Classics 2200 Week 2 Lecture: The Greek Gods and the Creation of the World PDF

**Classics 2200 Week 2 Lecture: The Greek Gods and the Creation of the World** Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I've asked you to read Hesiod's *Theogony*, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the Greek gods and the creation of the world. Since this is th...

**Classics 2200 Week 2 Lecture: The Greek Gods and the Creation of the World** Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I've asked you to read Hesiod's *Theogony*, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the Greek gods and the creation of the world. Since this is the first week with a reading assignment from the Loeb Classical Library, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the reading assignments, how you can access the assigned reading, and how you should tackle the assignments. **Slide 2** says that if you haven't already done the reading assignment for this week, you can find a link to it on the course syllabus and on the OWL site. The organization of the course generally assumes that you're going to do the reading before you listen to the lecture, but you're also welcome to listen to the lecture first. Many of you may find it helpful to have a bit of introduction to the reading before you read it, while others may find doing the reading first helps to make the lecture make sense. You should do whatever works best for you. And don't be afraid to do the reading more than once. If you have time, it can help to do the reading, then listen to the lecture, and then do the reading again. If you're not sure what works best for you, try it out a few different ways and see how you feel after that. The quizzes and the October test can help you to figure out what's working for you and what you might want to change. Once you've established a good practice, you can keep that going for the rest of the course. **The Loeb Classical Library** **Slide 3** has some instructions for accessing the assigned reading. When you click the link on the syllabus or the OWL site, if you're off campus it should ask you to sign in with your Western credentials, and then it will take you to a page that looks like the image on the slide: Graphical user interface, text Description automatically generated I've set up the links so that they'll take you to the first page of the assignment, so you shouldn't have to worry about navigating to that page. When you've read the first page, you can turn the page by clicking the arrow on the right side of the page, and for that you won't need to sign in again. The reason you will have to sign in at all when you're off campus is that the Loeb Classical Library requires a subscription, and Western has an institutional one. If you're on campus, any computer connected to the campus network should be able to access that subscription automatically, but if you're off campus, you will need to prove you belong to Western to access the subscription. The Loeb Classical Library is a great resource, and I encourage you to look around the site and see what's there and how it works. As long as you can access the subscription, it gives you access to good editions and translations of all the Ancient Greek and Roman literature that has survived, and it's pretty easy to search and browse. There's a link near the top right of the page that says "Using the Library," and it has some helpful hints if you're interested. Another link that may be helpful is the green "LCL 57" just below that. That link will take you to the table of contents of Loeb volume 57, which is the one with Hesiod's *Theogony* in it. Finally, just below that is a link that says, "View cloth edition." "Cloth edition" means a hardcover, physical copy of the book. If you'd prefer to do the reading on paper rather than on a screen, you can buy a physical copy of any Loeb volume using that link (or wherever else you like to buy books), and there is also complete collection of the physical volumes in the library, although I haven't put them on reserve so they may be checked out. They're actually really nice little books. They cost these days around \$30 US per volume, so they're not the cheapest, but they're also not the most expensive things in the world and they're worth having if you like books. Since we all have access to the digital versions through Western's subscription, I haven't ordered any copies of the books for the bookstore, but don't let that stop you from buying the books if you prefer to read on paper. **Slide 4** points out that one of the things I like about the Loeb Classical Library is that it has the original Greek (or Latin) on the left-hand pages, so you're always reminded that you're reading a translation. That also means that the reading assignment is shorter than the page numbers make it seem, because you only have to read the right-hand pages. The assignments are really only half as long as the page ranges on the syllabus make them seem. And don't worry---I'm not expecting any of you to read the original Greek or Latin, but I don't think it's bad for you to see it there just in case you want to look at it and see what it's like. No translation is perfect, and there's not a single translation that's right for even a single word. I absolutely think it\'s great to read versions of Ancient Greek and Roman literature in modern English, and it's wonderful that there are good translations available, but it's always worth remembering that a translation is not the original, and a lot gets lost in translation. **Slide 5** is about one of those things that gets lost. Having the Greek there reminds me also that even though the English translation is prose, the Greek original is poetry. There is some uncertainty about whether Ancient Greek performers recited or sang the *Theogony*, but there is good evidence that they accompanied themselves with a lyre a lot like the one the Muse in the image on this slide is playing.  Achilles Painter, fl. ca. 450-425 B.C. c.445 B.C. Shoulder-Lekythos: View 2-Muse Playing the Kithara on Mount Helicon. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR\_103\_41822000410579 The image is of a fifth-century vase, so it's a little later than the time Hesiod wrote the *Theogony*, but I'll talk more about dates and timelines in a couple of weeks. The vase depicts a Muse playing a kithara, or a lyre, which is a stringed instrument. Archaeological evidence suggests that although in the fifth century the lyre almost always had seven strings like the one in the image, actually around the time Hesiod wrote the *Theogony* and it was first being performed, it's more likely that the lyre had only four strings. Beyond that, it's hard to know much about what the music was like at the time. We don't know how complex the music was, and we don't know whether the *Theogony* was originally recited as poetry with musical accompaniment or whether performers were actually singing it as a song. One thing we do know is that whether it was recited or sung, it has a certain poetic rhythm to it. It doesn't rhyme. Ancient Greek and Roman poetry in general very rarely rhymed---that's not what makes it poetry. What makes it poetry is the meter, or rhythm. You'll also see on the slide the first few lines of the *Theogony* in Greek, and I'm going to make an effort to recite them metrically for you. I'm not great at this. I'm no performer, and I'm most definitely not a singer, so I'm just going to read these lines and try to emphasize the metre as much as I can so you can get a sense of how it's poetry, and how it might feel different from everyday speech. Here are the first eight lines of Hesiod's *Theogony*: Hopefully from that you can get a small part of the sense of what the poetry sounds like, even though my recitation skills are poor. It has a repeated rhythm, especially so at the ends of the lines. I may talk a little bit more about the technical details of that meter, but for now I just want you to realize that the Greek original really is poetry, and it really is written in a language that is not ours. I also want to reemphasize something that I said last week, which is that although I expect most of you won't do this, if you get really into Greek mythology, you can at Western take courses that will teach you to read Ancient Greek. They're small courses. Usually, we don't get more than 15 students in introductory Ancient Greek, and in the advanced courses it's more like five students in a class. These courses are a really great experience. You get to know your classmates and you get to know your professors, and you get to belong to a close-knit community. The skill you'll learn is really rewarding, and it's great because it's a humanities course that teaches a skill that is objective and measurable. It's easy to know if you know how to read Greek or not. Plus, reading Ancient Greek is something that provides a lot of enjoyment. It's just so wonderful to be able to read these texts as they were written. So, I just want to point out, as I do frequently, that that's an option that's available to you, and one I can recommend. I think it's really