Week 8 Lecture Script: Classical Mythology PDF

1 Pogorzelski Classics 2200 Week 8 Lecture: The Homeric Hymns and the Olympian Gods Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I’m going to talk a little about the Olympian gods and a little about the Homeric Hymns, and a lot about the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is the reading assignment for the week. By the way, I usually say “Demeter,” but I think it’s also perfectly fine to say “Demeter.” I say “Demeter” because the e’s are long, transliterating etas, and the accent in Ancient Greek was on the second syllable, but I think it’s more common these days for people to say “Demeter,” and I don’t have any objection to anyone choosing the one of those two ways that sounds best to them. Anyway, I’ll start this week’s lecture by saying some general things about the Olympian gods. Olympians vs. Titans and Olympians vs. Chthonic Gods On Slide 2, we often speak of the Greek gods as Olympians. Think, for example, of “Percy Jackson and the Olympians.” This is because Zeus’ home is on Mount Olympus and many of the most important Greek gods live there as well. And this isn’t just a modern shorthand. Ancient Greek authors also sometimes talk as if all gods lived on Olympus. For example, Hesiod, in Works and Days line 110 (page 95), writes, “the immortals, who have their mansions on Olympus.” He repeats that line elsewhere as well. For Hesiod as well as for us, “Olympians” can sometimes just be a general term for “gods.” Mount Olympus, by the way, is a real mountain in Greece and it was possible for Greek people to go up there. You might wonder how it is that Greek people imagined that the gods lived in a place they could go and see, when clearly when they went there the gods were not there. Mythical geography generally works in three ways. One is that supernatural gods and monsters can be said to live in vaguely defined or very remote places that nobody can actually go to, so 2 Pogorzelski nobody can confirm for sure that they’re not there. A second way mythical geography works is that specific locations that are reachable can be given, but the supernatural gods and monsters there are invisible, or only visible when they want to be. A third way is that gods or monsters can be said to have been in a particular place in the distant past, but have since been killed or moved on, so they’re no longer there to be seen. The monsters Herakles defeated are often like that. The gods’ homes on Olympus are that second kind of mythical geography. Mount Olympus is real, and the gods live there, but they have the supernatural power of invisibility, so they just make themselves and their homes so that humans can’t see them. The image on Slide 2 is of a kylix, which is a kind of drinking cup. This one shows the Olympian gods enjoying a feast, while the Trojan boy Ganymede pours wine for Zeus. You can see in the center of the image the bearded god Zeus holding out his cup for the boy holding the pitcher. In Zeus’ other hand is a weird-looking thing that you might not recognize. It’s a thunderbolt, and that’s what the usual thunderbolt iconography looks like on Greek vase paintings. They don’t look like the forked lightning we would draw. 3 Pogorzelski Oltos. c. 515-510 BC. Kylix with Gods in Olympus (Athena, Zeus, Ganymede, Hestia). ceramics. Place: Museo archeologico nazionale di Tarquinia. https://library.artstor.org/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039779916. To the left of Zeus, you can see a goddess carrying a helmet, and the warrior goddess is Athena. I won’t go through them all. I’ll just leave it there and say that the rest of the Olympians are around the edge of the cup, each with their own iconography that shows who they are. On Slide 3, there are more gods than just the Olympians, though. One way to categorize Greek gods is by generation, as Hesiod does. That way, we can divide the Olympians, who are the children and grandchildren of Cronus and Rhea, from the Titans, who are the children of Gaia and Ouranos. The Olympians are the generation, or rather generations, that are in charge in what Greek mythology describes as its present time, and the Titans are the previous generation—the generation ruled by Cronus—that the Olympians defeated and overthrew. They are, in the present of most of Greek mythology, imprisoned in Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld. But, because mythology can never be completely straightforward, there are also some Titans still out in the world. The sun, for example, is Helios, who is a Titan. Sometimes when mythological 4 Pogorzelski stories mean “the sun,” what they actually say is “the Titan.” But, in general, the Titans have been overthrown and superseded, and the Olympians have taken over. Another way to categorize the gods is by the gods who dwell above (the Olympians) and the gods who dwell below (the chthonic gods). The word “chthonic” comes from the Greek word, “chthon,” which just means “earth.” Chthonic means “earthly,” or especially “under the earth.” Ancient Greeks worshipped chthonic gods as well as Olympian ones. In general, sacrifices to Olympian gods were performed over altars during the day, and often they were of white animals. Sacrifices to chthonic gods were generally over pits, during the evening or night, and often they were of black animals. So, some gods dwell above on mountains or in the sky, and other gods dwell below the earth in the ground or in the underworld. Zeus is a sky god, associated with storms and thunder, and his home on Olympus is practically in the sky. Hades is a god of the underworld. They’re of the same generation—they’re brothers—but they belong to different categories in this other way. We saw a little while ago the importance of the sacrificial ritual in Greek life. Any important occasion or agreement has to be marked by an animal sacrifice. The most common version of this, and the one we still tend to imagine today as the classic version of Greek sacrifice, is a sacrifice to an Olympian god on a raised altar that the public crowd can see. The altar is on the steps in front of the temple. The blood of the sacrifice flows over the altar and then the bones and fat are burned on the altar so that the smoke rises to the sky for the god who dwells above. All this happens during the daytime, and while the gods get the smoke of the inedible parts, the people cook and eat the meat and organs at something like a barbecue party. There was, however, another kind of sacrificial ritual—this one to the chthonic gods. It was similar, but with 5 Pogorzelski some key differences. Instead of sacrificing at an altar, this type of sacrifice happened over a pit that was dug into the ground, and the way the sacrifice was transmitted to the god was by pouring the blood into the ground. The smoke of the sacrifice goes up into the sky, but the thirsty ground drinks the blood. The sacrifices happen at night, in the darkness. The blood appeases the darker forces. The gods beneath the earth are not always, but often gods of death and violence and anger. Hades lives beneath the earth, and the Erinyes, or the Furies, do too. The Furies enforce a kind of justice. When someone does violence against a family member, it’s the Furies who punish them, but the Furies also sometimes incite violence between family members. Sacrificing to them, letting them drink the blood that flows into the earth, helps to appease them and keep them directing those violent urges toward justice instead of injustice. That doesn’t mean that the chthonic gods are evil, just like the Olympian gods aren’t exactly good. They just represent different natural forces and human ideas. Death is neither good nor evil—it just is. Storms are also neither good nor evil—they just are. So, it’s not like there’s this evil cult of Greeks making sinister, nighttime sacrifices to the chthonic gods so they can gain power over death. The dark forces of the underworld are just as much a part of normal religious and mythological life as the light forces of Olympus. On Slide 4, it’s not unusual for people to speak of the twelve Olympians, but this is a little problematic. Eleven of the most important Olympian gods are Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, Artemis, Athena, Demeter, Hephaestus, Hera, Hermes, Poseidon, and Zeus. I’ve talked about all of these gods before. Apollo was a god of music and prophecy, and is particularly associated with the sun and the light. Aphrodite was a goddess of love, and especially sexual love. Ares was a god of war. Artemis was a goddess of the hunt—of wilderness and the rejection of marriage. She 6 Pogorzelski was Apollo’s twin sister and especially associated with the moon. Athena was a goddess of craft and skill, including feminine crafts like weaving and masculine ones like warfare. Demeter was a goddess of grain—of the harvest and the fertility of the earth that brings forth food. Hephaestus was the smith god, who ran the forges of the gods. His Roman name was Vulcan and the fire of his smithies made volcanoes. Hera was the goddess of marriage, the sister and wife of Zeus who represented the matrons of Greece. Hermes was a god of crossing borders and crossing lines. He was the messenger of the gods, although often goddesses would send Iris, the rainbow, as their messenger instead of Hermes. Hermes was a god of commerce and of theft. Poseidon, the brother of Zeus and Hades, was allotted the sea, which holds the earth. He was the god of the sea and of earthquakes, and he was particularly associated with horses. And finally, Zeus, the god of the thunderbolt, was the king of the gods and often described as the father of gods and men. Just as Hera was the example of and the patron of matrons, her husband Zeus was the example of and the patron of the fathers who were in charge of families, and the kings who were in charge of societies. Sometimes the twelfth Olympian is Hestia, but more often the twelfth is Dionysus. Hestia was a goddess of the hearth and the home, and you can see her on the kylix on the slide. She often carries a scepter, a lamp, or a branch, and she is the one on the right of Zeus, on the other side of Ganymede. Dionysus, the other option for the twelfth Olympian, was a god of wine, of theatre, and of songs. The principal chthonic gods, on the other hand, are Hades and Persephone (also called Kore, and in Rome Proserpina), but many others live beneath the ground, including the Erinyes (also called the Eumenides or the Furies). Hades was a god of the underworld and of the dead. He ruled the land beneath the earth as his brother Zeus ruled the land above the earth and his 7 Pogorzelski other brother Poseidon ruled the sea that held the earth. Persephone was the wife of Hades and the queen of the underworld, and the two of them, Hades and Persephone, ruled over all the many gods and monsters that lived beneath the earth. And there were many more minor gods that show up in our sources all the time. If I were to go through and name them all, we wouldn’t have time for anything else. You’ve already seen the proliferation of gods in Hesiod’s Theogony. It’s hard to manage. But the first step is to get a handle on the most common names of the most major gods, and to start categorizing them by generation and dwelling place. I want to focus on that categorization by dwelling place, that is, the divide between Olympian and chthonic gods, because it’s a significant theme in our reading for this week, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. On Slide 5, it used to be common to think that worship of chthonic deities was more primitive. The idea was that there was a pre-Greek, earth-mother, matriarchal religion that we can see in the Minoan “snake goddess” and cults of Gaia or Ge, and that a patriarchal religion focused on the sky god took over in a later period. