuff when he's in charge. He controls everything and everything happens according to his plan. But the gift of Pandora, accompanied by the release of evils into the world, is the other side of the theft of fire. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, hid it in a hollow reed, and brought it to humans. That technology enabled humans to work to become more powerful, and that was threatening to the gods, so Zeus sent Pandora, with gifts from all the gods, and a jar full of evils. And when she opened the jar, all the evils escaped, but she held on to Anticipation. And those evils hold humanity back, but they're also what makes work necessary. Once fire made labor possible, Pandora's jar made labor necessary. Before then, there was no toil (that is, work) or diseases, which bring death. Humans lived a godlike and easy existence. But what now separates the community and the social order of humanity from the gods is that humans work and they die. Sometimes people take this to be a description of the transition between hunting and gathering on the one hand, and agriculture on the other. Hesiod associates work with farming in particular. In the old days, the earth just produced food for people to eat and they didn't have to work at tilling the fields. They just gathered what the earth produced naturally, and life was easy. But with the arrival of technology, people had to start working on the farm. For our interpretations today, we might start by calling this an etiology of labor. Hesiod explains how the possibility and necessity of labor started---he gives us the cause of work. And he presents it both positively and negatively. At the beginning of the poem, he praised work as what humans are supposed to do, but in this passage about Pandora, the arrival of work among humans is a kind of downfall from a previously better state of being. Anticipation, the final contents of the jar, is similarly ambiguous. It is both a good thing that enables us to think ahead and plan for the future, but it also causes us worry and stress. Back when humans didn't have toil and diseases that cause death, there wasn't so much need for or possibility of Anticipation. Now that we live in the world in decline, it's both possible and necessary. It's the hope that kills you. Beyond etiology, we can also read this myth sociobiologically, in that toil and disease are the defining features of humanity---they are what separate us from the gods. Moreover, even though Hesiod's introduction of Pandora isn't explicitly sexual, she is the first woman, and the gods design her to be attractive to men. She brings with her the possibility of sexual reproduction, and that introduces one of the two themes that Burkert says are most common in myth: sex and violence. But the key, I think, in the sociobiological interpretation of Pandora is that she brings with her the evils that define the human community, separating humanity from its previously godlike existence. Immediately after the story of Pandora, Hesiod introduces a new story that is also a version of the downfall of humanity from a blissful state into the kind of state it's in now, when toil is necessary. On **Slide 28**, he tells us about the decline of the condition of humanity from an initial golden age and projects into the future an age even worse than his own iron age. We can see this starting with the passage from the *Works and Days* on **Slide 29** (pages 95-97): This starts a story of the decline of the world from a golden age to a silver age and so on. In some ways, even though Hesiod presents it as a decline, it's also possible to read it in a progressive spirit and talk about the advance of technology and labor, but for us today the most interesting aspect of this story is that it starts with the idea that humans and gods come from the same origin and early on, during the reign of Cronus, people lived free of cares and free of old age. They still were mortal, but death wasn't as big a problem for them. They were ageless and free of evils like disease. They didn't have to work, and in fact they couldn't work. This was before Zeus came to rule, and so before Prometheus and the negotiation at Mecone that established the sacrificial ritual, and before the theft of fire and the gift of Pandora that made labor necessary. In that Golden Age, humans spent their lives just like gods, with spirit free from care. On **Slide 30** (page 97): The Golden humans didn't do the work of tilling the fields, because the earth bore crops of its own accord. And the people were good to each other too, and they shared what they had with each other. Already there are hints of the coming work of agriculture in the "fruits of their labors" and in the fact that they have sheep, but really, it's an easy, godlike existence. But with the arrival of Zeus and his rulership, the Golden people passed away and became benevolent spirits. In their place, the gods made Silver people. This is on **Slide 31** (pages 97-99): The Silver people were worse than the Golden ones, because they didn't know how to behave with each other. When they were kids and under control, it was okay, but as soon as they grew up, they started being stupid and doing violence to each other, and as a result they had short lives and kept dying. They could not restrain themselves from doing outrage to each other---the Greek word for "outrage" here is "hubris." They exceeded the boundaries of what is appropriate for humans by acting hubristically or outrageously. They didn't have proper boundaries. And another thing that these people didn't have was the sacrificial ritual. Sacrifice is the thing that organizes human society. Without that ritual, there's no defining order of society for humans, and they don't know how to behave or what they're supposed to do. And it's precisely because they didn't perform sacrifices that Zeus decides they've got to go, and he ended the Silver Age, burying the people under the earth. On **Slide 32** (page 99): The third age of humanity was a Bronze Age. This one is weird because we use the term Bronze Age historically to mean the age when people used bronze tools rather than iron ones. Of course, there was not an earlier historical age when people used gold tools or silver ones, but Hesiod knows about the transition from bronze tools to later iron ones, so there's a kind of fuzzy relationship between myth and history here. In any case, the Bronze people were violent, and they fought each other and killed each other all the time, and they all went to Hades. The next age is not a metal one, but a brief interlude for an age of Heroes. This is on **Slide 33** (pages 99-101): Here Hesiod squeezes into his story of the metallic ages an account of the heroic legends of Greek mythology. There are a couple of big sequences of myth that we sometimes call "cycles." We talk about the Theban cycle and the Trojan cycle, and in this course I'll spend a few weeks each on myths that were connected with the city of Thebes and myths that were connected with the city of Troy. The central story of each is a war. The Theban one is the war of the Seven Against Thebes, when the sons of Oedipus fought over who would rule Thebes. The Trojan one is the Trojan War, when the Greeks sailed to Troy to fight for Helen. Hesiod knows those myths, but they're not the ones he's telling here, so he just passes over them quickly to continue with his story of the decline of humanity through the ages. Sociobiologically, what I think is most interesting about Hesiod's Age of Heroes is that the Heroes were demigods. They confused the boundaries between human and god. Some of them became immortal, and even those who died still live at the edge of the earth on the Isles of the Blessed in the far west. There they live immortal and happy lives, like gods. So until our age, Hesiod's age, there wasn't a firm boundary that distinguished the communities of humans and gods from each other. Finally, on **Slide 34** (pages 101-103), we get to Hesiod's own present age of humanity, the Iron Age: The Iron Age is defined here by toil, by labor. There is a mix of evil and good in the world, but it is a long way from the Golden Age of happiness and goodness and carefree life. People in this age do not cease from toil. And they're not all bad, like the Silver or Bronze people who couldn't stop from violence or hubris our outrage that exceeded the boundaries of what is appropriate for humanity. They do still do bad things, and the one example of that that Hesiod offers is that because these people age, there is conflict between the generations. I spent a lot of time last week and this week talking about inheritance and how it's related to conflict, and here that conflict spills over. People don't respect their parents. They fight with their brothers and their comrades, and they also have conflicts between guests and hosts. I'll talk later on in the course about the importance of hospitality in Greek culture, and how central to the rules of good behavior the proper treatment of guests and hosts is. Hesiod is telling us what the proper order of society is. He says that you must work, and you must respect your parents and practice proper hospitality between hosts and guests, and you must get along with your siblings and peers. If we don't do these things, Zeus will destroy us, just like he destroyed the previous types of mortals. Myth, here, is defining what it is to be human, and it's presenting to us the proper order of human society. **Slide 35** (page 103) describes what happens when that order of society breaks down: When Hesiod says, "Their hands will be their justice," he means that people will resolve conflicts with violence. They'll destroy cities and they'll break their oaths and they'll commit acts of hubris or outrage. People will give honor to evildoers instead of good people. This is the nightmare vision of what happens when civilization breaks down and people give in to the violence in ourselves. This is what Burkert says the rituals that bound the sacred are supposed to prevent. They acknowledge the violence in us, but they contain it and allow us to work together to build something instead of destroying it. After the end of the myth of the ages, Hesiod turns to addressing Perses again, and he tells him, and so also indirectly us and all of his other readers, how to behave to avoid the breakdown of civilization into violence. In other words, he's explicit here that the purpose of him telling the myths he's told is to illustrate proper behavior and the proper order of society. Here's **Slide 36** (page 105): Hesiod opposes Justice (Dike) to Outrageousness (Hubris). I want to dwell just for a moment on this word, "Hubris." Most translates it as Outrageousness or Outrage, and often other translators treat it as a kind of arrogance. You think you're too big to fail, and you'll fail. That's hubris. But there's also in the Greek a sense of a boundary or a line in this word. Hubris is behavior that's over the line. Especially when humans do things that are reserved for the gods, that's hubris. They confuse or violate the boundaries between the human and the divine. And Hesiod's myths are here to tell us where that line is. They establish the boundary, and they tell us what the gods do and what humans do. And here, the bad humans who commit hubris are the gift-eaters---they're the takers. The ones who don't contribute to civilization with their labor and instead just take from others. You still hear this kind of rhetoric in the world. Politicians all the time position themselves as on the side of the workers against the lazy people who take without contributing. Sometimes that's populists arguing that socialism and the welfare state will destroy us all by stealing from workers and giving to lazy people, other times that's progressives arguing that billionaires don't contribute and just exploit the labor of workers. And