worthwhile. **Introduction to Hesiod's *Theogony*** To get back to this course instead of ones you might or might not take in the future, for us you only need English, and the Greek is just there in the reading as a reminder of the original language. On **Slide 6**, you'll see a few basic pieces of information about the *Theogony*. Whenever you read an ancient text, or really any text, it's a good idea to know five basic things about that text: the author, the title, the date of composition or publication, the location of composition or publication, and the original language. For this week's assignment, those five prices of information are: Author: Hesiod Title: *Theogony* Date: some time between 750 and 650 BCE Location: Ascra (a town near Mount Helicon) in Boeotia, a region in Greece Language: Greek I feel like learning these five things about what you're reading should be automatic. Of course, if you're reading a text, you should know the title of that text and who wrote it, and when and where and in what language. I like to emphasize it because it's not as obvious to everyone as it seems to me. For every text I assign in this course, I will mention the five things, and whenever you read anything, whether for this course or not, you should find them out for yourself. Since I have mentioned the date when Hesiod composed the *Theogony*, I'd like to dwell a little bit on **Slide 7** about some basic information about dates in this course. Because we're dealing with ancient material, the system of dates will require some adjustment in your thinking. Most of the dates in this course will be BCE dates, which can be a little confusing if you're not used to it. Most of you, I think, probably have a pretty good handle on this already, but it's still worth being explicit about a few things: BC stand for "Before Christ" AD stands for "Anno Domini" (In the Year of the Lord) BCE usually stands for "Before the Common Era" (or more rarely "Before the Christian Era") CE usually stands for "Common Era" (or more rarely "Christian Era") Years BCE count down (650 BCE is the year before 649 BCE). There is no year zero, so 1 CE comes right after 1 BCE. 650 BCE is in the seventh century BCE. BCE, CE, and BC all go after the year, but AD traditionally goes before the year (e.g., 1066 CE or AD 1066), but this is increasingly flexible now. It's often the case that people write AD after the year just by analogy with the other abbreviations. Some people will tell you that's incorrect, but you see it often enough now that it's probably just a correct variation. In Latin, it makes sense that AD should go before the year, because "In the year of the Lord 1066 makes more sense than "1066 in the year of the Lord," so when I use it, I usually stick to the traditional placement before the year, but I don't think it matters much. Anyway, I typically, though not 100% of the time, use the BCE and CE abbreviations rather than the BC and AD ones. It's a little bit ridiculous, and I know that. I do it because it's a small way I can acknowledge that not everyone is Christian, and so using the Christian dating system isn't the most inclusive thing. I know that using the "Common Era" abbreviations doesn't actually change the system. We're still using the same numbers that were developed by Christians and just relabeling them, but I like to do it anyway. I don't have any objection to anyone using the BC and AD abbreviations, and I'm not convinced I'm making the right choice, but I have to make a choice and I try to stick with it to be consistent. In any case, it's a good idea for you to be familiar with both sets of abbreviations, since you'll see them both used. I also want to emphasize a little bit that years BCE or BC count down, so 650 BCE is the year before 649 BCE. That's really unintuitive for us, because we're very used to counting up the years instead of counting them down. The year 1968 CE comes before the year 1969 CE, and that feels right to us. The other way is harder to get your mind around. The years BCE are counting down toward zero, but there is no year zero. The year right after 1 BCE is 1 CE. And there's another, even more unintuitive aspect of counting centuries. The year 650 BCE is in the seventh century BCE. If you think about it for a minute, it makes logical sense and it has to be that way. The year 50 BCE is in the first century BCE. It wouldn't make any sense to have a zeroth century BCE, so that century from 100 BCE to 1 BCE has to be the first century BCE. And that means that the year 150 BCE is in the second century BCE and so on. That's how centuries CE work too, so right now we're in the twenty-first century CE, which is the 2000s. The 1900s were the twentieth century, even though the years started with nineteen. Because that can be confusing, many people prefer to use the term "1900s" for the twentieth century. It's more intuitive to use a labeling system that matches the number to the century instead of having it be one off. But in Classics we almost always use the older, more traditional system of numbering the centuries, and we talk about the seventh century when we mean the 600s. So, I do that a lot, and it's just something you'll have to get used to. You'll also have to get used to counting years down a lot, since the majority of dates in this course will be dates BCE. It's not the easiest thing in the world to get used to, but it's an important part of thinking about ancient stuff. I'll come back to the date of the poem, but next I want to talk a little about the title of the poem. **Slide 8** says that Hesiod's *Theogony* (classicists usually refer to "Hesiod's *Theogony"* or "the *Theogony*" but not "Hesiod's the *Theogony*") is one of the earliest poems to survive from Ancient Greece, and later Greeks treated it as an authoritative account of the gods and the creation of the world. The title translated literally means "god birth." The point about using the definite article, that is the word "the," in the title sometimes but not always is another minor point about usage, but I think it's worth pointing out because it's often one of the ways classicists judge the expertise of the people they're talking with. If you say, "Hesiod's *The Theogony*," a classicist is going to know you haven't spent a lot of time reading about the poem or talking about it with people who know what they're talking about. If you write "*The Theogony*" with the definite article capitalized and italicized, an experienced reader will similarly know you're not very experienced with this stuff. Small details like that, saying or writing titles not just correctly but also according to the conventions that professional and experienced classicists use, are a way in which you can present yourself as an expert and a member of the classicist community. It may seem silly, but we do this in all areas of life when we engage with other people. Small details show someone a lot about you, even when you and the other people aren't consciously thinking about it. Really, that's all modern convention, though. In fact, Ancient Greek authors and readers often just didn't give titles to their poems. Sometimes the titles we have are written in manuscripts that are centuries newer than the poems themselves, and we can't tell when the first person called the poem by the title that's in the manuscript, or if other people called it by a different title. So, we don't know what Hesiod called this poem, and we don't know if he thought the main theme of his poem was really the birth of the gods. We'll see that there's more to the poem than that, but it certainly is a big theme and a big enough part of the poem that it makes sense that it would be called the *Theogony*. And it's also a birth of the gods in a more metaphorical sense too, in that it's one of the earliest texts we have about the Greek gods, so it shows us not only how the Greeks in Hesiod's time said the gods came to be, but also how the stories of the gods came to be. It's not just the birth of the gods, but the birth of stories about the gods. **Sources of Greek Mythology** On **Slide 9**, Greek myth developed organically from a number of sources. Those sources include local rituals, etymological reasoning about the names of the gods, stories transmitted through oral tradition, and the iconography of visual art. If you were writing a fantasy novel or coming up with a set of gods for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, you'd have a kind of organizing principle and you'd create a system that made sense as a whole. You'd intentionally create a mythology. That's not at all how Greek mythology developed. Instead, Greek mythology developed organically from a whole lot of cultural stuff that was going on. One kind of stuff that was going on was religious rituals. We'll spend some more time on ritual and its connection to myth next week, but for now I'll just say that religious rituals often represent or act out parts of stories about the gods, and that means that rituals can develop from myths, and also that myths can develop from rituals. Moreover, there were lots of different local rituals in Ancient Greece, and there wasn't