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the earth goddess Gaia or Ge existed before the sky god Ouranos, and this could potentially represent a shift in patterns of worship, beginning with Gaia and moving on to Ouranos. This is an attractive idea for proponents of patriarchy, since it associates progress and the advancement of civilization with the shift from worshipping a mother goddess to worshipping a father god. It can also be an attractive idea for feminists, since it gives priority to the matriarchal, mother goddess and presents an opportunity to reconstruct or recreate a feminine-focused religion that opposes the patriarchal one. But all the evidence we can find suggests that both the earth mother and the sky father have been around and coexisted with each other from the beginning of Greek religion and mythology, and neither the archaeological record nor the written one actually 8 Pogorzelski supports the idea of this kind of historical shift. There was always a duality. Another previously popular interpretation is psychological, associating the chthonic gods with deeper or more emotional aspects of the mind and the Olympian gods with reason, but this interpretation is also difficult to maintain. This kind of idea even gets associated with the topology of the human brain, as the unconscious, emotional aspects are said to be deep inside the brain, while the reasoning aspects of the mind are said to be located on the surface of the brain. Of course, Ancient Greek people had no idea about cognitive mapping, and Homer and other Greek authors associate emotional responses with the liver rather than the brain. Even thinking sometimes happens in the midriff or the guts in Greek mythology. But modern scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nevertheless built elaborate metaphors about the feminine earth goddesses being deep and uncontrollable emotions and masculine sky gods representing the light of reason that advances civilization, and they connected that with the idea of historical progress from mother goddess worship to sky god worship to suggest that civilized people should conquer primitive people just as masculine reason conquers feminine emotion. But just like the idea of historical progress from the primacy of chthonic gods to the primacy of Olympian ones, this idea doesn’t fit well with the sources. There is just as much irrational emotion in the stories of the Olympian gods as there is in the stories of the chthonic gods, and there are both masculine and feminine aspects of both groups as well. There are differences between emotion and reason—it’s just not possible to map those differences onto Greek mythology in a neat and straightforward distinction between chthonic and Olympian gods. On Slide 6, Demeter and Persephone are special cases in the division between Olympian and chthonic gods. Mostly Demeter is Olympian and Persephone is chthonic, but Persephone 9 Pogorzelski spends two thirds of her time on Olympus and Demeter is an earth goddess who also, as we see in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, takes special care of the dead. So, Demeter has some association with the underworld, and Persephone does with Olympus too. Both goddesses are somehow both Olympian and chthonic. We’ll see that when we look at passages from the hymn in the next part of this lecture, but before I do that I should introduce the Homeric Hymns more generally. The Homeric Hymns On Slide 7, one source for mythology that I haven’t yet talked about is the so-called Homeric Hymns. We have a collection of 33 poems in dactylic hexameter, which is the same meter that the Homeric epics use, and the one that Hesiod used. In antiquity these were sometimes attributed to Homer, but it’s clear to modern scholars that they were written by various authors in various time periods. They are only Homeric in the sense that they use the same meter. Each hymn is dedicated to and largely about a particular god. Some are as short as a few lines long, and others are as long as a few hundred lines. So, first of all, we have the words written out as poems, but they were songs in Ancient Greece. We don’t have the music, so we don’t know what they sounded like, and what they sounded like changed over time and from song to song. Eventually, they were performed in a kind of recitation accompanied by music, but not really sung, and some of them were probably written for that kind of performance. As for who wrote them, we really don’t know. Next semester, I’m going to talk about Homer and the so- called Homeric Question, which is, “Who the hell was Homer anyway?” A short version is that the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally over a long period of time by many bards, so they weren’t really written by a single author named Homer. The Homeric 10 Pogorzelski Hymns were written in the same meter as the Homeric epics, and they share some features of the style of Homeric epics, but they were composed in writing, each most likely by a single, anonymous author. They are also Homeric in the sense that in the Classical Period, people would memorize the Homeric epics and recite them, and at those recitations, they would also recite Homeric Hymns as prefaces to the parts of the epics they would recite. In an oral culture, where books were very expensive and reading was rare, that kind of recitation was a major way in which people experienced literature and stories. So the hymns were associated with the Homeric epics, but they weren’t written by Homer, if Homer even existed. The Homeric Hymns are great sources for Greek mythology for us. Each one is dedicated to a particular god. Sometimes the short ones just briefly introduce and praise the god, and we don’t learn a lot from them. The longer ones, though, like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, tell us stories about the gods, and often the hymn is our only source that tells that particular story. Even when we do have other sources that tell the same story, it’s often the case that the hymn is our oldest evidence of that story, and the other versions we have are developed from the version in the hymn. I’ve seen mythology course syllabuses that make the Homeric Hymns the main textbook for the course. I think that’s a little too limiting, but I can understand why some teachers make that choice. The hymns are a great source. On Slide 8, using linguistic evidence, most scholars date most of the Homeric Hymns to the late seventh or early 6th centuries BCE. They seem to have been written after the Iliad and the Odyssey, and also after Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. What I mean by that is that languages evolve over time, so sometimes it’s possible to guess at when a text was written by its linguistic features. You may have read some books that were written in the nineteenth century, or 11 Pogorzelski the early twentieth century. The translation of Apollodorus in the Loeb Classical Library is like a hundred years old. When you read it, you can tell it’s old. It uses particular words and phrases and styles that are no longer commonly in use. We can read the Homeric Hymns like that too when we read them in the original Greek. Some words and styles are particular to some time periods, so we can date texts by comparing their styles with other texts we know from the various periods of Greek history. That method is not perfect. Sometimes people deliberately write in an old-timey way, especially when they’re writing poetry that’s religious or mythological. Still, we can sometimes correct for that kind of archaism in texts, and we generally feel okay about the broad guesses we can make about when poems like the Homeric Hymns were composed, even though there is scholarly debate that places the poems in some wildly divergent time periods. Some of them, and these are usually short ones, appear to be very late, but the longer ones, like The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, look firmly like something in between the archaic language of Homer and Hesiod on the one hand and the classical language of things like Athenian tragedy on the other. So we feel pretty confident about a guess of the late seventh or early sixth century for most of the Homeric Hymns. The most commonly accepted theory of their original performance context is that they were prooimia (from which we get the English word “proem”) or prefaces to recitations of Homeric epic. This is, however, far from certain and not universally accepted. Even if this was their original function, it changed over time, and the shorter and longer poems are different enough that they may have always had different purposes. Often the Hymns begin and end with an invocation of the god and a statement that the poet or reciter will go on to sing a longer story. Ancient authors, like the classical Athenian historian Thucydides, call the Homeric Hymns 12 Pogorzelski prooimia. So, we have internal evidence from the poems themselves and external evidence from other, later ancient authors that this was the purpose of the Homeric Hymns. Appearances in ancient poetry can be deceiving, though, and in modern poetry too. These days, love songs can seem like they’re written for or to a particular person, but that person might not really exist at all, and really those songs are written for a broader audience than just that one person. So, we can’t always trust that what a poem tells us is its purpose is actually its purpose. And purposes change over time too. We no longer use the Homeric Hymns as prefaces or introductions to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Instead we use them as sources for mythology, which wasn’t really necessary in the sixth century BCE, when people knew the mythology anyway. When we read ancient sources, we’re always using them for purposes other than what their authors intended them for, and that doesn’t mean we’re reading them wrong. It’s just that in our historical period and cultural context, the poems are different and have different purposes. And that’s true within antiquity too. These poems are more