# Hesiod, and Theognis/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
THE THEOGONY.
The geographer Pausanias was the first to cast a doubt upon the received belief of the ancients that the 'Theogony' and the 'Works and Days' originated from one and the same author. On the other hand, Herodotus attributed to Hesiod the praise of having been one of the earliest systematisers of a national mythology; and Plato in his Dialogues has references to the 'Theogony' of Hesiod, which apparently correspond with passages in the work that has come down to us as such. Unless, therefore, there is strong internal evidence of separate authorship in the two poems, the testimony of a writer four hundred years before Christ is entitled to outweigh that of one living two hundred years after. But so far from such internal evidence being forthcoming, it would be easy to enumerate several strong notes of resemblance, which would go far towards establishing a presumption that both were from the same hand. The same economical spirit which actuates the poet of the 'Works' is visible also in the 'Theogony,' where the head and front of Pandora's ​offending is, that the "beauteous evil," woman, is a drone in the hive, and consumes the fruits of man's labour without adding to them. The author of the 'Theogony' holds in exceptionally high esteem the wealth-giving divinity Plutus, and this is quite consistent with the hereditary and personal antipathy to poverty and its visitations so manifest in the bard of the 'Works.' Again, there is reason to believe that the proper commencement of the 'Works and Days'—which, to translate the Greek idiom, might run, "Well, it seems that after all Contention is of two kinds, and not of one only" (v. 11)—is nothing less than the poet's correction of a statement he had made in his poem on the generation of the gods, that Eris, or Contention, was one and indivisible, the daughter of Night, and the mother of an uncanny progeny, beginning with Trouble and ending with Oath. We might add, too, curious coincidences of expression and verse-structure, such as the use of a characteristic epithet standing by itself for the substantive which it would commonly qualify (e. g., "the boneless" to represent "the caterpillar," and "the silvery" for "the sea"), and the peculiarity of the commencement of three consecutive lines with one and the same word. Instances of both are common to the two poems. But for the purposes of the present volume it is perhaps sufficient to rest our acquiescence in a common authorship upon the plausibility and reasonableness of Bishop Thirlwall's view, that Hesiod, living amidst a people rich in sacred and oracular poetry, and engaged for the ​most part in husbandry, "collected for it in a fuller and a more graceful body the precepts with which the simple wisdom of their forefathers had ordered their rural labours and their domestic life;" at the same time that, "from the songs of their earlier bards, and the traditions of their temples, he drew the knowledge of nature and of superhuman things which he delivered in the popular form of the 'Theogony.'"
Of the aim which he proposed to himself in that ancient poem, no better description has been given than Mr Grote's, who designates it as "an attempt to cast the divine functions into a systematic sequence." The work of Homer and Hesiod was, to reduce to system the most authentic traditions about the Hellenic gods and demi-gods, and to consolidate a catholic belief in the place of conflicting local superstitions. So far as we are able to judge, Homer's share in the task consisted in the passing notices of gods and goddesses which are scattered up and down the Iliad and the Odyssey. For Hesiod may be claimed the first incorporation and enumeration of the generation and genealogy of the gods and goddesses in a coherent system; and so it was from his 'Theogony,' as Mr Grote has shown, that "men took their information respecting their theogonic antiquities; that sceptical pagans, and later assailants of paganism, derived their subjects of attack; and that, to understand what Plato deprecated and Xenophanes denounced, the Hesiodic stories must be recounted in naked simplicity." Whence he derived his information, which is older than the so-called ​Orphic Theogony—whether from Egypt, India, and Persia, or, as some have thought, from the Mosaic writings—it is lost labour to inquire. He certainly systematised and consolidated the mass of traditions, which came to his hand a more or less garbled and distorted collection of primitive and nearly universal legendary lore. An especial interest must therefore attach to the study of his scheme and method, and it must be enhanced by the position which antiquity has almost unanimously accorded to him, in the history of its earliest poetry and religion.
