In this part of our story, we see the war.
Zeus and Kronos go at each other. It's a ten-year battle that the stakes of
the universe are up for grabs in their conflict.
Just before we detoured into the story of humans and that episode on the, in the in,
in at Mekone we have a mention, remember, that Hesiod tells us just in a few
sentences there, that at a certain point Earth tricks Kronos into vomiting back up
his children and Zeus is involved. Zeus allies with the cyclopses and gets
the thunderbolt so that he can rule the Cosmos.
That happens on page eighteen. Hesiod is here looking forward to the very
end of the story where Zeus is going to be in control of everything.
There we can jump right into Zeus already being in control the later period, and
we've got humans and this episode with Mekone, and at the end of that, we jump
back to witness this ten-year battle between Zeus and Kronos.
The battle is nasty and deeply violent. A thunderbolt is not a gentle weapon.
Now, Zeus gets these weapons by means of persuasion.
He frees the cyclopses from their nasty place under the under the Earth.
This is where the Titans had kept them, not showing them proper deference.
Zeus was used as a way to try to persuade the cyclopes.
And if they, now, he, he would go ahead and free them, and after he did, he was
friended by them and they give him his thunderbolt.
Now, with that thunderbolt, Zeus can rule the Cosmos.
And is the nuclear weapon of its day. It's enough to annihilate whatever is in
opposition. Now, with the thunderbolt, he crushes the
Titans. And the Titans had a terrible, terrible
time. They wind up down in nasty Tartarus.
Zeus has them chained down there to the very bottom of the Tartarus.
They are living at the utter far edges of the, underneath part of the cosmos.
This war is nasty. It's awful.
Zeus so wins by means of this thunderbolt, he also wins by means of making alliances.
Te gets this hundred handers on his side. These are like, you know, the huge tanks
of today. Three of them, he talks over to coming to
his side, they also were offspring of the titans that were not treated well by the
Titans. Though there's a pattern developing in
both the cyclopses and the hundred handers, the Titans don't treat their
subordinates well. Zeus then sees an opportunity, jumps in
and starts to be kind to them and pulls them over to his side.
Using persuasion, now, he gets this excessive violence, his thunderbolt and
also the hundred handers. And with the, the scenes are especially
pungent with a hundred handers ripping off hunks of mountain and throwing all three
of them hundred boulders at the time at the titans.
They can't withstand the onslaught. Now, at the end of a huge war like this,
there is not going to be killing. These are all immortal principles.
Zeus though is now in a dominant position. So, he is able to restrain and bind the
Titans down in the mystic reaches of Tartarus.
This conflagration is so nasty as it's unfolding, we hear from the chasm.
So, the chasm is a principle that has been around of course, but we know it from the
very beginning but we don't hear so much about it.
But when this war is at stake, the earth is shaking to such a degree that we hear
that even the chasm is shaking. This is a, a war that shakes the universe
down to its fundamental pieces. Zeus wins and it's final.
There's going to be a later challenge to Zeus in this period in this episode
involving this monster, Typhoeus but Zeus is going to win that one, too.
This is, reinforces an idea that while in a previous generation, younger ones came
up and overthrew the older ones. Zeus's win is going to be final.
There, there is this coda afterwards with Typhoeus.
But since Zeus overcomes Typhoeus, Zeus is no longer going to be vulnerable to
younger generations coming and overthrow him.
It's not going to happen to him. He dispatches the younger creature and
tosses him in the Tartarus. So now, Zeus is forever going to be top
dog of the universe. With Zeus's victory the gods at Earth's
prompting make, make him king. So, he now has his place.
He's earned it through struggle. He is now, top creature in the universe
and he solidified himself. During this war, we get some details about
this cosmological structure. S I said, it shakes this cosmology to
it's, to it's fundaments. And in so doing, we got to kind of look
back at how the whole thing is ordered. This is also timed with Zeus' victory over
the Titans. So, it's as though the Cosmos is achieving
order. As Hesiod is articulating it in a similar
kind of pace to Zeus defeating the Titans. So, Zeus is defeating the Titans is
absolutely parallel to the Cosmos achieving its order.
We learn about Tartarus. It's this place way down below.
Earth is a place in the middle, and the Heavens are a place way up above.
In fact, Hesiod gives us a way of thinking about how this connections are made.
The Heavens are so far above the Earth that if you dropped a bronze anvil for
nine days it fell, on a tenth, it would hit the earth.
And the Tarturus is so below the earth. And if you dropped a bronze anvil from the
level of earth for nine days, on the tenth, it would hit the bottom of
Tartarus. Revealing huge expanses in Hesiod's
imagination, such that can be only described in these grand and grandiose
ways. We also hear of the principle of the Styx,
the river Styx, which runs through the, through Tartarus and is the body of water
on which even the gods are able to take an oath, an oath is something that you can
swear but you have to swear on, on some punishment.
Oftentimes, that punishment could be death but the gods, there is not going to be
death. They swear an oath on Styx, the Styx is so
powerful and mighty and holy in their own minds, they're in awe of it.
That it he's, he's a very detailed punishment of God, is in a coma, for many
years, if it violates an oath of Styx. It's not going to die but it has a
horrible, horrible punishment. We also hear about the ocean.
This is a river that circles the earth, out of which all the waters come and out
of which kind of Principle of coursing energy is present in the Cosmos.
Now, when Zeus overcomes the Titans, yes, he's achieved his position as the highest
in the ordering, ordering hierarchy of the universe so an order has been established.
