from The Theogony

HESIOD

So let’s imagine you’re thinking of writing a book. What are you going to write about? Your family perhaps, your quirky friends, some ex-lover who wronged you (after having righted you so nicely), the day-to-day living tips you learned from your cat? Or maybe you’re an ex-lawyer, ex– navy SEAL, ex–secret agent, or ex–medical examiner whose insider information will drive a nail-biter narrative. But how about this as a topic for your first book? The origin of the gods and the history of the world. Nice modest project, no? But that’s what Hesiod, an eighth century B.C. contemporary of Homer, opted for as the subject of his first book, the Theogony—no small proof of how much Western literature has changed in the last twenty-eight hundred years.

Now Hesiod probably didn’t invent all his material (much of it he could have taken from oral legends passed down or from written sources that predate him), but it’s still great to imagine him trying to pitch it to a Hollywood producer: “Well, Mr. Coppola, it’s kind of this classic tale of birth and rebirth, of gods being created out of nothingness or out of the side of each other’s heads, of sons castrating their fathers and genitals floating on the sea and turning into goddesses, that kind of thing.” Francis Ford would probably look him deep in the eye, put his hand on his shoulder and say, “Best lay off that crack pipe, son.”

But although much of the Theogony is decidedly distant to the modern sensibility, the one thing it shares with much modern literature, sadly, is its leaning toward misogyny. In a book that otherwise makes almost no reference to normal human reality, Hesiod pauses long enough to take some gratuitous potshots at our mothers, wives, and sisters. Women are the curse Zeus inflicted on mankind because his son Iapetos stole fire and brought it to us, and apparently we haven’t been forgiven.

Yet among the gods at least, it’s not the females who cause trouble but the fathers and sons. Iapetos stole the fire from Zeus. Zeus, meanwhile, vanquished his father, Kronos, who had eaten all of his other children. And Kronos, as we will see in the following excerpt, also had a father to fear and, with the help of his mother, took matters into his own hands. Centuries before Sophocles and millennia before Freud, Oedipal myths were in full force, nowhere more clearly than in Hesiod.

For of all the children that were born of Earth and Heaven, these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father [Heaven] from the first. And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth as soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light, and he rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth groaned within, being strained, and she thought up a crafty, wicked plan. Quickly she made grey adamant and shaped a giant sickle and told her plan to her dear sons. And as she spoke, she was vexed in her heart:

“My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father, for he first began devising his shameful deeds.”

Thus she spoke, but fear seized them all, and none uttered a word. But great Cronos the wily took courage, and answered his dear mother:

“Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I revere not our father of evil name, for he first thought to do the evil things.”

So he said, and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot.

And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth and swiftly lopped off his father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him. And not vainly did they fall from his hand, for all the bloody drops that gushed forth Earth received, and as the seasons moved round she bared the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armor, holding long spears in their hands, and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae all over the boundless earth. And so soon as he had cut off the members with adamant and cast them from the land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the main a long time, and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, after, she came to Cyprus and came forth an awful, lovely goddess, and grass grew up beneath her shapely feet. And gods and men call her Aphrodite.

—translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White,
modified by Jack Murnighan