one overarching system of religious ritual across all of Greece that a logical mythology could grow from. Instead, each local place had its own rituals and its own myths, and the local communities that practiced those rituals were sometimes in communication with other communities and sometimes not. Sometimes rituals in different places would grow closer to each other and get more similar, and other times they would diverge from each other. The whole of Greek religion was kind of chaotic, and so there could be many individual myths, but in the time when Hesiod was writing, there wasn't really a cohesive system of myths that we might call a mythology. Or if there was a system of myths that could be called a mythology, it was a very chaotic system. Another way that mythology developed in Ancient Greece was etymological reasoning about the gods. Etymology means the study of how words developed, and how they came to mean what they mean. So, for example, I could say about the etymology of the word "myth" that it comes from the Greek word *mythos*, which in our earliest records of Greek just meant a word, but later came to mean a story and even a fictional or mythological story. That's the etymology of the word "myth." Again, I'll go into more detail about this later on, but sometimes the names of gods mean something really clear. In that case, it's possible to come up with a story of how that god got that name. Other times, the meaning of the name of a god is not clear at all---not clear to us now and not clear to Ancient Greek people either. In that case, it's possible to come up with some wild ideas about what the names might mean and what that might imply about how the god came to be or how they got that name. And those guesses about how a god got a name or what a god's name might mean can develop into stories, which is to say into myths. So that's a second source of Greek myth. A third source of Greek myths is oral storytelling itself. Sometimes, Ancient Greek people told stories in a formal way, when a bard would get up in front of a group of people and sing a song or recite a poem. Other times, Ancient Greek people told each other stories in a more informal way, just in talking with each other every day. All humans do this. When we talk with each other, we tell stories, and we often share with others the stories we have heard. I'm going to spend a lot of time on this later in the semester. Storytelling is fundamental in human life. We couldn't get away from it even if we wanted to. Storytelling and narrative are deep parts of human cognition. I'm going to make the argument later in the course that we don't just think in language---we think in stories. The universality of storytelling means that, just like religious ritual, every local community had stories that circulated in it, and as those stories developed and changed over time, since in an oral tradition each telling of a story is a little bit different, the stories of one local community could grow closer to or farther from the stories of a different local community. The whole thing became a chaotic system of different but related stories that varied from place to place and from time to time. Instead of one person sitting down to write a logical and definitive story that included a systematic mythology, many different people in many different communities shared the stories that would become the kinds of traditional tales we associate with mythology. The final source of mythology I want to single out here is the iconography of visual art. What I mean by that is that the Ancient Greeks from a very early period liked to represent their gods visually. Sometimes that was in sculpture. Sometimes it was in painting or in drawing. But whatever the medium, if these visual representations of the gods were going to be identifiable as the gods that they were, they needed to refer to stories or to call to mind stories. I talked about this a little bit last week with that image of Achilles and Ajax. That image is a painting. It's not a painting of the gods, but it is a painting of mythological figures, and it tells us, or it makes us think about a story that we know from other sources. The interaction of visual art with the stories that are told in words is another thing that is really interesting, and at the beginning of next semester, I\'m going to talk a little bit about Greek and Roman visual art as a way of talking about how visual art is an important source for mythology. That is, Ancient Greek people looked at visual art and they drew some of their ideas about who the gods were, who mythological figures were, who the heroes were, who the monsters were, and what they were like, from the visual representations that they saw. On **Slide 10**, when I say "iconography," what I mean is the details of a visual representation that tell you who the figures are. So, for example, in the image on this slide, I can tell that the figure on the left is Poseidon because he's carrying a trident. Hermes is also carrying a distinctive staff and wearing a distinctive hat, and Athena has a shield with an owl on it. A vase with a painting on it Description automatically generated with medium confidence Attributed to the Amasis Painter. c. 550-525 BCE. Olpe with Trefoil Mouth showing Herakles Presented to Poseidon, Hermes and Athena (Herakles Entering Olympus). ceramics. Place: Musée du Louvre. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARMNIG\_10313259642. The vase on the slide is from the 6th century BCE and it has very clear iconography. That is, the details of the representation tell us very clearly who these gods are. The trident, the hat and the staff that Hermes is carrying, and the shield with the owl on it tell us that these are Poseidon, Hermes, and Athena. When I talk about iconography, what I'm talking about is the parts of a visual image that tell you what\'s going on and who the people are. So, all of this is swirling around in the late 8th and early 7th centuries when Hesiod was alive, and when he was thinking about mythological system. The whole chaotic soup of local rituals, etymological reasoning, oral storytelling tradition, and visual art was there without any real controlling influence or organizing principle. But then one of the historical developments that happened in the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE in Ancient Greece was the arrival of alphabetic writing. On **Slide 11**, in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, alphabetic writing was new to Greece, and written texts like Hesiod's *Theogony* could exert a new kind of control over myth. They could also more effectively combine disparate local traditions into something panhellenic. The story how writing came to Greece is complicated, and it did so in several different phases. The alphabet of the eighth century BCE was not the first writing system that the Ancient Greeks developed, but it was a new kind of writing system, and it coincided with a virtual explosion of writing all around Ancient Greece. We don't have any records of writing in Greece from the centuries leading up to the eighth century BCE, so for the people living at that time, writing was an amazing, new technological development. We think it came to Greece from Phoenicia, which was a Greek name for some of the people of the eastern Mediterranean in the southern part of Anatolia, in what's now Türkiye. We think that a writing system came from that region to Greece, and that it was adapted by the Greeks to their language. The arrival of alphabetic writing means that when Hesiod was composing poetry, he could use this new communication technology to record his poems, and so his work could do things that the stories of oral tradition had a lot more trouble with. One of those things is that a written poem can exert a kind of control over myth that oral stories can't. Orally transmitted stories change quite a lot from version to version, but written stories change much more slowly. They do change, because copies of copies of copies always let errors and small changes creep in, but the version of Hesiod's *Theogony* we have now is basically the same one as Hesiod wrote almost three thousand years ago. A text like that fixes myth in place and, even though it can't control everything, it does provide a kind of stable core around which a mythology can grow and organize itself. For that core to work, it has to be able to fit with a number of local traditions and provide something common to all of them. That's what I mean when I use the term "panhellenic." In Greek, the word for Greece is not "Greece" but "Hellas." "Greece" is a version of the word the Romans used in Latin for Greece. Just like the adjective "Greek" comes from "Greece," the adjective "Hellenic" comes from "Hellas." And so "panhellenic" means "all-Greek." Rather than being specific to a local community, something panhellenic applies to the whole of Greece. In the late 8^th^ and early 7^th^ centuries BCE, when Hesiod lived, more stable and efficient means of communication were helping to connect disparate communities and create a panhellenic culture. Hesiod's *Theogony* was