There's a strong acknowledgment of that order from all of his peers.
There's also, interestingly, in this part of the epic, a handover of the powers of
reproduction. And that's something we're going to turn
to in this next segment. Using a tool that we developed at the
University of Pennsylvania, we can actually see, visualize how Zeus
appropriates this power of reproduction, and how fully it moves over into his
purview. At the very beginning of our story, we'll
remember that Gaia was the one who mainly was the reproducer.
We see here all of her offspring connected to her by blue lines, and her consorts are
connected to her by green or red lines. These are the creatures that are connected
to Gaia. You can see she's powerful and
reproductive. She has lot's of creatures connected to
her. Now, we might think that lot's of these
other creatures surely must have given birth to other things, too.
Let's look for example at Themis. Well, sure, there is some offspring
involved, and there is some consorts that she has but not nearly as much as Gaia.
Going back again, we can get ourselves back up to Gaia and see other of her
offspring and say well, surely, maybe Theia had a lot of offspring.
Well, not quite so much. Back to Gaia, how to look at Rhea an
important principle that comes from her. Well, again, not so much.
Now, the generations that follow Earth mostly have reproductive trees that look
like that. Yeah, under ten, under a dozen offspring
for each of them. But when we move on to Zeus something
quite different happens. Tracing out the lineage that brings us
from Gaia to Rhea, and then having a look at what happens with Zeus, we enter into a
new level of reproductivity. Zeus is an extremely powerful reproducer.
Some of these creatures he produces all on his own.
Lot's of them he produces by sexual relations with other divinities.
He becomes the most important node of reproduction in this ancient scheme.
And in doing so, the only, the only principal that could rival his position
earlier on is Gaia. So, in doing, this he takes over the power
of principal reproducer from Gaia. So now, Zeus is top dog in the universe in
lots of different ways and not least because he's now at the center of the
genealogical chart. How is it that Zeus appropriates this
power of reproduction? How does he get it for himself?
Well, there's a long string of events that unfolds as the story closes.
You recall near the, near the very end Zeus has sexual relation sexual
relationship with a goddess called Metis. When he does, she becomes pregnant.
Now, before she gives birth, he swallows her down.
Seeming to do something as awful as Cronus does.
He never receives any nasty interpretation, there's never a nasty
interpretation of this in the tradition. Instead, what people thought when they
looked at Zeus swallowing Metis was they looked to her name.
Her name means practical wisdom. So, when Zeus swallows Metis, what he's
doing is internalizing practical wisdom according to the ancient reading of it.
So, Zeus here, successfully appropriates the power of reproduction by following the
scheme of internalizing practical wisdom. When he does look what happens, he becomes
reproductive himself. The first thing that comes out of the
offspring from Metis. Remember, she's gotten pregnant
beforehand. He's ingested her.
She, he, she then give birth presumably inside of him out of her own womb.
Then he gives birth again out of himself out of his head and out pops Athena.
So, Zeus appropriates the power of reproduction by assimilating practical
wisdom inside of him. And so, he now starts to be able to
reproduce on his own. Great power, all of a sudden, gets moved
over to Zeus. Harkening back to the gender politics as
involved in Hesiod's story. It's very clear, I think, in Hesiod's
story that males should have the power of reproduction for the universe to work
right. Hesiod must have been a little sad that it
never quite worked out. But in his mind, that clearly seems to be
the way the things to go, that should go. When Zeus becomes the leader of the
universe and establishes order, that move is paralleled with his appropriation for
males, or the female power of reproduction.
All of this gives us a chance to look back on the pivotal role that this figure,
Earth, has played in the story. She as a female principal and as the prior
most productive entity in the universe. Yeah, has an important role in all aspects
of this rise to power of Zeus. She's sometimes on his side, sometimes not
on his side. She is moving things along in a
interesting backdoor kind of way. Remember, at the very beginning, she is a
primal deity. She is there before creation itself, she's
just around. She's also involved in the castration of
the sky. She wants that to happen so she
disempowers her own husband and that generation her own generation on page
eight, handing her power to her younger son.
Then she warns Kronos, page seventeen, that someone, one of his off-springs is
going to overthrow him. But that doesn't stop her from also
helping Zeus. She goes over and schemes with Rhea on
page seventeen to make sure that Kronos swallows down a stone and not Zeus.
Then, she takes in Zeus into herself in a cave in Crete so that Zeus can be raised
out of the womb of the Earth in addition to being raised out of the womb of his own
mother on page seventeen. She then advices Zeus to free the 100
handers so they can be on his side in the war, page 21.
A pivotal tactical maneuver that Zeus makes.
Finally, she bares Typhoeus, page 27 in order to struggle against Zeus, to test
him, to see if he deserves that power, and maybe try to overthrow him.
After Zeus defeats Typhoeus then she jumps on in and advises all the Olympians to
accept Zeus as their main power. So, they all jump in and do that.
She then advises Zeus, yes, indeed, to be the one to swallow Metis.
So, this power of reproduction seems to have been given over willingly by Earth,
the female principal to Zeus, the male principal as a marker of Zeus' now
position of authority as the central figure in the Cosmos.
So, this messy, very messy family tree is something that he seduces to order this
whole set of events. He has got what he's been looking for at
the beginning. There's order, there's predictability,
there's structure in the Cosmos, and it's based on Zeus, the powerful male
principal.