Hesiod's 'Theogony' consists of three divisions: a cosmogony, or creation of the world, its powers, and its fabric; a theogony proper, recording the history of the dynasties of Cronus and Zeus; and a fragmentary generation of heroes, sprung from the intercourse of mortals with immortals. Hesiod and his contemporaries considered that in their day Jupiter or Zeus was the lord of Olympus; but it was necessary to chronicle the antecedents of his dynasty, and hence the account of the stages and revolutions which had led up to the established order under which Hesiod's generation found itself. And so, after a preface containing amongst other matters the episode of the Muses' visit to the shepherd-poet, at which we glanced in Chapter I., Hesiod proceeds to his proper task, and represents Chaos as primeval, and Earth, Tartarus, and Eros (Love), as coming next into existence:—
At first Chaos spontaneously produces Erebus and Night, the latter of whom gives birth to Ether and Day; whilst Earth creates in turn the heaven, the mountains, and the sea, the cosmogony so far corresponding generally with the Mosaic. But at this point Eros or Love begins to work. The union of Earth with Heaven results in the birth of Oceanus and the Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred-handed giants. The sire of so numerous a progeny, and first ruler of creation, Uranus, conceiving that his sovereignty is imperilled by his offspring, resorts to the expedient of relodging each child, as soon as it is born, within the bowels of its mother, Earth. Groaning under such a burden, she arms her youngest and wiliest son, Cronus, with a sickle of her own product, iron, and hides him in an ambush with a view to his mutilating his sire. The conspiracy is justified on the principle of retributive justice. Uranus is disabled and dethroned, and, by a not very clear nor presentable legend, the foam -born goddess Aphrodite is fabled to have sprung from his mutilation. Here is the poet's account of her rise out of the sea:—
The concluding verses of this passage are notable as enumerating the fabled assessors of Venus; and the italicised lines, which find modern parallels in Milton, Scott, and Tennyson, may have suggested the invo​cation of the benignant goddess in the opening of Lucretius:—
By the act of Cronus, the Titans, released from durance, arose to a share in the deliverer's dynasty, the Cyclopes and giants still, it would seem, remaining shut up in their prison-house. But before the poet proceeds to the history of this dynasty and succession of rulers, he apparently conceives it to be his duty to go through the generations of the elder deities with a genealogical ​minuteness which, it must be confessed, is now and then tedious; though, on the other hand, there are occasional points of interest in the process, which would be interminable if not so relieved. It is curious, for example, to find "the Hesperian maids"—
ranked with Death, and Sleep, and Gloom and its kindred, as the unbegotten brood of Night. Possibly the clue is to be found in Hesiod's having a glimmering of the Fall and its consequences, because death and woe were in the plucking of the fruit of "that forbidden tree." Again, from the union of Nereus, the sea-god par excellence, and eldest offspring of Pontus, one of the original powers, with the Oceanid, Doris, are said to have sprung the fifty Nereids, whose names, taken from some characteristic of the sea—its wonders, its treasures, and its good auguries—correspond in many instances with Homer's list in the Iliad (xviii. 39-48), and point to a pre-existent legend approached by both poets. In due order, also, are recorded the children of Tethys and the Titan Oceanus,—to wit, the endless rivers and springs, and the water-nymphs, or Oceanids, whose function is to preside over these, and to convey nourishment from the Sire to all things living. As to the list of rivers, it is noticeable that Hesiod includes the Nile, known to Homer only by the name of Ægyptus—and the Eridanus, supposed to ​represent the Rhodanus or Rhone; also that the rivers of Greece appear to be slighted in comparison with those of Asia Minor and the Troad—a circumstance to be accounted for by the Asiatic origin of the poet's father, which would explain his completer geographical knowledge of the colonies than of the mother country. The names of the water-nymphs are referable to islands and continents—e. g., Europa, Asia, Doris, Persia—or to physical characteristics, such as clearness, turbidness, violet hue, and the like. But the poet gives a good reason for furnishing only a selection:—
