At this point in the course, we are about
to make a pivot. We are leaving behind Homer's world and
this wonderfully rich set of stories that get told in, in, in Homer's epic poetry.
And we are moving into some different genres of writing.
We are going to look at things in the next couple of weeks that are going to get us
up close and personal with the gods. We are going to spend some time in their
temples , we are going to get to know them or we are going to get to know what they
like, what they don't like. We are going to get to know them in a kind
of up close and personal way. We've got a sense of them from Homer, but
our main character, always, always there was a human being a male gender version of
the human being at the center and that's what we really focused on.
The gods were kind of there, they seemed mostly attached to the action by focusing
on what humans cared about. That's not going to be true where we turn
to next. What we're going to do now is go to an
epic by this poet Hesiod named The Theogony, and also look after, the week
after that, at a collection of hymns known by tradition as The Homeric Hymns.
Each of these poems is going to get us inside of a god's world.
We're going to have a chance to watch what it's like to be them.
If we go in with the expectations that we're going to find all powerful, all
knowing and all good creatures we're going to not be satisfied.
In fact, the Greek gods are not all like that.
They're flawed and strange, and they have their own ways of doing things.
They don't actually know everything. They know lots of stuff but they don't
know everything. They have tremendous powers.
They're much more powerful than you and I but they're not all powerful.
And they're surely not all good. They do some bad things.
They're in fact maybe it's something like what you and I are like, if only we didn't
die and we're massively powerful. That's kind of, I think, how the Greeks
have their vision of their gods. In addition to the other things that they
do that we've talked about, they suffer, they go through trials and tribulations
they try to find their place among their peers they try to get set up in life and
for those of you who, who pay attention to your etymologies, you'll already know in
looking at the title of the work we're going to turn to in this coming week,
Hesiod's Theogony that the gods are also born.
Yes, indeed, and the gods might not die, but according to Hesiod and rich parts of
the tradition, the gods are indeed born, there's a time before which they don't
exist. He Greek title of Hesiod's epic,
Theogonia, comes from two words, thaos, and gonia thaos being God and gonia
meaning a birth, a coming into being through birth.
So, we're going to get into this other kind of world through Hesiod and through
the Homeric Hymns. We're going to be in a world that's very
early, early on much prior to the kind of Homeric stories that we've been seeing in
what happens in the Trojan War and afterwards.
We're back in the early days of creation in kinda protozoon before the world was
formed. This early time humans and gods spend time
face to face. We're going to see that's happening.
And as you run into it it's quite striking from a Homeric perspective but it's the
world we're going into next. So, we are going to get to know their gods
in these coming lectures. We're going to see them face to face and
spend some time with their trials and their tribulations as they try to find
their places. Hesiod's Theogony is coming this week, and
the Homeric Hymns coming in the week