than two thousand years old, and the way they got read and understood and used in the sixth century BCE was probably very different from the kind of scholarly attention they got in the third century BCE, three hundred years later. Antiquity is not monolithic or homogenous or the same in all times and places. But still, we do care about the original composition and the original purpose of the poems in a special way, and even though the Homeric Hymns were composed in different times by different people, it does seem likely that they were originally a kind of opening act at public performances of Homeric epic. Even though the original date of composition and the original performance context is important, it’s easy to fetishize that as the only correct way to read a text. We decide that what the author intended is the only thing that determines whether we’re reading correctly or not. I 13 Pogorzelski prefer a different way of thinking about the meaning of a text, and sometimes this is called “reception theory” or “reader-response theory.” I’ll talk a bit more about that around the end of next semester. For now, I’ll summarize by saying that whenever an author writes something, they write it in a particular cultural context that gives them what is sometimes called a “horizon of expectations.” Readers, sometimes thousands of years later, have a different cultural context and a different horizon of expectations. The meaning of a text gets produced in the space where those horizons meet, and this is sometimes called a fusion of horizons. These terms were originally made up in Germany, and I like the German word for that fusion, the Horizontverschmelzung. Any act of communication involves interpretation, and it involves both an originator and a receiver, and the communication happens in between them. The reason this is important for us is that it means that we cannot, in modern Canada, read myth like Ancient Greek people did. For us, it’s an ancient thing that attracts scholarly and historical interest, while in Ancient Greece, mythology was alive and present everywhere. We can try to understand what it must have been like to be an Ancient Greek person reading mythology, but that understanding is always going to be incomplete, and the very fact that we are standing outside trying to understand it means that Greek mythology is different for us. One of the things that Classical Studies professors do is to look not just at Ancient Greek texts in their original contexts, but also how those texts have been read and understood in different ways over time. So, for example, I’ll talk when we get to Ovid’s Metamorphoses about how that poem was different for medieval Christians than it was for Ancient Romans. And I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on how James Joyce used Classical mythology in his twentieth-century novel Ulysses. We call that kind of work “Classical Reception Studies,” and it’s an important part of the field of 14 Pogorzelski Classical Studies. It recognizes that how people understand things like Classical mythology changes over time and from place to place, and that texts are only meaningful if they’re meaningful to us in our own cultural context. I care about and want to know how the Homeric Hymns were used and understood in the sixth century BCE, but I also care about and want to know how the Homeric Hymns were used and understood in the nineteenth century CE, and I want to know how they’re different again for us now, because of course we use ancient texts in ways for which they were never intended. Whoever wrote the Homeric Hymns could not possibly have envisioned a twenty-first-century university course full of people who had lost the vast majority of knowledge about the Greek gods, and so those authors didn’t write the poems for us. Cicero didn’t write his courtroom speeches so we could use them as historical sources. He wrote them to persuade juries. But we use them as historical sources to learn about Ancient Rome, and rightly so. Mythology was never intended for us, but we learn it anyway, for our own interests and our own purposes, and I love that about mythology. I love reading against the grain and getting more out of a text than its author meant to put in it. On Slide 9, if you’re interested in more detail about all of the Homeric Hymns, you might look at The Homeric Hymns: Interpretative Essays (2011), edited by Andrew Faulkner. For a more detailed and original approach, Jenny Stauss Clay’s The Politics of Olympus (1989) is still the best. The main argument of that book is that the longer Homeric Hymns, like the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, but also including the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus, are stories that help to organize the social order and the political relationships between the Olympians. So, if we read the narrative hymns together, we get a story that helps us to see how the Olympian gods related to each other, because none of these stories has only one 15 Pogorzelski character. The god that each hymn is dedicated to is the main character, but they interact with the other gods all the time, and we get to see how they do that. The title of the book, The Politics of Olympus, is about how the hymns show us not just that Zeus is in charge and everyone else is subordinate, and not just that this god is in charge of this area or natural force, but also how the different powers of the gods interact with each other and how the different gods contest the spheres of influence of other gods. They’re always pushing at each other about who is in charge of what and who has what rights and authority. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is all about Demeter demanding her rights and using her power to contest the authority of other gods. We don’t get that kind of conflict story in this kind of detail from a lot of sources. Mythographers like Apollodorus just give us the bare bones of the characters and plot points. Poets like Homer give us only little snippets of stories about the gods embedded in stories that are mainly about heroes. The Homeric Hymns are a rare source that puts the gods as characters in focus and shows us their struggles. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter 16 Pogorzelski On Slide 10, the hymn I asked you to read for this week is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is one of the longer ones. It not only enumerates Demeter’s powers, but it tells a story. We have no idea who wrote it, but it wasn’t Homer. Linguistic analysis suggests it was likely written after the Homeric epics and Hesiodic poems. It deals with a cult known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, but it doesn’t mention Athens, and since Athens took firm control over the cult in the middle of the sixth century BCE during the tyranny of Peisistratus, the poem was probably written before then. It would have been very difficult after Peisistratus to write about the Eleusinian Mysteries without mentioning Athens, and since this poem does have some stuff about the Eleusinian Mysteries (and I’ll talk more about them in a few minutes) without mentioning Athens, that gives us a good, general guess about the date when it was composed. You can see on this slide an image of a statue of Demeter: 17 Pogorzelski Roman 2nd century CE copy of a Greek original of the late 5th or the early 4th century BCE. Demeter. sculpture. Place: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin--Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Antikensammlung, https://library.artstor.org/asset/ BERLIN_DB_10312563309. And on Slide 11, you can see the list of five important pieces of information about the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. The author is unknown, the title is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the date is probably in the late seventh or early sixth century BCE, the location is Greece (but we can’t be any more specific than that), and the language is Greek. Slide 12 is the first in a series of slides that show passages from the text, and for the next part of the lecture, I’m going to read those passages and do a little analysis. As always, this is meant to model how to read and analyze ancient, mythological texts, with the idea that you can then use that model to read this and other texts yourself. If you want to develop that skill, and I think it’s totally worth developing, you will need to practice it by doing the reading assignments. 18 Pogorzelski The more of any kind of text you read, the easier it gets to read that kind of text. Anyway, the passage on the slide is the beginning of the poem, lines 1 to 14, on page 33: Of Demeter the lovely-haired, the august goddess first I sing, of her and her slender- ankled daughter, whom Aïdoneus seized by favor of heavy-booming, wide-sounding Zeus as she frolicked, away from Demeter of the golden sword and resplendent fruit, with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean, picking flowers across the soft meadow, roses and saffron and lovely violets, iris and hyacinth, and narcissus, that Earth put forth as a snare for the maiden with eyes like buds by the will of Zeus, as a favor to the Hospitable One. It shone wondrously, an aweinspiring thing to see both for the immortal gods and for mortal men. From its root a hundred heads grew out, and a perfumed odor; the whole broad sky above and the whole earth smiled, and the salty swell of the sea. The first line of the poem tells us that it’s not just about Demeter, but really about Demeter and her daughter, who is sometimes called Kore and sometimes called Persephone. The two goddesses often form a pair, and sometimes they’re called by that name, “the two” or “the pair.” I can’t resist a quick side note about Ancient Greek grammar that’s relevant here. In English, we have two numbers: singular and plural. “One house” is singular, and “many houses” is plural. Ancient Greek has three numbers. Instead of just adding an “s” to make a noun plural, Ancient Greek had one form for when there was one house, a different form for when there were two houses, and then a different form for when there were three or more houses. By the Archaic Period, the use of the so-called dual number was already mostly old-fashioned and not used except in special cases. Things that come in pairs use the dual, so two hands or two eyes, but not really ever things like two houses. For houses and almost everything else, two things used the 19 Pogorzelski plural number, just like in English. But natural pairs used the dual, and these two goddesses, Demeter and Kore, are often described in Ancient Greek as the two goddesses using the dual number. That means they form a natural pair, like two eyes or two hands. This poem is about the one of them, Demeter, but because they’re so closely linked, it’s also about the two of them. The name “Kore” means “maiden” or “young woman,” and even though she is the dread queen of the