We must not trespass upon our readers' patience, by enumerating with the conscientious genealogist the progeny of the rest of the Titans. Two goddesses, however, stand out from amidst one or other of these broods, as of more special note, and more direct bearing upon the world's government and order. Asteria, the goddess of stars, a Titanid in the second generation, bears to Perses, a god of light, and a Titan of the original stock, one only daughter, Hecate. The attributes of ​this goddess, as described by Hesiod, are so discrepant from those ascribed to her by later poets, as to afford strong proof of the antiquity of this poem. She is not, as in later poetry, the patron of magic arts, but the goddess who blesses labour and energy, in field, senate, and forum:—
The other goddess, Styx, a daughter of Oceanus, is memorable not more for her own prominent position in ancient fable, than for having amongst her off-spring those iron-handed ministers of Jove, Strength (Kratos) and Force (Bia), whom the classical reader meets again in the opening of the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus. Their nearness to Zeus is ascribed by Hesiod to the decision with which their mother espoused his cause in the struggle with Cronus and the Titans:—
But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second stage of the poem. According to Hesiod, Cronus or Saturn was alive to the faults of his sire's policy of self-protection, and conceived an improvement in the means of checking revolutionary development on the part of his offspring, by imprisoning them in his own bowels rather than their mother's. Mindful of the destiny that "to his own child he should bow down his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his consort, Rhea, roused her to a spirit of opposition. When about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus, she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth, in the concealment of his birth:—
As the gods in ancient mythology grow apace, Zeus is soon ripe for the task of aiding his mother, whose craft persuades Cronus to disgorge first the stone which he had mistaken for his youngest-born, and then the five children whom he had previously devoured. A stone, probably meteoric, was shown at Delphi in Pausanias's day as the stone in question, and an object of old memorial to the devout Greek. The rescued brethren at once take part with, their deliverer. The first act of Zeus was, as we have seen, to advance Force and Strength, with their brothers Victory and Rivalry, to the dignity of "a bodyguard," and to give their mother Styx the style and functions of "oath-sanctioner." His next was to free from the prison to which their father Uranus had consigned them, the hundred-handed giants, and the Cyclopes, who furnished his artillery of lightnings and hot thunderbolts. His success in the struggle was assured by the oracles of Gæa (Earth), if only he could ​band these towers of strength and muscularity against Cronus and his Titans; and so the battle was set in array, and a fierce war ensued—
Hesiod's description of the contest, which has been justly held to constitute his title to a rank near Homer as an epic poet, is prefaced by a feast at which Zeus addresses his allies, and receives in turn the assurance of their support. The speeches are not wanting in dignity, though briefer than those which, in his great epic, Milton has moulded on their model. Our English poet had bathed his spirit in Hesiod before he essayed the sixth book of his 'Paradise Lost;' and it was well and wisely done by the translator of the following description of the war betwixt Zeus and the Titans to aim at a Miltonic style and speech:—
A pause at this point may be excused, seeing that it affords the opportunity of noting the contrast between the heathen and the Christian conceptions of divine strength. In Milton the Messiah has a super-abundance of might:—
In the conflict with the Titans, Zeus has to exert all his might to insure victory:—
To heighten the turmoil, the winds and elements fight on the side of Zeus. The tide of battle turns. Jove's huge auxiliaries overwhelm the Titans with a succession of great missiles, send them sheer beneath the earth, and consign them to a durance "as far beneath, under earth, as heaven is from earth, for equal is the ​space from earth to murky Tartarus." There, in the deeper chamber of an abyss from which there is no escape, the Titans are thenceforth imprisoned, with the hundred-handed giants set over them as keepers, and with Day and Night acting as sentries or janitors in front of the brazen threshold:—
Of these sentries the readers of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' may recall the description at the opening of the sixth book; whilst the counterparts of the twin chil​dren of Night may be found in the Iliad, as well as in the Æneid.