an important part of that, establishing a panhellenic core of Greek mythology. It's one of the oldest written texts we have from Greece. Because written texts have survived in relatively stable form, they are not only sources of myth, but act for us as sources for myth. We don't know the stories because they have been passed down through generations. We know the stories because we can read them in texts like Hesiod's *Theogony*. And the same was true for the Ancient Greeks. Hesiod's *Theogony* quickly became an authoritative text for them, because it's not like they just knew Greek mythology intuitively---they had to be taught it too. Of course, they also learned it from everywhere in their lives. They learned it from religious ritual and from ubiquitous images in visual arts and from oral storytelling and from everyday conversation, but once the *Theogony* was written down, there was a stability behind all that that means that when we want to know the answer to a question, we can go to the text. It tells us how a god was born and what that god's name was and what they were like. It doesn't answer all our questions, and that's part of mythology. Mythology is a complex system held together by many authors and many people as a collaborative project, and as the system grows and changes, it leaves behind many types of evidence that we can use as sources to find out about it, but once writing came to Greece, written texts became the most important sources for learning about Greek mythology. Let me emphasize again the distinction between sources of myth and sources for myth. I've argued that there are four significant sources of myth, that is to say places where the stories come from: namely religious rituals, etymology, oral storytelling, and visual art. Written texts can sometimes act as a source of myth, but more importantly it's a source for myth, teaching people about the stories and fixing them in place in an authoritative version. The reason I want to emphasize this so much is related to a concept you hear a lot about when people talk about what you learn in courses in Arts and Humanities, and that's so-called critical thinking. I think that term means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I also think Arts and Humanities doesn't have any kind of monopoly on critical thinking, but for me and for this course, the key to it is the question, "How do we know that?" When I was in grade three, I learned about Greek mythology in school, and I learned things like that Zeus was the god of thunder. I just accepted that as a fact because my teacher and my textbook said it. I think I kind of imagined that my teacher knew it because her teacher had told her and that teacher's teacher had told them and it just kind of got passed down through the ages. But that's not how we know Zeus was the god of thunder. In grade nine, I was made to read Homer's *Odyssey*, in which Zeus appears a lot, and it didn't really make much of an impression on me. But then I read Homer again in my first year as a university student, and something clicked. I saw that this ancient text was how my teacher and my textbook in grade three had known that Zeus was the god of thunder. And Hesiod's *Theogony* is one of the ancient sources that tells us the most information and the most reliable information about what the Ancient Greeks thought about their gods. We sometimes talk in Classical Studies about primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are ancient evidence, and secondary sources are the articles and books that modern scholars write interpreting that ancient evidence. Primary sources can be textual or material. Hesiod's *Theogony* is an example of a textual primary source. It's a text that was written in antiquity. It's also possible, however, to learn about antiquity from the material, archaeological remains. My colleague Alex Meyer, for example, is an archaeologist, and he excavated a broken piece of a calendar at a Roman fort. He was able to learn from that piece of a calendar about the way Ancient Romans kept track of time, and he wrote a journal article about that. So if you want to learn about Roman timekeeping, you could look at a photo of the primary source, that is the calendar fragment, and you could look at the secondary source, that is Alex's journal article. But if you were only to look at Alex's article without paying any attention to the photos in it of the artifact, you'd have a problem. Then you're just taking on faith what Alex says about Roman timekeeping. Alex doesn't want you to do that. Instead, he wants you to follow his logical argument analyzing the calendar fragment and then look at the fragment to see if you think his analysis makes sense. And the same thing is true for this course. I've asked you to read Hesiod's *Theogony*, and in the second half of this lecture I'm going to analyze that ancient text. I don't want you just to believe what I say. I want you to look at the primary source and follow my arguments about it to see if they make sense to you. And this, I think, is what people mean when they talk about critical thinking. In school, you get given a lot of information. People tell you things. In university, we ask you to ask the question, "How do we know that?" In Classical Studies, the answer to that question is always, 100% of the time, ultimately some kind of ancient evidence. These days I hear a lot the phrase, "Do your research," by which I think a lot of the time people mean to ask you to look at secondary sources, and I guess that's a kind of research. But really, serious research gets to the primary sources. In the natural sciences, that means observations of the natural world, often in controlled experiments. In Classical Studies, that means ancient sources, whether textual or material. **Summary of the *Theogony*** I've been talking for a while now, and I haven't really gotten to the *Theogony*, which is really what I'm supposed to be talking about this week. **Slide 12** says that on pages xxiv-xxvi (24-26 of the Introduction), which isn't part of the required reading, Glenn W. Most provides a handy summary of the poem. The next few slides are that summary. Our editor and translator of this particular Loeb volume is Glenn Most, who is a famous Classics professor. One of the things I like about the Loeb series is that the editors and translators of the volumes are serious scholars. Most's introduction to the *Theogony* is really interesting and helpful. It's not assigned reading for the course, but that doesn't mean you can't read it anyway if you feel like it. But since most of you won't have time to read things that aren't assigned, I've just copied and pasted the summary of the poem from that introduction to give you a sense of what the poem is about. Here\'s **Slide 13**: I'll pause here just to note a few things. First, Most uses the technical term "proem" for the beginning of the poem. Often long poems, especially ones that tell stories, and especially Ancient Greek and Roman ones, have a kind of introductory section that's called a proem, which is spelled like poem with an extra "r" in there. I also want to point out that Most gives ranges of line numbers for the sections into which he divides the *Theogony*. I'll also use line numbers in this course when I talk about ancient poems, and those line numbers refer to the Greek or Latin text and not to the English translation. You can get a sense of what line numbers are covered on what pages by looking at the line numbers on the left hand pages, with the Greek text. You won't often be able to tell exactly what part of the English translation is from what Greek line numbers, but you can get a pretty good estimate. The reason Classicists usually talk about line numbers rather than page numbers is because there are many different translations of each text available out there, so the page numbers change all the time, but the line numbers don't change from version to version, so talking about line numbers is more reliable and consistent. So the first 115 lines of the *Theogony* are the proem, or introduction, and that's true whatever the page numbers in your version are. Finally, I want to point out that the sections Most divides the *Theogony* into aren't marked in any way in the ancient text. Most is the one who is inventing those sections, and he's doing that just because he thinks it will help make it easier for readers to understand what's happening in the poem. Here's **Slide 14**: This part of the summary makes it clear that there are two primary lineages of gods in the *Theogony*, namely the descendants of Earth and the descendants of Chasm. The poem switches between them. Here's **Slide 15**: And the last slide of the summary is **Slide 16**: And that's the end of Most's summary of Hesiod's *Theogony*. **Some Passages from the *Theogony*** What I want to do next is something I'm going to be doing a lot in this course. I've selected a few passages from the text and I'm going to spend a little time reading them out and then analyzing them. I do this first of all because ancient texts can be difficult to understand, and I think this