underworld, the prominence of the story told in this poem means that she is always associated with youth and often represented as a young woman. We also learn at the very beginning of the poem that the story we are going to hear is the story of the rape of Persephone by Hades. “Aïdoeus” is the name the beginning of the poem gives to Hades. Now, some people will tell you this isn’t really a story of rape, and I want to correct that right at the beginning. The idea is that the Greek marriage ritual was a representation of a man, the groom, taking a woman, the bride, away from her father’s house to his own. Our modern, Western marriage ritual has a version of this, as a father walks his daughter down the aisle and hands her over to another man who will be her husband. Here, the poem tells us that Zeus, who is Persephone’s father, granted his favor to Hades to take Persephone to his home to be his wife. So Hades went to Zeus and asked his permission to marry Zeus’ daughter, and Zeus granted that permission, so Hades went to Persephone and took her to his house. The Earth, Gaia, was even involved. She put forth beautiful flowers to attract and distract Persephone so she wouldn’t see Hades coming and run away from him. Gaia did this as a favor to Zeus and Hades, whom the poem calls “the Hospitable One,” because we will all be guests in the house of Hade one day. So Zeus has granted Hades permission to marry his daughter. It’s all legal and in accordance with custom. This isn’t rape, some people say, but just an arranged marriage. I’m unconvinced for a couple of 20 Pogorzelski reasons. The first is that the language is clear that Hades seizes Persephone, and the story makes it clear that this is both a surprise to her and against her will. And what is Hades going to do with his unwilling wife except force her into sex she doesn’t want? So, I don’t think it’s a misnomer to call this, as most people do, the rape of Persephone. Another objection I sometimes hear to the characterization of this story as a story of rape is that the word that the name comes from is the Latin word rapio, rapere, which just means “to seize” or “to take,” and it can apply to picking up any object. It doesn’t necessarily mean “rape” in the sense of the English word. And in archaic English, it is possible to use the word “rape” in the sense of the Latin rapere, just to mean “take.” Readers apply the archaic name of the story in a way that, supposedly incorrectly, implies the modern English word “rape” by an accident of etymology. So some people say that the name is an archaic one in which the “rape” of Persephone is just the act of picking her up and taking her away without the implication of sexual assault. I don’t buy that either. Neither Ancient Greek nor Latin had a word for “rape” in the sense of sexual assault. There just wasn’t a word in either language that corresponded to the modern English word. That doesn’t mean Ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t understand the concept, and there are various ways Ancient Greek and Roman authors used to describe the act of rape and the lack of consent involved. A lot of the time, it’s not clear to us in mythological texts whether an act is sex or rape, because the text doesn’t specify whether there’s consent or not. And I think the frequency with which mythological stories just don’t care about whether there’s consent or not is really disturbing. There are a lot of times when we read an ancient text and we just can’t tell whether someone is consenting to sex or not because the author doesn’t really care to specify one way or the other. But there are Ancient Greek and Latin expressions 21 Pogorzelski that do specify rape, and these are usually verbs like “seize” or “take” or “constrain” with or without a longer phrase explaining that the victim did not consent. Often the addition is something like “by force” or “by violence,” indicating that the rapist has physically overpowered his victim. The verb “to seize” here, which in Greek is “ἥρπαξεν” from “ἁρπάζω,” which means “seize” or “snatch” or “take,” is one of the standard Greek verbs for “rape,” and it’s coupled with very clear statements throughout the story that Persephone was not willing to go along with it, including a “by force” in the passage on the next slide. Persephone had to be tricked into this so- called marriage by being lured into the loveliest meadow of flowers the Earth could produce, and then seized by force. Zeus has agreed to this and set it up, and Hades wants it, but Persephone, along with Demeter, objects. This is a story about the injustice of the rape of Persephone, and how Demeter holds her ground against Zeus and refuses to let him excuse Hades and refuses to let Zeus decide whether or not it’s okay for Hades to rape Persephone. That shows that even though the Greek mythological world is a patriarchal one that often doesn’t care about whether a person consents to sex, it’s also a world that recognizes the injustice of that state of affairs, and we’ll see this poem giving powerful voice to that resistance. I want to digress briefly about the name “the Hospitable One” for Hades. We have this view of the underworld as a bad place, and it is, but our view is too often influenced by the idea that when good people die, their souls go up to heaven and live forever in the presence of God, and that when evil people die, their souls go down to Hell to be tortured by the Devil. That’s not really how Hades works. It’s hard to say exactly how Hades does work, because in different versions of different myths, it works differently. Sometimes, great heroes don’t go to the underworld, but cross the sea to the west where they live forever on the Isles of the Blessed, and 22 Pogorzelski other times they go to the underworld like anybody else. Sometimes, Herakles becomes a god and goes to live as an immortal on Olympus, but other times his shade is in the underworld. Sometimes, within the underworld there are different areas, some for good people and some for evil people. The Fields of Elysium are for the virtuous, and Tartarus is where the evil go to be tortured. Sisyphus is in Tartarus rolling his rock up the hill and having it roll back down over and over, and Tantalus is there standing in a pool of water that recedes every time he tries to take a drink, and under a fruit tree with branches that take the fruit just out of his reach every time he tries to get some food. But Hades is not some evil torturer of evil souls. He is the natural and inevitable force of death—not something to be celebrated, but not something evil, either. He is wealthy, because everything belongs to him in the end, and he is here hospitable, because he welcomes everyone to his home. The underworld is a dark and dreary place without the sun, but it's not exactly Hell. Slide 13 picks up where the last slide left off, showing us lines 15 to 29 on pages 33 to 35: In amazement she [Persephone] reached out with both hands to take the pretty plaything [the most beautiful flower ever]. But the broad-wayed earth gaped open on the plain of Nysa, and there the Hospitable Lord [that is, Hades] rushed forth with his immortal steeds, Kronos’ son whose names are many. Seizing her by force, he began to drive her off on his golden chariot, with her wailing and screaming as she called on her father Zeus, the highest and noblest. But no one heard her voice, none of the immortals or of mortal men, nor yet the olive trees with their resplendent fruit—except that Perses’ daughter still innocent of heart, Hecate of the glossy veil, heard from her cave, and so did the lord 23 Pogorzelski Helios, Hyperion’s resplendent son, as the maiden called on her father Zeus: he, however, was seated apart, away from the gods, in his prayerful temple, receiving fine offerings from mortals. This passage is just heartbreaking. A girl goes to play among the flowers in the meadow that her grandmother, Gaia, has set up for her, and when a chariot drives by and without a word a man grabs her, she screams for her father to protect her. Her father, however, has not only assented to this, but arranged with her grandmother for her to be vulnerable and left alone for Hades to grab. And on top of that, he’s left the area and gotten distracted by receiving sacrifices from mortals, so he doesn’t even hear her screams. He set the whole thing up and then went away to do the immortal equivalent of watching TV, not even bothering to care what’s happening. And, by the way, Hades is Zeus’ brother—they’re both sons of Cronus and Rhea—so that makes Zeus’ daughter Persephone also Hades’ niece—he’s her uncle. But, as I’ve mentioned in a previous lecture, incest is standard practice among the gods. I just bring it up here because it’s all the more horrifying that this is happening within a family, and I don’t think we can brush away how horrifying this is. There are two gods who do see what’s happening and hear Persephone’s screams. One of these is the sun, Helios, who sees everything. He’s like a giant, round eye in the sky. Here he is the son of Hyperion, who is also a sun god, but Helios is the most commonly named sun god. Apollo is the Olympian god who is most closely associated with the sun, but for whatever reason, the Titan is the one who sticks as the sun in Greek mythology. The sun is not the only one who sees what’s going on. A goddess named Hecate also sees it and hears Persephone’s cries. We don’t know as much as we’d like to about Hecate, but she’s an interesting goddess. She is often 24 Pogorzelski referred to in vague ways. We’ve already seen her in Hesiod’s Theogony, where she’s a powerful goddess with domain over both the earth and the sky, making her both heavenly and chthonic. But the Theogony doesn’t really specify how that is or what exactly her powers are. It doesn’t tell us any stories about her. Later, in Roman mythology and in later Greek mythology, Hecate is a goddess of the crossroads, especially the triple crossroads, where three roads meet. It’s a place of encounters and meetings. It’s a liminal space of transitions. Her powers are control over witchcraft and spellcasting, and when sorcerers try to do things like make rivers reverse their flows or make love potions or curse enemies, they draw on the power of Hecate. It’s not clear whether those associations are already active in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, or what exactly this version of Hecate is like. The poem tells us that she is innocent and wears a veil, and that’s about it. Slide 14 picks up where we left off, now lines 30 to 46 on page 35: So, despite her resistance, her father’s brother was carrying her off by Zeus’ design, the Major General, the Hospitable One, Kronos’ son whose names are many, with his immortal steeds. Now so long as the goddess could still see the earth and the starry sky and the strong-flowing fishy sea and the light of the sun, and yet expected to see her good mother again and the families of gods who are for