Another wonder of the prison-house, in Hesiod's account of it, is Cerberus:—
In close proximity to this monster was the fabled Styx, in some respects the most awful personage in the 'Theogony.' The legend about her is somewhat obscure, but it is curious as being connected with that of Iris, the rainbow, whose function of carrying up water when any god has been guilty of falsehood seems a vague embodiment of the covenant sealed by the "bow set in the cloud:"—
Such, according to Hesiod, are the surroundings of the infernal prison-house which received the vanquished Titans when Jove's victory was assured. Not yet, however, could he rest from his toil: he had yet to scotch the half-serpent, half-human Typhœus, the offspring of a new union betwixt Earth and Tartarus,—a monster so terror-inspiring by means of its hundred heads and voices to match, that Olympus might well dread another and ​less welcome master should this pest attain full development. Zeus, we are told, foresaw the danger:—
The italicised lines may recall the noble image in the 'Paradise Lost;' a passage which Milton's editor, Todd, pronounces grander in conception than Hesiod's. But, as Elton fairly answers, it is only in Milton's reservation that he is superior. "The mere rising of Zeus causing mountains to rock beneath his everlasting feet, is sublimer than the firmament shaking from the rolling of wheels."
After quelling this monster, Zeus is represented bethinking himself of a suitable consort, and espousing Metis or Wisdom, so as to effect a union of absolute wisdom with absolute power. As, however, in the Hesiodic view of the divinity, there was ever a risk of dethronement to the sire at the hand of his offspring, Zeus hit upon a plan which should prevent his wife producing a progeny that might hereafter conspire with her to dethrone him, after the hereditary fashion. He absorbed Metis, with her babe yet unborn, in his own breast, and, according to mythology, found this task ​easier through having persuaded her to assume the most diminutive of shapes. Thenceforth he blended perfect wisdom in his own body, and in due time, as from a second womb—
Yet, notwithstanding so summary a putting away of his first wife, Zeus, it appears, had no mind to remain a widower. Themis bare him the Hours; Eurynome the Graces—
and Mnemosyne, a daughter of Uranus, became the mother by him of the Nine Muses, celebrated by Hesiod at the beginning of the poem. With Demeter and Latona also he had tender relations, before he finally resigned himself to his sister Hera (Juno), who took permanent rank as Queen of the Gods. From this union sprang Mars and Hebe, and Eileithyia or Lucina: whilst according to Hesiod, who herein differs from Homer, Hephasstus or Vulcan was the offspring of Hera alone, as a set-off to Zeus's sole parentage of Athena. Of the more illicit amours of the fickle king of the gods, and of their issues, and ​ the marriages consequent upon these children of the gods espousing nymphs or mortals, Hesiod has still much to tell, in his fashion of genealogising, before we reach the Heroogony, or list of heroes horn of the union of goddesses with mortal men, which is tacked to the 'Theogony' proper, as it has come down to us. It is indeed a list and little more; tracing, for example, the birth of Plutus to the meeting of Derneter with lasius in the wheat-fields of Crete; of Achilles, to the union of Peleus with Thetis; of Latinus, Telegonus, and another, to the dalliance of Ulysses with the divine Circe.
