But before we get to this massive war
between Zeus and Chronos. New generation of gods and old generation
of gods, there's a long digression that's built in.
Hesiod talks to us about the arrival of human beings.
All of a sudden they're just there in the story.
Now, some of us as we read this are thinking to ourselves, Where did the human
beings come from? There's no drum roll, there's no clash of
cymbals, there's no rhetorical flourish to say ta-da here comes the human beings.
They're just there. Hesiod's story, they're just kind of
there, pretty much in order to worship the gods.
We meet them in the context of sacrifice, and the worship of the gods.
I think we can draw from this a couple of different conclusions.
For Hesiod, it's definitely not a big deal, that a human should arrive on the
scene. The gods is the story he's telling now.
And then also, the point of human beings and their relationship with the rest of
the, of the cosmos, is in order to keep things functioning.
They give the gods what the gods want through sacrifice.
The story of human beings emerges out of this figure of Prometheus, and it happens
at a place called Mekone. We learned about Prometheus, via
digression on genealogy connected to. Everything is connected to genealogy in
Hesiod, a genealogy connected to a titan named Iapetos.
Iapetos has offspring, Prometheus is one of them, and Prometheus gets involved in a
mischievous way in a sacrificial ritual that human beings, who just happen to
already be around, are given in honor of the gods.
Zeus is there, and he gets to witness the sacrifice being made, and Prometheus makes
two piles of the animal sacrifice. One of them is just the bones of the
animal covered with fat to make them look attractive.
And the other is a heap of the choicest meats, that he covers over with fur to try
to hide that. He then gives Zeus the opportunity, and
says Zeus, choose which one you like. The, the one that's showing glistening
with fat is the one that Zeus goes for. In Hesiod's version of the tale, Zeus is
not deceived. He knows what's happening, but he's going
to go out and do this so that he can punish Prometheus later.
He takes the bones, and goes and gobbles them up.
Leaving the choicest piece of meats for the human beings to eat.
Some people when they read this say to themselves, well, this is a very strange
sounding ritual. Why should this be happening?
Very strange sounding thing to need an explanation.
Well, it just so happens that what we're seeing here is the typical way that Greek
sacrifice is executed. When a Greeks, when the Greeks do
sacrifice, they'll kill the animal ritually.
They'll take its bones, wrap them in glistening fat, and they'll send those up,
burn them up in a fire and send them up to the gods.
The gods presume they like that smoke. That's the part they like.
This is the kind of story that we hear from Homer.
Hesiod gives us a further story saying, this whole thing emerged out of an
original deception. The gods were actually, Hesiod says
Prometheus was trying to trick them. Zeus wasn't really tricked.
Prometheus was trying to trick them, Zeus went along with it and he's, now takes the
bad parts of the sacrifice leaving all the best parts for the human being.
It seems like what we have here is an example of humans who were engaged in
sacrifice, did this as a normal ritual activity and at some point asked
themselves, my gosh you know just give the bones to the Gods and keep all the good
meat for ourselves. Is that okay?
There's a kind of residual guilt built into this explanation, isn't there, as if
the human beings needed an explanation, why it was okay to give just the bones to
the gods and keep the meat for themselves. I think what [inaudible] has done is given
us a, a reasoning behind that. He's using myth to explain a ritual
practice whose logic is a little hard to understand.
Giving us that background, we get to blame it all on Prometheus, and then you and I
as humans, when we carry forward our sacrificial rituals, keep the best parts
for ourselves and give the bones to Zeus, we're just doing what's been set up since
time immemorial, back to that original deception of Prometheus.
Zeus is highly angered and he decides to punish Prometheus.
First he's going to punish the human beings by stealing fire back from them.
Presumably they had fire because they were engaged in sacrificial rituals, so they
had to have something to be able to burn up the sacrifices to the gods.
Zeus takes it back from them and keeps it with, from them.
Prometheus now, carrying forward with his mischief, worms his way back up to Zeus's
lair and steals the fire again in a fennel stalk, and gives it to the human being so
they can have it again. Zeus is irate and decides to punish
Prometheus through eternity. He has now an eagle, Zeus' own bird, who
goes down and eats out Prometheus' liver. That liver then grows back such that the
bird can come back and eat it out again. Prometheus constantly is being tortured
for all eternity by having his liver eaten out by a live bird and then have it grow
back. He's one of those famous sinners that we
see who does something so awful that he gets punished throughout all eternity.
Not that many of those in antiquity. Prometheus is in a very small group.
We met a couple of them in the underworld in Homer's Odyssey.
Now, as our story carries on, there's more punishment.
Zeus is not done with his punishment when it comes to, this episode at Mekone, and
this attempted deception by Prometheus. He now needs to punish human beings.
So what he does is create a affliction against humankind, as he see, puts it.
It's the whole race of women. Female gendered human beings are brought
against males as a punishment, in Hesiod's telling, strongly misogynistic.
Character of this story, reveals, a, a, a strong gender affiliation of Hesiod.
He sides with men clearly, talking about condemning the whole race of women by
connecting them genealogically with men only in so far as they are brought down as
a punishment, for all the nasty stuff that happened at Mekone, reveals Hesiod's view
of women. Sadly, many of our poets don't have quite
rich and very well thought out views on these gender relations.
Hesiod's very strong and upsetting opinion, right there at the core of the
theogony is one, that those who were interested in gender and antiquity.
Surely, you need to take a good, strong, hard look at.
Now after this episode at Mekone, this digression in which we learn about human
beings, we learn about them as being involved with the divinities in a ritual
context. We're going to turn from here back to
Zeus. And we're going to hear about this story
of how Zeus goes ahead and conquers the earlier generation of Titans.