helps with that, but also to model ways of reading for you. My hope is that you'll be able to do this kind of thing yourself, so when you read the assignments for this course, you can pause and analyze passages as you go. **Slide 17** is the English translation of lines 1-8 of the Greek, that is the very beginning of the poem. It's on page 3 of the Loeb volume: Hesiod starts with an invocation of the Muses, and this is typical of long Greek poems. Poetry doesn't come from nowhere or just from the mind of the poet. Instead, the Muses inspire poetry. Some poems even say that it's the Muses themselves who are singing, but here the Muses are teachers. Hesiod was a shepherd from the town of Ascra, which is near Mount Helicon, and so he associates the Muses with that mountain. And that association sticks, so in the image of the Muse playing the lyre on that fifth-century vase, she's on Helicon. And the Muses are not just the teachers of poetry, but they're dancers too. Poetry is rhythmic, and it's musical, and so the Muses dance to it as well as singing. Hesiod continues on **Slide 18**, still on page 3: Here Hesiod transitions from the Muses to the gods more generally, since in this poem the Muses sing about the gods. And the key thing that Hesiod points out about the gods is that they "always are." They're immortal. In many ways, the Greek gods are like humans. They have emotions and jealousies and conflicts, and many of the stories about them emphasize these kinds of human qualities. But one big thing that separates gods from humans is that they're immortal. They don't die, and they always are. Another interesting point about this passage is that Hesiod selects a few names of gods to single out, and then he says he'll talk about the rest of them too. That means that the gods he names explicitly here are particularly important to him. Because he names them first and he thinks they're worth naming in that initial list, we can tell that these are the most important ones to know. While I'm talking about the names of gods, I want to take a brief detour from looking at passages to say a little about Greek names. On **Slide 19**, Ἠέλιόν in line 19 is an inflected form of Ἥλιος. Let me explain what I mean by that. Ancient Greek is an inflected language, in which grammatical relationships are indicated by small changes to words. We do this in English too. So "lecture" is singular, and "lectures" is plural. A small change to the word indicates a grammatical change from singular to plural. Or "change" is in the present tense and "changed" is in the past tense. It's still the same word, but the small change indicates the time of the action. Or "he" is a subjective form and "him" is an objective form and "his" is a possessive form. They're all the same masculine, third-person, singular pronoun, but they change their form as a way of indicating grammatical change. And Ancient Greek does this even more than English does. So one reason names sometimes look different in Greek is because in Greek, even proper nouns, that is names, are inflected. Anyway, when we write the names of Greek gods, we first have to transliterate them, which means we have to change the letters from those of the Greek alphabet to the modern version of the Roman alphabet that we use. This is mostly a pretty straightforward process, but it's not 100% straightforward. To some people, it seems best to use the Romanized versions of the names, while to other people it seems better to use a more direct system for transliterating Greek names. That means that there are different spellings of Greek names for us, and there are sometimes many correct versions. Helios is a common spelling and that preserves the Greek omicron as an o, but when the name is written in Latin that omicron becomes a u, and so Helius is also a common and correct spelling of the name. It turns out that Latin is an inflected language too, and in Latin the "-us" ending is really common, and so it works better for Latin just to make the Greek omicron sigma into the Latin ending -us. And because so much of our knowledge about Ancient Greece comes to us filtered through Rome, people very frequently use the Latin spellings of Greek names. So even though the Greek omicron looks like an "o" and sounded like an "o" in Ancient Greek, you'll frequently see the omicron sigma ending of Greek words transliterated with the -us ending that comes to us from Latin. The same thing happens with "c" and "k." The Greek letter kappa looks like a "k," and it was pronounced like a "k," so we often transliterate it as "k." But for the Romans, "k" was a super rare letter. There was a "k" in the Latin alphabet, but I've got a Latin dictionary on my bookshelf in my office that has about 2000 pages in it, and all of the entries for the letter "k" take up less than half of one page. For whatever reason, the Romans just didn't use that letter much. They did, however, have that sound in Latin a lot, and they almost always represented it with a "c." The Latin "c" was always what we sometimes call a hard "c," like in "cut" or "card," and so when the Romans transliterated Greek words, they transliterated kappa as "c." And that means that when we transliterate Greek words, many people follow the Romans in using a "c" to transliterate kappa, but a lot of people use a "k" instead because it feels like a more direct transliteration of the Greek word into English. And that's a big reason why there are so many different spellings of the same Greek names. Of course, it's also true that even the Ancient Greeks spelled names with some variation, because that happens in a chaotic system like Greek mythology, but more commonly what's happening when you see different spellings of the same Greek name is that people are transliterating the Greek words into the Roman alphabet in a slightly different way, and that means there's very rarely a single, correct spelling of any Greek god's name. Most of the time, there are several correct variations. I just want to point out, though, that just because there are several correct spellings doesn't mean that there are no incorrect spellings. There's no single, right answer, but there are wrong answers. I'll often use different spellings so that you can see what they're like, and because I will usually follow the spelling used in the text I've assigned for any given week. On **Slide 20**, the various Ancient Greek texts we'll read in this class all have different translators, and they will all use slightly different transliteration practices. That means that I won't be consistent in spelling the same names the same way all the time, since I'll follow the practice of the translator of the particular text we're working on. For example, sometimes I might refer to Herakles, and other times to Heracles, and still other times to Hercules, which is a Latin version of the name. So, in a few weeks we're going to read about Heracles in Apollodorus' *Library*, and I'll use the spelling "Heracles" that our translator, James Frazer, uses. But then in the week after that we'll read the Roman tragedy *Raging Hercules* or *Mad Hercules*, and I'll follow the practice of John Fitch in using the Latin version of the name, Hercules. That kind of variation is just something you have to get used to in Classical mythology. Also, sometimes translators will translate names instead of just transliterating them. In line 116, Hesiod refers to Χάος, which most translators simply transliterate as "Chaos," but our translator, Most, thinks that's misleading, and so he translates the name as "Chasm." What Most argues about that is that the English word "chaos" means something like disorder, which is not exactly the sense of the god Hesiod calls "Chaos." Even though our English word "chaos" comes from the name of the god etymologically, the meaning of the word has evolved away from the meaning of the god. Most says that the god is a kind of primordial emptiness or a gap or a space that is filled with nothing. He calls this "Chasm." It's like a vacuum rather than disordered space. Most thinks that translation will more effectively convey the meaning of the Greek. In contrast, almost all other translations of the *Theogony* will just call that god Chaos. I'm so used to saying Chaos that I'll say that sometimes, but for the most part I'll try to respect Most's choice and call this god Chasm. On **Slide 21**, even more than spelling, the pronunciation of Greek names is confusing. Sometimes we try to reconstruct how Ancient Greek people might have pronounced the name, sometimes we instead use a Romanized version of the pronunciation. Most often, we invent a few options that seem to sound right in English. So, when I was talking just now about Chaos, sometimes I used a reconstructed Ancient Greek pronunciation like "caw-os," and sometimes I pronounced the name like the English word chaos. Of course we don't know for sure or exactly how Ancient Greek people pronounced words, but there are a lot of clues that help us out. Sometimes the variations in spelling help, and sometimes there are surviving texts that talk about things like pronunciation. In any case, even if