ever, so long her great mind had the comfort of hope, despite her distress. The mountain peaks and the sea deeps rang with the sound of her divine voice; and her lady mother heard it, and a sharp pain seized her heart, and the veil over her ambrosial locks tore apart under her hands. Throwing a dark covering over her shoulders, she sped like a bird over land and water in her search. But 25 Pogorzelski there was no one prepared to tell her the truth, either of gods or mortals, nor did any of the birds come to her with reliable news. Persephone resists and she continues to cry out as long as she and Hades are still above ground and she can see the sky, and eventually her mother, Demeter, hears her voice resounding. And when Demeter hears her daughter’s distress, she immediately goes looking for her, flying over the land like a bird, and she asks everyone she meets, the gods, the mortals, and the birds, where Persephone is, but nobody will help her. I think this isolation is important. Persephone cried out for her father to protect her, and he was indifferent to her. Her mother hears her, and she tries to help, but she can’t get anyone to help her. The text says that nobody will tell her the truth. That’s not just everybody not knowing what’s going on—that’s everybody deliberately deciding to help the perpetrator of a sexual assault by refusing to act as a witness for the victim. Demeter here feels like the whole world is against her, and she’s right that the cultural system of Ancient Greece was set up to make this kind of assault happen. Zeus and Gaia and Hades all actively conspired to deceive Persephone and then Zeus and Gaia look away and abandon her to Hades, and all of the bystanders in the world just shrug their shoulders and lie about it. When mythological texts don’t care whether sex is consensual or not, that’s a sign that the broader culture is doing that. Everyone is reading about what may or may not be rape, and they’re shrugging their shoulders and not caring. But in this story, which is an old story and a fundamental one in Greek mythology, one person does care. Persephone is not alone because her mother is going to do everything she can do to help her, even if everyone else in the world is against them. And we’ll see that even though Demeter’s resistance is not 100% successful, it’s not 100% useless or futile either. 26 Pogorzelski So Demeter, unable to find Persephone but knowing she’s in trouble, goes to Helios, who sees everything, and asks him to help her. On Slide 15, page 37, she says: “Helios, have regard for me, if ever I have gladdened your heart either by word or deed. The maiden I bore, my sweet sprig, with looks to be proud of—I heard her voice loud through the fathomless air as if she was being taken by force, but I did not see it. You, however, look down from the sky with your rays over the whole earth and sea: so tell me truly if perchance you have seen who it is, of gods or mortals, that has taken her away from me by force against her will and gone off with her.” Demeter is as clear as she can be that her daughter has been raped, and she’s asking for help in finding her. And Helios’ reply is on Slide 16, pages 37-39: So she spoke, and Hyperion’s son answered, “Daughter of lovely-haired Rhea, lady Demeter, you shall know, for I greatly revere you, and I pity you in your sorrow over your slender-ankled child. No other of the immortals is to blame but the cloud-gatherer Zeus, who has given her to Hades, his own brother, to be known as his buxom wife. He seized her, and was taking her on his chariot down to the misty darkness, while she screamed loudly. So goddess, end your loud lamenting; there is no call for you to rage for ever like this to no purpose. Aïdoneus, the Major General, is not an unsuitable son-in-law to have among the gods, your own brother, of the same seed. As for privileges, he has the portion he was allotted originally in the threefold division; he dwells among those whose ruler he was allotted to be.” In this passage, Helios’ reply to Demeter is that Persephone’s rapist is a good guy, so it’s all okay and Demeter shouldn’t be upset. He explains that Zeus assented to this, and that Persephone’s 27 Pogorzelski honor is intact, because this isn’t happening outside of marriage. Persephone doesn’t need to be ashamed because she hasn’t had sex before marriage, and every woman should want to be with the husband she’s now got. Hades is a powerful king, the brother of Zeus. In fact, Hades could very well have been the king of the gods. The three brothers, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots, which means they chose randomly, who would control the realms of the sky, the sea, and the underworld, and it was only by chance that Hades became the king of the underworld instead of the king of Olympus. So of course Persephone should be happy to be married to Hades, and Demeter should be proud of and happy with her new son-in-law. Helios doesn’t seem to understand that there’s anything wrong with this. And there are a lot of people out there now who will take that as evidence for the idea that this kind of forced marriage was totally fine in Ancient Greek culture, and we shouldn’t judge the Ancient Greeks by the moral standards of our own time. Judging by the standards of his own time and culture, Hades really is an upstanding guy and he’s not doing anything wrong. But the existence of this poem is a powerful argument against that, because even though Helios expresses the idea that Demeter shouldn’t be upset, she doesn’t give up her anger. Her voice is the most powerful one in the poem, and even though everyone else tells her that Hades is a good guy, and she shouldn’t be upset, she refuses to listen to them, even alone in the world. Everyone is rallying around the perpetrator, and Persephone and Demeter, who are kept isolated from each other, feel that isolation and aloneness, but they refuse to give up. And I don’t think I’m reading modern morals anachronistically into an ancient text. Everything I’m saying is right there in the passages we’re reading. Helios’ point of view, that there’s nothing bad happening here, is there, but it’s overwhelmed Demeter’s view and by the sympathy the poem expresses for that view. 28 Pogorzelski I don’t think it’s just Helios that thinks this way about this story. I’ve played the video game Hades, and in that game, Persephone explains that she really did want to be with Hades all along, but it was a forbidden love and a way to escape her oppressive family on Olympus. In the wake of that game, I’ve seen memes on the internet expressing the idea that Hades was a good husband. He never cheated on Persephone, and he made her queen of the underworld. Meanwhile, her father Zeus cheated on his wife all the time, frequently without the consent of his victims, and was generally an asshole to Hera as well as the goddesses, women, and boys he raped, keeping them all in line by violence and the threat of violence. So the supposedly good one in the sky is really bad and the supposedly bad one in the underworld is really good. And it’s not just in the game, either. There are modern versions of the story out there that make this into a love story between Hades and Persephone, sometimes along the lines of Beauty and the Beast, where he’s intimidating and scary at first, but actually he’s a sweetheart and a gentle giant and a powerful protector. And like anybody, I like love stories, including stories on that model, but I can’t help but be disturbed by those ones about Hades and Persephone because it seems too much like what Helios is saying here. It takes a story that in its oldest and most powerful version is a story about the injustice of rape, and it erases that injustice to make it into a much happier and more comfortable story. It makes me feel like I’m one of the people who lies to Demeter about what’s happening, or one of the people like Helios who says that Hades is a good guy and actually Persephone must be happy to be married to him now. I know there’s no one, single, authoritative version of a story, but this one is just so powerful for me that I can’t help but feel like it’s wrong to rewrite it in that radical way. 29 Pogorzelski In the version of the story in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Demeter does not believe Helios, and instead she decides to protest not just what Hades is doing, but what all the gods are doing by being complicit with Hades. We can see her resistance on Slide 17, pages 39 -41: Then in her anger at the dark-cloud son of Kronos she turned away from the gods’ assembly and long Olympus, and for a long time she travelled to the communities of men and their rich farmlands, effacing her beauty, and no man or deep-girt woman looking upon her knew who she was, until the time when she came to the house of wise Keleos, who was then the ruler of fragrant Eleusis. She had sat down at the roadside, sick at heart, at the Maiden’s Well, from where the people of the community used to draw water; she was in the shade, with a bushy olive growing overhead, and she looked like an ancient crone, debarred from motherhood and the blessings of garland-loving Aphrodite: a woman like those that are nurses to the children of lawgiver kings, or housekeepers in their bustling mansions. In this passage, Demeter is angry at Zeus, who is the dark-could son of Kronos, and so she turns away from the gods and withdraws from Olympus. She leaves and disguises herself as an old woman, a crone. That’s interesting, because Demeter is a goddess of grain, of the harvest, of fertility, and she deliberately makes herself into an infertile woman. The poem tells us that she looks like someone debarred from motherhood and from the blessings of Aphrodite—she’s too old to be fertile. It’s not explicit in this passage, but it will be later that when Demeter is not fertile, the grain does not grow. Her fertility is the fertility of the earth, and so her giving up Aphrodite, that is giving up sexual love, and making herself into a post-menopausal crone, she is refusing to perform her divine duties. Instead, she just takes a long walk and grieves. Eventually, 30 Pogorzelski sick at heart, she just sits down in the shade by the side of the road. He anger has become depression, and he refusal to do her job as a protest now merges with an inability to do her job because of her grief. The town where Demeter gives up and sits down is called Eleusis, and it was a real town not far from Athens. From the Archaic Period all the way to the Later Roman Empire, Eleusis was home to one of the most popular and influential cults in Greece, the so-called Eleusinian Mysteries. Now, I should be clear that when I say “cult,” I don’t mean it in the negative sense that the word usually has now. Ancient Greece had many gods and many heroes, and the particular traditions around worshipping any one god or hero is called a cult. It comes from the same root as the word “cultivate.” It’s just how Ancient