either way, they threaten that if you don't side with them, all of civilization will collapse and humanity will descend into violence. When you hear that kind of rhetoric, you can realize it's thousands of years old. Hesiod was saying the same things. And myth is a powerful tool for that kind of rhetoric. It says that we have to maintain the present power relations, and we have to behave in certain ways, or bad things will happen. It establishes the order of society. I want to be clear, here, that I'm not saying this is a good thing. I'm not saying that myth doesn't do harm with this kind of power to bind people together in a community and establish an order of society. Absolutely it can do good, and it is necessary for us as humans to live in communities that have some kind of order. The thing is that the order of society myth establishes for us is often an unjust one. It tells is what justice is, but usually that's just what powerful people think it is in a way that benefits them. We can't live without ritual, and it's hard to live without myth, but they're not always on the side of good in the world either. Hesiod shows us what he argues is the good side of establishing the order of society on **Slide 37** (page 107): The point in here that seems most interesting to me is that in the good version of civilization where people follow Peace and Justice, children resemble their parents. Not only is this a statement about harmony rather than conflict between the generations, but there's something about genetics here too. First, it means that spouses aren't cheating. There's this big anxiety among Ancient Greek men that we'll see in some myths this year about how you can usually tell who a child's mother is, but you can never really be sure who the father is. There's no DNA testing for that in Ancient Greece. And men do their best to control women's sexuality as a way of ensuring that their children will resemble them. This is one of the reasons why we'll see such a sexual double standard, where men are allowed cheat on their wives all they want, but women are not allowed to cheat on their husbands. It's because when men cheat on their wives, it\'s obvious that the children are, as they say, illegitimate and not potential heirs, but when wives cheat on their husbands, the children can mess up inheritance by having a son inherit from someone who was not his biological father. There's also something in here about the inheritance of virtue. Aristocracies run on inherited privilege and power. Kings are the sons of kings, and nobles are the sons of nobles. For that to work, you have to believe that the things that made one person worthy of power, that they're talented and virtuous, are passed down in families, and that the sons of nobles are worthy of their privilege and power because children resemble their parents. So, it seems like a small thing, and it's easy to pass over, but I think when we pay attention to this idea that Hesiod says that in a just society, children resemble their parents, in there is a lot to unpack about power relations. It means that in Hesiod's version of the just society, men exert control over women's sexuality, and aristocrats inherit their wealth, power, and privilege. It's all fine and good for Hesiod to say that he's telling us the myths so that we know how to behave, but hidden in that are subtle clues that the ways he wants us to behave will benefit wealthy and powerful men. Hesiod finally offers advice to us to be good to each other, and in particular he warns us that kings are corrupt gift-eaters, and justice will punish the evil kings. He says that people who do evil to others bring evil on themselves. This is on **Slide 38** (page 109): We can all live in the just and peaceful world, Hesiod tells us, if we follow justice and we realize that evil brings evil. If you do evil to other people, other people will do evil to you. Zeus sees everything, and he makes sure this is true. He rewards the people who work hard, and he punishes the gift-eaters. And, look, people can't be loners. No man is an island. No matter how independent we think we are, we are always dependent on the community of other people. We have fantasies about surviving alone after an apocalypse, but that's a terrible life, and even if it weren't miserable to be lonely and isolated for your whole life, the loners who survive do so by using things that other people made that have been left behind, and using techniques and technologies that other people invented. Humans simply have to cooperate with each other. Community is essential to us. With that being said, in any system of cooperation, it's possible for some people to take advantage and work in their own interests instead of in the interests of the group. The group has to police that somehow, and myth is a way of convincing the group to behave cooperatively. Here in Hesiod's *Works and Days*, that's super explicit. Hesiod comes right out and tells us how to behave and says Zeus will punish us if we're bad. It's not always going to be that obvious, but it's going to be possible to read all myths in this way. The lessons for us aren't always obvious, but the stories and the rituals that surround them are the things that make communities. So, for example, tragedy in Athens was a ritual for building community. People came together in the theater and performed rituals and heard stories that, in their weird and gruesome ways, called into question and then reestablished the order of society. This is what Burkert and his sociobiological approach say is the function of myth. That's all I have for you for this week. Next time I will be back with an overview of the history of Ancient Greece and Rome. Good news---you don\'t have a reading assignment. I will just tell you a little bit about the history of Ancient Greece and Rome so that you have some sense of what I mean when I talk about dates for the rest of the year. I\'ll talk to you next time.