we're right about that kind of reconstructed pronunciation, if I were in Ancient Greece, I'd have a horrific accent. But I like to try anyway. So sometimes I use that kind of pronunciation, and sometimes I use a Latinized kind of pronunciation, and sometimes I use an Anglicized pronunciation, and sometimes I'll use different variations, and even when I'm consistent, other people may use different pronunciations. As with spelling, I'd love to say that there are no wrong ways to pronounce the names, and that's tempting because there aren't really rational rules for how we do pronounce the names. Even though there aren't really any right answers, there are often one or a few usually acceptable ways to pronounce the names, and a lot of possible pronunciations that just don't get used. There are many possible pronunciations of "Zeus" or "Phoebus," but most people pronounce them in the same way. If I want to reconstruct how I think Ancient Greek people might have said it, I might say Zeus, but if I tried that in everyday conversation people would think I'm really weird. Nobody says it that way. And most of the time it's just that somebody decided one day that a certain way sounds better in English. That "oe" in Phoebus is a Latin version of the spelling that in Greek would be omicron iota, and the word might be pronounced Phoebus (phoy-bus), but we say Phoebus (Fee-bus) because it sounds better in English and because now it's what people expect. I'll do my best to pronounce the names in the most conventional way I can. **Slide 22** brings us back to a passage from the *Theogony*, this time on page 5: So here Hesiod gets instructions from the Muses, and they say that first and last, you've got to talk about the Muses, and then in the middle talk about the race of blessed ones who always are, that is the immortal gods. What's most interesting about this passage to me is the part where the first thing the Muses tell Hesiod is that they know how to say many false things that are similar to genuine ones. That is, they know how to lie convincingly. They also know how to proclaim true things. And the reason I'm so interested in that is because I sometimes think about whether the Ancient Greeks actually believed their myths. Is Hesiod saying that what he wrote in the *Theogony* is one of the true things the Muses proclaim, or is he saying that it's one of those times when they are telling lies that seem like the truth? Is this nonfiction or fiction for Hesiod? Did he believe Zeus was real and in the literal truth of the stories about Zeus? In any society, there are different people and different people have different levels of belief in their religion. For some people, their religion is interesting stories, but those stories don't really represent reality. For other people, the stories of their religion are the literal truth. And there are all kinds of variations on that, like when people believe that the stories of their religion aren't literally true, but they do contain a kind of true message. Still, we can in a broad way generalize about societies, and we can wonder what the prevailing view in Ancient Greece was. Did Prometheus really, literally trick Zeus? And it's super interesting that at the beginning of one of our earliest texts about Greek mythology, so basically as soon as we have any real record of Greek mythology, the author calls into question whether it's true or not. Hesiod isn't saying in this passage that what he's saying is definitely true, and he's not saying it's not true, either. But he does bring up, out of the blue and without really needing to, the question. I don't have an answer, or at least not a straightforward one, but I love that Hesiod is interested in the question too. Here\'s **Slide 23** from page 7: In this passage, the Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or Memory, and they are there to help people forget their troubles and anxieties. What I think it most interesting about this is that, just like the Muses are capable of both truth and falsehood, now they're related to both memory and forgetfulness. They are the daughters of Memory, but their purpose is forgetfulness. Hesiod, and Greek myth in general, loves this kind of opposition, almost a paradox in which two opposites come together. Later in this course, I'm going to talk about some theories of mythology, and this kind of opposition will be important in so-called structuralist theory. Anyway, it makes sense that the Muses are related to memory, because poetry is all about memory, especially in an oral culture like Ancient Greece in the time leading up to Hesiod. Without writing, it's hard to remember things. You can't make lists or notes or review materials, so you have to remember stuff. And one of the reasons why poetry is important in oral cultures is because poetry is easier to memorize than prose or everyday speech. The predictability of the metrical form acts as an aid to memory. Sometimes people who are trying to remember stuff get the advice these days to make up songs or rhymes, and that's because even now our memories work better with those kinds of patterns. The Muses, who inspire poetry and song, help people remember things. And as writing came to Ancient Greece in the eighth century BCE, one of the first uses they put it to was writing down poetry, because that was the important stuff to remember. Writing acts like an external memory, and the stories of mythology were so important to the Ancient Greeks that the felt they needed to remember them. Before writing, that meant they were in poetic form, and once writing arrived, that meant that the poems were written down. But if the Muses are so connected to memory, it's weird that they would also be a source of forgetfulness. At least a part of the solution to this knot is the question of why stories were so important to the Ancient Greeks that they would first preserve them in easy-to-memorize poetry and then write them down, and part of the answer is that stories help us to forget our troubles and the ease our anxieties. This is another theme that will come back in the course---that stories are a kind of therapy. I'll present some evidence that stories help us to cope with the problems of life, and that they are good for our mental health. Hesiod, at least, seems to think this is true. Here's **Slide 24** (page 11): In this passage, Hesiod tells us a little about the roles of some of the gods. Apollo is the god of poetry and music, and Zeus is the god of political power, and that the Muses bless people with poetry. The reason poetry is a blessing is because when someone is unhappy, poetry helps that person forget their sorrows and anguish. The implication here is that even though the gods offer both political power and stories, stories are better for people. If the Muses love you, you can help people feel better. Of course, this is self-serving coming from Hesiod. He's a poet who is going to tell us a story, so of course he thinks it's the best thing. But I think he's right. Stories are the best. The first story Hesiod's *Theogony* has for us is the story of how the universe began. Here's **Slide 25** (page 13): Hesiod tells us here about the three primordial beings that came into existence out of nothingness. First, there was that nothingness, Chaos, or Chasm, as Most translates it. This is space, and for anything else to exist, there first has to be a space for it to be. So space comes first, and then the Earth came into being, which gave the gods, and incidentally everyone else too, a place to stand. After space comes place, and this is the Earth. The third primordial being that just pops into existence with no explanation is Eros, or sexual desire. This is the most beautiful of the gods, and also the so-called limb-melter. I feel like it makes a certain kind of logical sense that space and place, Chasm and Earth, should be the first items to check off on the to-do list of the creation of the universe, but the logic of the third primordial being being Eros is a little harder to see. I think it's not just that sexual desire is a powerful and primal force. I also think there's a poetic or mythological reason behind this too. I've already talked about how in the time leading up to Hesiod's time, Greek mythology was a kind of chaotic soup, and Hesiod's *Theogony* starts to exert a kind of controlling influence, making a stable core of mythology. Hesiod is combining a lot of local traditions into something panhellenic, and the way he organizes all of the different gods into a coherent system is by genealogy. He organizes the gods into generations and into a big family tree. That means that for gods to be created in this system, he needs sex to happen. How do you get more gods? The same way as you get more people. So for the organizational goal of the poem to happen, the many different gods have to come into being in a family tree, in a genealogical system, and so before any of that can happen, there has to be Eros. Sort of. Actually, Chasm seems to be able to bring forth offspring without sexuality, and the sex starts happening in the next generation. Already in this passage, we