Greek or Roman people worshipped any one particular god. And people could participate in multiple cults. Just because you were a participant or initiate in one cult didn’t mean you couldn’t also be a participant or initiate in several other cults as well. In this case, the Eleusinian Mysteries were a mystery cult, which means that only the people who had been initiated into the cult were allowed to know what the rituals were, and the secret rituals worshipped Demeter and Kore or Persephone. So what’s about to happen in Eleusis in the story is also an etiological origin story for the cult, that Demeter came to Eleusis and taught the people there the proper rituals for worshipping her. In the poem, Demeter goes to Eleusis and she sits down by the well where the women collect water in the morning. She looks like an old woman who might be a childcare worker, that is a nurse, or a housekeeper in a rich person’s house. So the women see her there, and among them are the daughters of Keleos, the king in Eleusis. They say that she could work in one of their houses, or the house of their father. Keleos and Metaneira, as it happens, have an infant son 31 Pogorzelski named Demophon, who was born when Metaneira was getting old and her fertility was waning, so he’s a cause for special celebration in the house. And so Demeter ends up getting a job as a nanny in the royal house of Eleusis, taking care of the infant prince. But Demeter is, of course, in disguise this whole time, and she gives her name as “Dos,” which our translator, West, translates as “Bounty,” but it could also mean “Gift.” Even though Demeter is in disguise, and even though she is wretched in her grief, she is still a goddess and she still looks awesome. Slide 18, page 47, shows her arriving at Metaneira’s house: Then Demeter stepped onto the threshold: her head reached to the rafter, and she filled the doorway with divine radiance. The queen was seized by awe and reverence and sallow fear; she gave up her couch for her, and invited her to sit down. But Demeter, bringer of resplendent gifts in season, did not want to be seated on the gleaming couch, but stood in silence, her lovely eyes downcast, until dutiful Iambe set a jointed stool for her and laid a shining white fleece over it. There she sat, holding her veil before her face, and for a long time she remained there on the seat in silent sorrow. She greeted no one with word or movement, but sat there unsmiling, tasting neither food nor drink, pining for her deep-girt daughter, until at last dutiful Iambe with ribaldry and many a jest diverted the holy lady so that she smiled and laughed and became benevolent—Iambe who ever since has found favor with her moods. Demeter, who is the new nanny, nevertheless shines with divine radiance so that the queen is in awe and invites her to come sit on the couch. Demeter is still really sad and angry, so she just stands there and looks all sad, until Iambe, who is a loyal servant of the house, tells so many 32 Pogorzelski dirty jokes that even Demeter has to laugh. Interestingly, Iambe is the root of the word “iambus,” which is a metrical foot that is the basis of, among other meters, iambic pentameter, the meter Shakespeare used. In Ancient Greek poetry, iambic poetry is often funny, and it’s also often abusive and coarse or sexual. It’s dirty jokes and insults. The name of the woman is a little etiology of the type of poetry. Once Demeter’s bad mood has been softened with jokes, Metaneira offers Demeter some wine, but she refuses. This is on Slide 19, page 49: Metaneira filled a cup with honey-sweet wine and offered it to her. But she declined, saying that it was not proper for her to drink red wine; she told her to mix barley and water with the graceful pennyroyal and give it to her to drink. So she made the kykeon and gave it to the goddess, as she requested, and the lady Deo took it for custom’s sake and... The reason the passage breaks off here is because there’s a problem with the text. There’s some damage to the manuscript at this point, and so there’s a gap in the poem where we don’t have the text. But what we do have makes it clear that Demeter refuses wine and instead instructs Metaneira in how to make a special drink called the kykeon out of barley and water and pennyroyal, which the initiates drank at the Eleusinian Mysteries. What I find most interesting about that drink is that it contains pennyroyal. Pennyroyal is an herb that in Ancient Greek medicine was used as an abortifacient, that is to say that it causes abortions. I want to emphasize that you should not try this at home. Pennyroyal is toxic, it can cause liver damage, and in large doses it can be fatal. In smaller doses, it can cause nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Nevertheless, it tastes kind of like mint and people can and do use it as an herb to flavor cooking. 33 Pogorzelski It can also be used, apparently, as an insecticide. Anyway, it has been for centuries a folk method of inducing abortion. I first learned about it when I was a kid from the Nirvana song, “Pennyroyal Tea,” in which some of the lyrics are “Sit and drink pennyroyal tea, to still the life that’s inside of me.” The relevance here is that drinking pennyroyal is part of Demeter’s plan to suppress her fertility. She has disguised herself as an old woman who is too old to have children and she drinks this tea that makes sure she won’t have any children. Doing this is how she protests by refusing to fulfill her role as the fertility goddess who brings forth food plants from the earth. Even though she herself is no longer fertile, she can take care of the infant Demophon, and because she’s a goddess, she’s going to do that in a weird goddess way. On Slide 20, page 51: With these words she took him into her fragrant bosom and immortal arms, and his mother was delighted. So she proceeded to rear in the mansion wise Keleos’ resplendent son Demophon, whom fair-girt Metaneira had borne, and he grew like a divine being, though he ate no food and sucked no Demeter would anoint him with ambrosia, as if he were the son of a god, breathing her sweet breath over him as she held him in her bosom, while each night she would hide him away in the burning fire, like a brand, without his dear parents’ knowledge. To them it was a great wonder how precociously he flourished; he was like the gods to behold. Demeter doesn’t feed Demophon any food or give him any milk to drink. Instead she anoints him with ambrosia, which is the food of the immortal gods. The gods eat ambrosia and drink nectar. And even though she doesn’t feed him, the ambrosia makes him grow strong, and she 34 Pogorzelski burns away his mortality by putting him in the fire every night, like he’s a log. Apparently, it’s a long process to burn away mortality like this, because she has to keep doing it every night. This is a passage that has some brackets in it, and I want to take a moment to explain what those brackets mean. I’ve already talked about how when there are problems with the text because the manuscripts are damaged or corrupted with copying mistakes, editors use brackets to indicate how they’re trying to fix things. Our editor for this text is West, and West uses these pointed brackets here in this passage. What that means is that there’s a small gap or problem with the text, and West has written his own supplement. He’s made something up that makes sense in the context and might be what the author wrote, but he puts it in pointed brackets to indicate that he's the one who wrote it. He uses square brackets for when he’s using a supplement or emendation that a different editor has proposed, and he uses curly brackets for when there’s some text in the manuscript that he thinks shouldn’t be there and should be deleted. On Slide 21, page 51: Indeed she would have made him ageless and deathless, if in her folly fair-girt Metaneira had not waited for the nighttime and spied from her fragrant chamber: she shrieked and clapped her two thighs in alarm for her son, for she was greatly misled, and she addressed him with winged words of lament: “Demophon my child, the visitor is hiding you away in the blazing fire, causing me groaning and grief.” In this passage, Metaneira walks in on Demeter putting Demophon in the fire and she freaks out. Our poet is maybe not the best at writing naturalistic dialogue, and I can’t help but laugh at my imagination of this scene in a movie, but the point is clear enough anyway. Metaneira freaks out, and she can’t even do anything. Her daughters show up and pull Demophon out of the fire, and 35 Pogorzelski in doing so they unwittingly prevent Demophon from becoming immortal. Oh well. That probably wasn’t a great idea anyway. So Metaneira fires the nanny, and Demeter responds by explaining who she is and what she was doing. On Slide 22, pages 53-55, she says: “Ignorant humans and witless to recognize a dispensation of coming good or ill! You are another one irremediably misled by your folly. For may the implacable Water of Shuddering [the Styx] on which the gods swear their oaths be my witness, I would have made your dear son deathless and ageless for ever, and granted him unfading privilege; but now there is no way he can avoid death and mortality. Yet a privilege unfading shall always be his, because he came onto my lap and slept in my arms: in his honor, at the due season of the revolving years, the sons of the Eleusinians shall evermore make battle and affray among themselves. For I am Demeter the honored one, who is the greatest boon and joy to immortals and mortals. Now, let the whole people build me a great temple with an altar below it, under the citadel’s sheer wall, above Kallichoron, where the hill juts out. As to the rites, I myself will instruct you on how in future you can propitiate me with holy performance.” Demeter gets fired, and she’s super angry about it, and so she reveals her true identity. She tells the Eleusinians to build a great temple for her, and she says that she will instruct them in the proper rituals for worshipping her. Some of those rituals will remain secret, but she says at least one of them here. There’s going to be a big mock battle in the name of Demophon. There will be other rituals too, but she teaches them to the Eleusinians off screen, so we readers don’t get to learn about them. They’re secret. I can’t help but imagine this scene as Mary Poppins getting 36 Pogorzelski fired for endangering the children, but then she reveals herself as a dread goddess and demands that everyone build a big temple and worship her. Anyway, now that her adventure in Eleusis has ended and her disguise is gone, Demeter turns her protest into a simpler and more serious one. She just stops allowing the crops to grow. This is her special power and it’s the only way she can make an effective protest. On Slide 23, page 57: The most dreadful and abominable year she made it for mankind across the nurturing earth. The land allowed nothing sown