Chapter 3

Greek Creation Stories

 Hesiod
• Greek poet who lived in about 700 B.C.E.
• Composed two great poems, the Theogony and
the Works and Days.
• Gregory Nagy has argued that Hesiod and his
predecessor Homer played were instrumental in
formulating Greek traditions about the gods by
synthesizing diverse local stories into a “unified
pan-Hellenic model that suits most city-states
but corresponds exactly to none,” at a time when
“[e]ach polis or ‘city’ was a state unto itself, with
its own traditions in government, law, religion”
(37).
 The Greek Generation Gap
• Hesiod presents us with a succession of
three gods – Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus –
each of whom supplants his father. Each
male god incorporates elements of his
predecessors.
 The Greek Generation Gap, 2
• Philip Slater points out that the attitude of Greek
fathers to their sons is related to the marriage
practices and family structure of the Greeks.
• Greek men tended to marry when they had
already established themselves, at age 30 or so.
• Women, on the other hand, were much younger
when they married and tended not to be
educated outside the household. Slater puts the
age of marriage at 14: Hesiod recommends
marrying a girl who is “in her fifth year” of
maturity, which implies a marriage age of 16 to
18 (Works and Days 698).
 The Greek Gender Gap
• In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hera is presented as the
mother of Typhon, the monstrous creature who attacks
Zeus in Hesiod. This battle may well have represented a
more general conflict between the gods.
• Jenny Strauss Clay points out suggestions in Homer’s
Iliad of an earlier stage in the history of the Olympian
gods when Zeus’ authority was not yet firmly established,
as well as indications of a challenge by an alliance of
Hera and the Titans.
• Joan V. O’Brien has argued that Hesiod was familiar with
an older, more powerful Hera, who was herself an earth
goddess. In her view, Hesiod weakens the primeval
female goddess by distributing her power to a variety of
goddesses and by attributing the birth of Typhon to Gaia,
or Earth.
 The Greek Gender Gap, 2
• When Zeus worries about being usurped, he
exerts power over his wives directly.
– He swallows Metis so she never bears the son she is
destined to have, who will be greater than his father.
– The female forces in the universe are weak:
• Gaia’s power over fertility is distributed, first to Aphrodite,
goddess of animal fecundity, then to Demeter, goddess of
vegetable fertility.
• Aphrodite, the source of procreation, herself has no divine
children except, in later myth, the harmless Cupid.
• Demeter bears only a daughter, who is no threat to her
father, in part because Zeus marries her off to his brother.
 Creation in Hesiod
Neutral scientific language:
Chaos was first of all, but next appeared
Broad-bosomed Earth, sure standing-place for all
The gods who live on snowy Olympus' peak,
And misty Tartarus, in a recess
Of broad-pathed earth, and Love, most beautiful
Of all the deathless gods . . .
From Chaos came black Night and Erebos.
Sexual language:
And Night in turn gave birth to Day and Space . . .
And Earth bore starry Heaven, first, to be
An equal to herself, to cover her
All over, and to be a resting-place,
Always secure, for all the blessed gods.
 Creation in Hesiod, 2
More sexual language:
Then she brought forth long hills, the lovely homes
Of goddesses, the Nymphs who live among
The mountain clefts. Then, without pleasant love,
She bore the barren sea with its swollen waves,
Pontus. And then she lay with Heaven, and bore . . .
Kreius, Iapetos, Hyperion,
Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne,
Lovely Tethys, and Phoebe, golden-crowned.
Last, after these, most terrible of sons,
The crooked-scheming Kronos came to birth
Who was his vigorous father's enemy.
 Creation in Hesiod, 3
Chaos means gap, and the gap created is
described as follows:

. . . But the hidden boy

Stretched forth his left hand; in his right he took
The great long jagged sickle; eagerly
He harvested his father’s genitals
And threw them off behind.
 Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Devotes more attention to the affairs of
humans than does the Theogony.
• Is the source of the stories of Pandora and
the Ages of Man.
• Stories show the mastery of Zeus and his
control of gods and humans.
• May have been written to be performed at
a poetic competition; it features the
concept of Strife.
 Strife
• Theogony: Heaven tried to withhold power
from his sons by hiding them in the earth.
• Works and Days: This principle is also
operative in relations between the gods
and humans.
 Strife, 2
Strife is no only child. Upon the earth
Two Strifes exist; the one is praised by those
Who come to know her, and the other blamed.
Their natures differ: for the cruel one
Makes battles thrive, and war; she wins no love
But men are forced, by the immortals’ will,
To pay the grievous goddess due respect.
The other, first-born child of blackest Night,
Was set by Zeus, who lives in air, on high,
Set in the roots of earth, an aid to men.
She urges even lazy men to work . . .
this Strife is good for mortal men
Potter hates potter, carpenters compete,
And beggar strives with beggar, bard with bard.
 Pandora
• “Zeus concealed the secret, angry in his heart at
being hoodwinked by Prometheus, and so he
thought of painful cares for men. First he hid fire.
But the son of Iapetos stole it from Zeus the
Wise, concealed the flame in a fennel stalk, and
fooled the Thunderer.”
• Zeus’ response: “They’ll pay for fire: I’ll give
another gift to men, an evil thing for their delight,
and all will love this ruin in their hearts.”
 Pandora, 2
“The woman opened up the cask, and
scattered pains and evil among men.”
• Pandora opened a storage jar, which was
more usually a container for food like wine,
olives, or grain.
• Hesiod uses the story to justify Greek
misogyny (the dislike of women). For an
alternative view, we have Odysseus’ positive
estimation of his wife Penelope’s importance
in Homer’s Odyssey.
 The Ages of Man
• Golden Race – “... untouched by work or
sorrow. Vile old age never appeared ...”
• Silver Race – “huge baby, by his mother's
side ... [They] lived brief, anguished lives
... could not control themselves, but
recklessly injured each other and forsook
the gods.”
 The Ages of Man, 2
• Bronze Race – “… strange and full of power.
And they loved the groans and violence of
war …”
• Race of Heroes – “A godlike race of heroes …
some, who crossed the open sea in ships, for
fair-haired Helen's sake, were killed at Troy. ”
• Iron Race – “I wish I were not of this race, that I
had died before, or had not yet been born.…
Now, by day, men work and grieve unceasingly;
by night, they waste away and die.”