can see that Chasm just starts producing offspring. Here Erebos, who is darkness, and Night, just spring forth from Chasm, but then they have sex with each other to produce Aether, which is the upper air, and Day. Earth, like Chasm, starts by just producing things, but then very quickly that production switches over to sexual reproduction. Here's **Slide 26** (page 13): The summary of the poem told us that there would be two lineages of the gods, one from Chasm and the other from Earth. We've seen the start of the one from Chasm, and now this starts the one from Earth. Like Chasm, Earth brings forth a few offspring alone, here Sky, and some mountains, and Pontus, the sea. And then the sex starts, which is why there had to be Eros already. Earth and Sky have sex and that produces the Ocean. The Ocean, by the way, can be distinguished from the sea. Greece is on the Mediterranean Sea, and this inner sea is one thing, and the Ocean that goes around the outside of the lands is another. In modern terms, we might call Pontus the Mediterranean Sea and Ocean the Atlantic Ocean. After that, the children of Earth and Sky are the Titans, and all these names Hesiod lists are the generation of the Titans. Elsewhere, Hesiod engages in a little etymological play by claiming that the Greek word "Titan" is related to the Greek word for "struggle." These guys are the ones who try, who struggle and fight. **Different Types of Greek Gods** The Titans are a little different from the kid of primordial beings we've seen up to now, so I want to take a brief break from looking at passages from the *Theogony* so I can talk a little about different kinds of gods, and different kinds of names of the gods. **Slide 27** says that there are many gods in the *Theogony* and each one has a complicated history of names and stories. We'll come back to a lot of them over the course of the year, but it's worth looking at a few examples now. I've already talked a little about Chaos, which Most translates as "Chasm." Also significant here are Γαῖα, Gaia, or Earth, and Οὐρανός, Ouranos, Uranus, or Sky. I've written the Greek words on the slide, so you can see what they look like. If you were to look up these words in a Greek dictionary, you would most likely find two entries for each, one with a capital first letter for the god, and one with a lowercase first letter for the natural phenomenon. When you read in the Loeb volume "Earth" with a capital "E," the Greek word is Gaia, which is both the normal word for earth with a lowercase "e" and also the name of the goddess. And, interestingly, early writing doesn't make a distinction between capital letters and lowercase ones, so for a long time, there was no way to distinguish between the common noun, that is the word earth with a small "e," and the proper noun, that is the name Earth with a capital "E." The same is true for Sky. The Greek word is Ouranos, and the more common Latinized version is Uranus, and our translation just makes that Sky, both as the common word and the name of the god. The fact that the names of these gods are just the words for natural things like Space and Earth and Sky tells us something about one type of Greek god. And, by the way, I often follow the usual convention of using the masculine form, "god," for both masculine and feminine gods together, that is for both gods and goddesses. When I say "gods," I usually include goddesses in that, and I don't often spell out the inclusion of both goddesses and gods. It's not ideal, but it's the usual convention as we have it. Anyway, one type or category of Greek god is a personification of a natural phenomenon. The sky is the sky, and it's also the god, Sky. Not all the gods are personifications of natural phenomena, but some are. **Slide 28** is a brief digression about the modern use of the Greek word Ouranos, or Sky, and that is the name of the planet, Uranus.  Original Caption Released with Image: This is an image of the planet Uranus taken by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986. The Voyager project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. **Image Credit: **NASA/JPL-Caltech\ **Image Addition Date: **1986-12-18 https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18182 While the brightest planets from Earth were named after and identified with gods in Ancient Greece and Rome, Uranus was not identified as a planet in antiquity and was only named Uranus in the late 18^th^ and early 19^th^ centuries. In 1782 Johann Elert Bode proposed the name Uranus for the newly identified planet on the reasoning that Saturn (that's the Roman name for the Greek Cronus) was the father of Jupiter (the Roman name for the Greek Zeus), and Uranus (the Roman name for the Greek Ouranos) was the father of Saturn (Cronus). Returning to the types of gods, **Slide 29** says, the primordial gods Hesiod names are often the names of natural phenomena, and this is not uncommon in polytheistic religions. We see things like this all the time and all over the world, where things like the sky get conceived of as anthropomorphic or human-like. It is unusual that the most important Greek gods have names that are largely unintelligible, not just to us, but to the Ancient Greeks too. Ancient Greeks and modern scholars try to find etymologies for names like Zeus, Hera, and Apollo, but they're never clearly correct. This is all the more puzzling given the fact that many Greek personal names, like Thrasyboulos (bold in counsel) have clear meanings. So, the word "Zeus" doesn't mean something like "Storm" or "Thunder" in the way that "Ouranos" means "Sky." It is not the case the Zeus *is* the storm. He brings storms. And Aphrodite is not sexuality---she bestows sexuality. The most important Greek gods are not personifications of natural phenomena. Aphrodite bestows sexuality, and her name can be used as a way of referring to sexuality, but there's no clear etymology linking her name to sexuality and there's no lowercase entry in the dictionary for Aphrodite like there is for Eros, who is both the god of sexual desire and the thing, sexual desire, itself. So, these gods are really a second type of category of god. There's the personifications of natural phenomena like Earth and Sky, and then there's these gods who are associated with natural phenomena, but whose names and origins are mysterious. **Slide 30** says, Nevertheless, we have already seen, mixed in with the Olympian gods, personifications of abstract concepts. On page 3, Hesiod wrote about, "venerated Themis (Justice) and quick-glancing Aphrodite, and golden-crowned Hebe (Youth) and beautiful Dione, and Leto and Iapetus and crooked-counseled Cronus, and Eos (Dawn) and great Helius (Sun) and gleaming Selene (Moon), and Earth and great Ocean and black Night, and the holy race of the other immortals who always are." Some of these gods belong to the first category, personifications of natural phenomena. Selene, the Moon, is like that. But there are also personifications of more abstract concepts here. Themis, who is Justice, and Hebe, who is Youth, are not exactly natural phenomena. They're more social concepts that get personified into anthropomorphic gods. There are at least, then, three types of Ancient Greek gods: natural phenomena like Eos (Dawn), personifications of abstract concepts like Themis (Justice), and characters whose names and origins are mysterious like Zeus. Of course, there's no evidence that these categories meant anything to Hesiod. I'm just trying to organize the gods in my own way here. Hesiod organized the gods by genealogy, and I'm trying to organize the gods by typology. **Slide 31** says, Hesiod makes no attempt to explain the concept of gods, although later Greeks did, and we do too. What I'm trying to do now is to think rationally about how the gods might have been invented in a time long before we have records. If there are different types of gods, did they get invented by people in different ways? What are the sources of these gods? Hesiod doesn't think that way at all. His story takes for granted that the gods exist. Maybe he really believed that and maybe he didn't, but his story says that the gods are real, and they came into being at first spontaneously and then by sexual reproduction, and so a genealogical organization makes sense. My story is a social historical one in which people invent the gods, and so a typological organization makes sense for me. But modern scholars aren't the only ones who try to tell a social historical story about the origins of the gods. Ancient Greek people did that too. We associate with Euhemerus (who lived in the 4^th^ century BCE) the idea of "euhemerism," which argues that gods like Zeus were once real people and that stories about them grew exaggerated over time to the point that they became gods in later times. I don't know if that's really how the gods got invented. It might be right and it makes a kind of logical sense, but there's no real evidence for it. My point is that sometimes Ancient Greek people, like Euhemerus, tried to explain the origins of the gods in a rational way, just like I'm trying to do. Hesiod isn't one of those