to come up, for fair-garlanded Demeter kept it hidden. Many were the bent ploughs that the oxen dragged in vain over the fields, and much the white barley seed that fell into the soil without result. Indeed, she would have destroyed humankind altogether by grievous famine, and deprived the Olympians of their honorific privileges and their sacrifices, had Zeus not taken notice, and counselled with his heart. As a first step he sent gold-winged Iris to summon Demeter the lovely-haired, whose form is beautiful. Demeter makes her protest, in part because she is angry at Hades and Zeus and at the whole world for enabling them, and in part because she’s sad and tired and alone. The crops don’t grow, and humans start to die. Zeus gets upset at this, not because he feels responsibility toward the humans and wants to keep them alive, but because without healthy humans, he doesn’t get sacrifices. He wants people to sacrifice to him and he wants to savor the sweet smoke of the burning fat. When gods take a break from their jobs or they relax away from Olympus, they go visit some sacrifices and breathe the smoke. So when Demeter exercises her power over her province of the fertility of the earth and the gods can’t do that anymore, Zeus sends the 37 Pogorzelski messenger, Iris. I’ve talked about how Hermes is the messenger of the gods, but often when a goddess or a woman is involved, either as the sender or the receiver of the message, the messenger isn’t Hermes, but is instead Iris, the rainbow. So Iris tells Demeter Zeus wants to meet with her. The meeting doesn’t go well. Zeus says, “Hey, I want some sacrifices, so do your job and make the crops grow, please.” And Demeter says, “I’m angry and I’m grieving and you suck, so no.” Zeus isn’t giving up, though. He enlists the help of all the gods, and he sends them all to try to convince Demeter to save the humans. This is on Slide 24, pages 57-59: Next the Father sent all the blessed eternal gods, one after another: they went in turn to summon her, offering many resplendent gifts, the choice of whatever privileges she wanted among the immortals. But none was able to bend her will, angry in heart as she was, and she firmly rejected their speeches. She said she would never set foot on fragrant Olympus, or allow the earth’s fruit to come up, until she set eyes on her fair-faced daughter. One by one the gods all offer Demeter gifts and privileges. They honor her and acknowledge that she is powerful and that her strike is effective, but she only wants one thing, and that is for Persephone to come back to her. So, Zeus relents. He sends Hermes to Hades to ask Hades to send Persephone back to Demeter. Here’s Slide 25, page 59: When heavy-booming, wide-sounding Zeus heard that, he sent the gold-wand Argus- slayer to the Lower Darkness to persuade Hades with soft words and bring chaste Persephone out from the misty dark to the daylight to join the gods, so that her mother 38 Pogorzelski might set eyes on her and cease from her wrath. Hermes did not demur, but straightway left the seat of Olympus and sped down under the recesses of the earth. He found its lord within his mansions, seated on his couch with his modest consort, who was full of resistance from longing for her mother … [unintelligible] … The Argus-slayer is Hermes, and when he goes to Hades with Zeus’ message, he finds Persephone being polite and acting properly, but still resisting Hades and still wanting to go back home. Zeus sends Hermes to persuade Hades with soft words, and Hades is persuaded. He obeys the command of Zeus. Interestingly, the Ancient Greek word for “obey” is “to be persuaded.” Here’s Slide 26, page 61: So he spoke; and the lord of those below, Aïdoneus, smiled with his brows, but did not demur from the command of Zeus the king. Quickly he told wise Persephone: “Go, Persephone, to your dark-robed mother’s side, keeping a gentle temper in your heart, and be not too excessively aggrieved. I shall not make you an unsuitable husband to have among the gods, own brother to your father Zeus; by being here, you will be mistress of everything that lives and moves, and have the greatest privileges among the immortals, while there will ever be punishment for those who act unrighteously and fail to propitiate your fury with sacrifices, in holy performance, making the due offerings.” So he spoke, and prudent Persephone was delighted, and promptly jumped up in joy. But he gave her a honeysweet pomegranate seed to eat, surreptitiously, peering about him, to prevent her from staying up there for ever with reverend Demeter of the dark robe. 39 Pogorzelski In this passage, Hades obeys the command of Zeus, but he doesn’t do so perfectly. He resists in two ways. First, he tries to persuade Persephone to stay and be his wife willingly. He uses the same argument that Helios used to try to convince Demeter not to be angry. He says, “Hey, I’m a good guy, and I’m super powerful and rich and I’d be a good husband. If you stay you’ll be a queen and lots of people will make sacrifices to you, and the people who don’t sacrifice to you will be punished horribly. Doesn’t that sound like a good life? Why wouldn’t anyone want to marry me?” But there’s no question in Persephone’s mind, and no hesitation. As soon as she’s allowed to leave, she jumps up and takes off. She has never wanted to be here. Hades, however, isn’t done resisting the command of Zeus. Having failed to persuade Persephone to stay, he tricks her. He gives her a pomegranate surreptitiously. He’s being sneaky about this. He knows that if she eats the food of the underworld, she will be compelled to stay even against her will and there will be nothing anybody can do about it. Apparently, this is a law of nature that even the most powerful gods cannot disregard. It seems weird to me, and it’s kind of a crazy plot device, but in the world of the story, it’s how things work. What’s important here, I think, is not the iron law of nature that says that if you eat the food of the underworld you have to stay there, but that Hades deliberately and with deceptive intention gives Persephone food to eat. Persephone has rejected him, and he decides that he won’t take no for an answer. Zeus himself has said he has to give her up, and he still won’t do it. She says no to him, and so he looks around to make sure nobody is looking and he slips her a few seeds that he knows will make her unable to leave. And then there’s a problem with the manuscript and we lose the text briefly. We pick up on the next page, Slide 27, page 63, with Persephone’s reunion with Demeter: 40 Pogorzelski [But even as she held her child in her arms, her heart suddenly suspected some trick, and she was very afraid,] endi[ng the embrace, and quickly she asked:] “My child, I hope you didn’t [taste] any food [when you were down there? Tell me, [don’t hide it, let’s both know about it]. For if you didn’t, you can be w[ith the rest of the immortals] and live with me and your father, the dark-cloud son of Kronos, with all the immortals honoring you; but if you tasted anything, you will go back down and dwell in the recesses of the earth for a third of the year, until the due date, spending the other two thirds with me and the other gods; and when the earth blooms with sweet-smelling spring flowers of every kind, then you will come back up from the misty dark, a great wonder to the gods and to mortals. Demeter knows the rule that if Persephone has eaten the food of the underworld, she has to stay there. But even though that rule is inviolable, it’s also apparently not absolute. If Persephone has eaten in the underworld, she has to stay there for a third of the year, and the other two thirds of the year, she can live with the other gods on Olympus. You may have heard later versions of the story in which Persephone has eaten a certain number of pomegranate seeds and she has to stay in the underworld for one month per seed she ate, and often that number is six, so that six months of the year she’s among the dead and for six months she’s among the living. There’s none of that here in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Here the rule is that if she has had any food while she was in the underworld, she must stay there for a third of the year. And she has had food, so she goes to the underworld for a third of the year, during which time every year Demeter renews her protest and refuses to make the crops grow. This is winter. In winter, the crops won’t grow 41 Pogorzelski because Demeter is angry that Hades has tricked Persephone and keeps her held in the underworld. But, on Slide 28, pages 69-71, for the time that Persephone is free of Hades, Demeter makes the earth produce the crops: So she spoke, and fair-garlanded Demeter did not demur, but quickly made the produce of the loam-rich ploughlands come up; and the whole broad earth grew heavy with leafage and bloom. She went to the lawgiver kings, Triptolemos and horse-goading Diocles, strong Eumolpos and Keleos leader of hosts, and taught them the sacred service, and showed the beautiful mysteries to Triptolemos, Polyxenos, and also Diocles—the solemn mysteries which one cannot depart from or enquire about or broadcast, for great awe of the gods restrains us from speaking. Blessed is he of men on earth who has beheld them, whereas he that is uninitiated in the rites, or he that has had no part in them, never enjoys a similar lot down in the musty dark when he is dead. In this passage, Demeter makes the crops grow, but that’s not all she does. She also instructs the kings in Eleusis about how to worship her. This time, it’s explicit that what she tells them is secret and that only initiates of her cult can know exactly how the rituals are supposed to go. But the fact that the rituals are secret is not what’s most interesting to me about this. I think the most interesting part of this passage is that, even though Demeter is a goddess of grain and agriculture and earthly fertility, here she takes some charge over the afterlife as well. She is an Olympian, but she becomes chthonic too. Whoever has taken part in the mysteries apparently enjoys a better afterlife in the underworld than the people who haven’t participated. I talked earlier in this lecture about how Hades is not Hell, and there’s not a thing in Ancient Greece where the souls of 42 Pogorzelski good people go to Heaven and the souls of bad people go to Hell to be punished. I also talked about how there are sometimes in Greek mythology versions of the underworld that separate good spirits or shades from bad ones and send them to different places, or that give a different kind of afterlife to heroes. This is one of those. The initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries are said in this passage to go to the underworld like anyone else, but when they’re there, they have a different and better kind of afterlife, and those who were not initiated into the mysteries have an unequal part in the afterlife. Demeter has spent