Thus virtually ends the 'Theogony' in its extant form, but our sketch of it would not be complete were we to ignore the story of Pandora and Prometheus, which has been passed over at its proper place in the genealogy, with a view to a clearer unfolding of the sequence of the poem. In the 'Works' this legend is an episode; in the 'Theogony' it is a piece of genealogy, à propos of the offspring of lapetus, the brother of Cronus, and Clymene. Atlas, one of their sons, was doomed by Zeus to bear up the vault of heaven as an eternal penalty; Menœtius, another, was for his insolence thrust down to Erebus by the lightning-flash. Of Epimetheus, who in the 'Works' accepts the gift of Pandora, it is simply said in the 'Theogony' that he did so, and brought evil upon man by his act. Nothing is said of heedlessness of his brother's cau​tion; nothing of the casket of evils, from which in the 'Works,' Pandora, by lifting the lid, lets mischief and disease loose upon the world. The key to the difference between the two accounts is to be found in the fact that in the 'Works' Hesiod narrates the consequences of the sin of Prometheus; in the 'Theogony,' the story of the sin itself. In the order of events that story would run thus: Prometheus enrages Zeus by scoffing at sacrifices, and by tricking the sage ruler of Olympus into a wrong choice touching the most savoury part of the ox. In his office of arbitrator, he divides two portions, the flesh and entrails covered with the belly on one hand, the bones under a cover of white fat on the other. Zeus chooses after the outward appearance, but, as Hesiod seems to imply, chooses wittingly, for the sake of having a grievance. Thenceforth in sacrifice it was customary to offer the whitening bones at his altars. But the god neither forgot nor forgave the cheat—
Outwitted twice, he roused himself to take vengeance ​upon Prometheus as well as his clients. On the latter he inflicted the evil of winsome womankind, represented by Pandora, and placed them in the dilemma of either not marrying, and dying heirless, or of finding in marriage the lottery which it is still accounted. As to Prometheus and his punishment, Hesiod's account is as follows:—
This durance was eventually terminated by Hercules slaying the vulture or eagle, and reconciling Zeus and the Titan. Hesiod's moral will sum up the tale:—
The foregoing sketch will, it is hoped, have enabled English readers to discover in Hesiod's 'Theogony' not a mere prosy catalogue, but a systematised account of the generation of the gods of Hellas, relieved of excessive ​detail by fervid descriptions, stirring battle-pieces, noble images, and graceful fancies. Such as it was, it appears to have found extensive circulation and acceptance in Greece, and to have formed the chief source of information amongst Greeks concerning the divine antiquity. This is not the kind of work to admit of a comparison of the so-called Orphic Theogony, which, in point of fact, belongs to a much later date, with that of Hesiod. Enough to state that the former, to use Mr Grote's expression, "contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons, enlarged and mystically disguised." But those who have the time and materials for carrying out the comparison for themselves, will be led to discover in the development of religious belief, in the bias towards a sort of unity of Godhead, and in the investment of the powers of nature with the attributes of deity, which characterise the Orphic worship and theogonies, indirect corroboration of the opinion which assigns a very early date to the simple, unmystical, and, so to speak, unspiritual view of the divine foretime, handed down to us in Hesiod's theogonic system.
* ↑ See Theog., v. 225.
* ↑ 'Hist, of Greece, I., c. vi.
* ↑ Ibid., i. 15, 16.
* ↑ "Now when as sacred light began to dawn In Eden on the humid flowers that breathed Their morning incense, when all things that breathe From the earth's great altar send up silent praise To the Creator;" &c. —Paradise Lost, ix. "A foot more light, a step more true, Ne'er from the heath-flower dash'd the dew; E'en the slight harebell raised its head Elastic from her airy tread." —Lady of the Lake, i. 18. "But light as any wind that blows, So fleetly did she stir; The flower she touched on dipt and rose, And turned to look at her." —Tennyson: 'The Talking Oak.' Even more to the point, which is the charm to create verdure and flower-growth which pertains to Aphrodite's feet, are the following citations from Ben Jonson and Wordsworth:— "Here she was wont to go, and here, and here, Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow; The world may find the spring by following her, For other print her aery steps ne'er left. And where she went the flowers took thickest root, As she had sowed them with her odorous foot." —Jonson: 'Sad Shepherd,' i. 1. "Flowers laugh before thee in their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads." —Wordsworth: 'Ode to Duty.'
* ↑ II. xiv. 231, &c.
* ↑ Æn. vi. 278, &c.
* ↑ "Under his burning wheels The steadfast empyrean shook throughout, All but the throne itself of God." —vi. 832-834.