people, though, or at least that's not his goal in the *Theogony*. On **Slide 32**, Hesiod's achievement in the *Theogony*, although it is certainly not his alone, is to organize a system in which primordial, natural gods like Earth and Sky coexist with abstract concepts like Justice and Youth and with more complicated, personal gods like Zeus and Hera. Ancient Greek names often included a patronymic, which means the name of the father. Pericles, for example, was Pericles, son of Xanthippus. It makes some sense, then, that the principle that would organize the proliferation of many gods into a system is a genealogical one. Ancient Greek people in Hesiod's time found themselves with a bunch of sky gods. For example, there's both Ouranos and Zeus, and they're both sky gods. So how do you reconcile the fact that there are two (and actually a lot more than two) gods that represent the same thing? Well, Hesiod lived in a society in which ancestry, genealogy, and inheritance were really important, so it made sense to him to put the different gods in charge of the same thing into different generations, like one could inherit from the other. It's not an ideal system because the gods are immortal, but he can gloss over that part. This type of plan, where you take the different traditions and combine them into one system that has a kind of logic, in Hesiod's case a genealogical logic, we might say takes myths and turns them into a mythology. And I want to be clear here that this is not Hesiod's idea alone. He wasn't some kind of solitary genius who decided to take a bunch of myths and make them into a mythology. This was a gradual cultural process done by a lot of people and enabled by the new technology of writing. It's just that Hesiod's work survives even now, so we can associate a larger, collective process with his name. **The Succession of the Rulership of the Gods** On **Slide 33**, what I want to do with the rest of our time for this week is just to retell one of the narrative threads of the *Theogony* in a way that emphasizes its continuity, even though it takes place in passages that are spread out throughout the poem. That thread is the story of the succession of the rulership of the gods that leads to the permanent establishment of Zeus as the king of the gods. I think this one thread is the one that is most commonly thought of as the main plot of the poem, so excerpting passages that tell that story might help to give you a sense of a story the poem is telling. The first passage from that story is on **Slide 34** (page 15): Right, okay, so here Hesiod is talking about the children of Earth and Sky. The Earth mother and the Sky father have had sex, but the Sky father is evil and he doesn't want any of his children to inherit is power. He's worried that having kids means that he'll become irrelevant and his kids will become the ones who matter. And he's immortal, so it's not like he's going to die. He wants to be the main guy in charge forever. The story is one of a conflict of generations, and that's a really common theme in Greek culture. We see it a lot, for example in classical Athenian comedy. In any society in which inheritance matters, and that's a lot of societies, the conflict between generations is going to become a thing. And at the time when Hesiod was writing, inheritance is becoming more significant in Greek culture. Sometimes I teach Athenian law, and I tell a story that in Greek culture, grazing land is communal land, and crop-growing land is privately owned. In the eighth century BCE, the population in Greece was rising and more land was being devoted to growing crops, which produces more sustenance per acre than raising animals does. That means that more land in Greece was becoming privately owned. It's also around this time that the arrival of writing allows written laws, and one of the first and most important purposes of those laws is resolving disputes about private property ownership and the inheritance of private property. So at the same time as Hesiod was writing the *Theogony*, we see in other parts of Greek culture that the issue of the inheritance of private property is becoming a core cultural concern. It makes sense, then, that one of the issues Hesiod would confront in his genealogical organization of mythology is the generational conflict that arises from inheritance. So anyway, Ouranos definitely wants to have sex, because, you know, Eros is a thing, and he doesn't want to have kids, because he doesn't want them to inherit from him and marginalize him while he's still alive. So he develops an evil plan to make that happen. He'll just keep on having sex with Earth continuously forever, and that way the kids will have to stay inside her and they can never be born. But being pregnant with many children forever is really uncomfortable for Earth, so she comes up with a plan of her own, and she creates an adamantium sickle to give to the unborn children inside of her. On **Slide 35** (page 17) we see what that sickle is for: Cronus, the last conceived child, is the one who is right up in the front of Earth next to Sky's genitals, so he takes the adamantium sickle, and Hesiod adds the gruesome detail that it's serrated, and he castrates his father Ouranos, which frees up the birth canal and allows Cronus and all the other Titans to be born. And the blood that spurts out is also fertile, and it also impregnates Earth, and evil things are born from that kind of angry violence. This is the birth of the Erinyes, who are the Furies, and the Giants. But it's also the origin of the nice Nymphs, so it's not all bad. The Titans now take over as the chief generation of the gods. They have their own Earth mother, her name is Rhea, and their own Sky father, his name is Cronus. And they're going to repeat the generational conflict they had with their parents, but now they'll be the parents and the Olympians will be the children. On **Slide 36** (page 40): Okay, so it didn't work for Ouranos to keep his children inside their mother, so Cronus has a different plan. He'll let his children be born, but he'll swallow them and keep them inside himself, and that way they won't be out in the world and the next generation won't inherit his power and take over. Just like Gaia, the new Earth mother, Rhea, fights back. On **Slide 37** (page 41): So Rhea gives birth to Zeus in secret and hands him over to her mother Earth, Gaia, and she conceals him deep in a cave on Crete. Rhea tricks Cronus by giving him a stone to swallow instead of a child, and he is totally fooled. This is after the passage, but in the interests of time I'll summarize. The stone makes Cronus vomit up all of his children, the Olympians, who fight with Zeus and defeat the Titans and imprison them. So Now Zeus and the other Olympians are in charge and there's a new father in charge of the family of the gods: Zeus. But Zeus knows that Ouranos' strategy for not being overthrown, that is, keeping his children in their mother, didn't work, and neither did Cronus' strategy of keeping his children in himself. So Zeus develops a new plan. He marries Metis, whom Glenn Most identifies as the goddess of wisdom. That's not wrong, but it's not detailed enough. Metis is sometimes called the goddess of transformative intelligence, but I think the clearest way to describe her is that she is trickery. She's cleverness in the sense of planning to defeat an opponent. She's craft and guile. Here's **Slide 38** (page 73): So Zeus' strategy is not to keep his children inside himself, but to swallow his wife and keep her inside himself. Zeus knew that his wife, Metis, would give birth to children who would overthrow him, so when she was about to give birth to their first child, Athena, he swallowed her. Then, after the passage ends, Athena is born and springs forth from the forehead of Zeus. But he can't have any more children with Metis, because she's inside him, and he has absorbed her cleverness and wisdom. He now has the trickery and guile of Metis at his disposal all the time. And it turns out that this strategy for avoiding inheritance is the successful one, and Zeus gets to be the king of the gods forever. He'll marry a second time, this time to Hera, but that's not part of this story and it doesn't seem to cause him the generational problem. He has solved that one. It's easy to avoid letting your children inherit your power---just live forever and make sure to keep your wife inside of you. I could spend a lot of time analyzing that story, but I've been talking for a long time and I didn't tell the story for complex analysis. I just wanted to extract and emphasize that particular narrative thread from the *Theogony* to help you see a bit of a throughline. I also think it's just a fun, awesome, and weird story. It's a great example of how Greek mythology sometimes makes sense and other times has these wild and outlandish things happening. And we're not done with the weird and wild tales of Hesiod. We're only done for this week. For next time I've asked you to read a part of Hesiod's *Works and Days*, and I'll have some more to say about the *Theogony* too. I'll talk to you then.