the entire poem resisting Hades and fighting against him, and in the end, she manages to take over a part of his role or his power. She becomes a goddess of the afterlife as well as a goddess of grain. She, like her daughter Persephone, bridges the gap between the Olympian gods and the chthonic ones. And I think that makes sense. Demeter is in charge of life-giving food, but she has shown that she can also cause death. In winter, she makes the world a kind of dead world. Her anger and depression are a version of the tedious and torturous afterlife where nothing can happen. Interpreting the Homeric Hymn to Demeter That was the last passage I wanted to show you from the poem, and I’m going to spend the rest of this lecture offering a couple of interpretations of the poem. The first one is etiological, and that starts on Slide 29. There were two major festivals dedicated to Demeter. The more widespread one was the Thesmophoria, during which the women of a Greek city would go to a separate place where no men were allowed for three days and sacrifice pigs or piglets over a pit. Apollodorus (1.5) explains that Iambe’s jokes in the hymn was the origin of women’s jokes at the Thesmophoria. The sacrifice of the pigs over a pit indicates that the worship of Demeter followed the pattern of worship of chthonic gods. The blood flows into the earth and nourishes 43 Pogorzelski the gods below. It’s also interesting that the sacrifice was of piglets. In Ancient Greek, the word for “piglet” was also a term for female genitalia, and the jokes at the Thesmophoria were, if iambic poetry is anything to go by, often raunchy. So, this isn’t just a chthonic sacrifice, but also one about feminine fertility. Aphrodite, not Demeter, is the goddess of sex, but Demeter’s fertility of crops is related here to female sexuality too. And the hymn provides an etiology of that aspect of the Thesmophoria in the brief appearance of the character of Iambe. The more famous festival dedicated to Demeter was the Eleusinian Mysteries, at which both men and women were welcome. This cult was tied to Eleusis, just outside of Athens, and in the middle of the sixth century BCE, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus took firm control of the mystery cult. He promoted it as a panhellenic festival and encouraged people from all over Greece to come to Athens and make the short journey to Eleusis to participate in the cult. On the slide, you can see an image of a well excavated at Eleusis, and remember that in the poem, women of Eleusis gather at the well to get water and that’s where they meet Demeter in disguise as Dos or Bounty. 44 Pogorzelski The well-head was first made in the 6th century BC, Image: 10/5/2011. Well of the Fair Dances (Kallichoron). https:// library.artstor.org/asset/ASITESPHOTOIG_10313820695. When Demeter is in Eleusis, we get some hints about the mystery cult, and then at the end of the poem Demeter explicitly instructs the Eleusinians in the mysteries. On Slide 30, our earliest evidence of the Eleusinian Mysteries is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and the rites continued to be celebrated until the Roman emperor Theodosius prohibited the practice in the late fourth century CE and the sanctuary was destroyed. That’s a period of at least a thousand years. Especially because of the connection with Athens, which is our best documented Greek polis, we have a lot of information about the cult, but most of our sources try to preserve the mysteries that were supposed to be known only to initiates, and so we don’t have a fully clear story of the rites. On Slide 31, not only was the myth told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter about how Demeter went to Eleusis when she lost Persephone, but there are allusions in the hymn to parts of the cult. For example, the grain-based drink (the kykeon) Demeter asks for in Eleusis was also drunk by initiates. When Demeter instructs the people how to worship her at Eleusis, this is 45 Pogorzelski generally taken to mean the foundation of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This does not mean that the hymn founded the rites or that the hymn relates the story that the rites dramatize. It does mean that the hymn provides an etiology of the ritual practice. When I talked in a previous lecture about myth and ritual, I pointed out that ritualist interpretations of myth often take myths to be stories made up to explain the actions of a ritual. I associated that view with Jane Harrison and the so-called Cambridge Ritualists. I also argued that later interpretations, especially the sociobiological work of Walter Burkert, complicated the relationship between myth and ritual. You could imagine that people heard a myth and then invented a ritual to act out parts of it, or the other way around, that people had a ritual and invented a myth to explain why they acted as they did. But there were Greek religious rituals that don’t have an obvious connection to myths, and there were myths that don’t have an obvious connection to ritual. Burkert argued that even in those cases, myth and ritual are related because they serve the same function, and because they serve the same function, it’s easy for them to get intertwined with each other. Etiological myth is one of the ways in which myth and ritual get entangled with each other. We can’t tell whether the rituals got invented at the same time as the hymn, or before or after. What we can say is that whatever the truth of the matter, the myth in this case claims to explain the origin of the ritual. Etiological interpretation isn’t always about myth and ritual, however. On Slide 32, a different etiological reading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is that the myth explains the cause of the seasons. Winter happens because that’s when Persephone is in the underworld and Demeter renews her protest. Etiology offers explanations both for natural phenomena and for ritual practices. We’ve already seen Burkert argue that the function of myth is the same as the function of ritual, to provide social cohesion. Not long from now we’re going to look at 46 Pogorzelski structuralist interpretations of myth, and one of the things that structuralists sometimes argue about myth is that myth serves the same function as science does. People experience the natural world and get curious about why things are the way they are. Natural sciences, like physics and chemistry and biology, satisfy that curiosity by providing causal explanations about why the world is the way it is. In a time before the scientific revolution, myth served the same function in a different way. It provided explanations for why the world is the way it is. In this way, myth can be seen as primitive, and we have moved beyond it. I think that Burkert’s argument about social cohesion helps to explain why myth hasn’t completely faded away as obsolete in the scientific era, but it’s undoubtedly also true that we no longer need this kind of etiological function of myth. And this is one of the reasons why myth and religious ritual have become less significant in the modern age. They’re still important for social reasons, but they don’t have the same etiological function in explaining natural phenomena. I think my biggest problem with interpretations like the ritualist ones is that they too often claim to be the interpretation of or explanation of myth. The most wonderful and amazing thing about myth and about stories more generally is that no single interpretation can explain everything about them. There is always another interpretation available. No interpretation is exhaustive or complete. If that were possible, if we could somehow solve myth with a simple explanation that said everything, mythology would be really boring and we would leave it behind quickly. But it’s not that way. You can’t solve myth, and that’s why we still read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter two and a half thousand years after it was written. We can say that it’s an etiological myth, but that doesn’t mean we now fully understand it and we can put it away because we’re done with it. We will never be done with it. 47 Pogorzelski Alongside the etiological interpretation, I also want to offer a different one that I think is more powerful and more compelling. On Slide 33, I want to interpret the Homeric Hymn to Demeter through a feminist lens. In the previous lecture, we saw a story of domestic violence focused on the masculine perpetrator of that violence, Hercules. I argued that the myth of Hercules was a story of a man who left home and experienced traumatic violence, and then when he got home, he experienced a kind of insanity, and he turned that violence against his wife and children. I connected that with my very first lecture for this course, in which I connected the myth of Ajax to the experience of combat veterans. Seneca’s tragedy that tells the story of Hercules encourages us to feel a lot of sympathy for Hercules, and to see his suffering and how hard it is for him to go on living. I think that’s really important and really compelling, but it also leaves out the experience of Megara and the children. It makes Hercules into a sympathetic victim and survivor, when in fact he is the perpetrator of domestic violence. It’s a story of a male protagonist, and it has a masculine focus. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, on the other hand, the focus is on the feminine victims and survivors of violence, and although we hear the masculine perspective of Hades, Zeus, and Helios, Demeter’s insistence on the rightness of her anger and her refusal to back down dominate the story. In the story of Hercules, we saw that Zeus has sexual affairs that are both consensual and non-consensual, and Hera takes out her anger at Zeus on the women Zeus has either seduced or raped, and on their children, like Hercules. Hera, or Juno, blames the victims. This week’s poem does not do that. It insists on the rightness of Demeter’s anger even when the whole world is telling her that this is just how it is and actually she should be flattered and happy that a great guy like Hades wants her daughter. The poem includes the masculine perspective, but it does so 48 Pogorzelski in a way that focuses not on that perspective, but rather on Demeter’s response to it. On Slide 34, this is a story of rape that does not blame the victim and does not allow the masculine justification of the rape to overshadow Persephone’s and Demeter’s perspective. At the same time, the poem also doesn’t show us a complete victory for Persephone and Demeter. Hades still wins, and nobody is won over by the justice of Demeter’s anger. Instead, she has to use her power to fight for her position. At the end of the poem, still nobody believes she’s right—they just have to do what she wants because she can kill everyone on the planet if they don’t do what she wants. And even so,

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