Lecture Five. The Reign of the Olympians.
After overthrowing the Titans, Zeus consolidated his power and became the primary ruler of the gods, which he will continue to be for as long as the universe lasts.
- There will be no further struggles of sons to over throw their fathers and no further shift of power down the generations.
- Hesiod does not explicitly state that the universe became fixed with Zeus’s ascendancy to power. This omission is justified by reasons that are important to remember throughout the study of myth.
- Hesiod and his audience assume the reality of Zeus and the other gods.
- Therefore, everyone knows that Zeus will remain in power and that the point of the whole story was Zeus’s rise to power.
- This is an important point to remember in reading any myth. Narrative points that may seem arbitrary from outside the culture that created the myth seem necessary from inside that culture.
- Zeus divides power among himself and his brothers, in what is often called the triple division.
- Hades becomes the ruler of Tartaros and lord over the souls of the dead.
- Poseidon becomes the ruler of the sea and water in general.
- Zeus becomes the ruler of the sky.
- Theoretically, all three brothers have power over the earth. In practice, the earth too is Zeus’s domain, and the division of power is fall from equal.
- Zeus’s sisters also have their particular roles
- Hera is the patron goddess of marriage.
- Hestia is the goddess of the hearth.
- Demeter is the goddess of grain and agriculture.
As ruler, Zeus not only grains physical control over the sky and the earth, but his domain also includes various abstract concepts that concern the orderly functioning of human society.
- Zeus oversees justice; in this aspect, he is the patron of oaths and punishes oath-breakers.
- He also is the god of xenia, a very important concept usually translated as the guest-host relationship.
- He oversees prophecy, particularly at his shrine at Dodona.
- Zeus’s sun Apollo is also a god of prophecy, but it is quite clear that Apollo derives his control of prophecy from Zeus.
- Zeus’s connection with prophecy emphasizes both his wisdom and his power; prophets often say that they foretell “the will of Zeus”.
Once he is established as the ruler of the gods, Zeus marries his first wife, the minor goddess Metis.
- Metis is fated to bear a son who will overthrow his father, thus repeating the pattern seen in the earlier generations.
- On the advice of Gaia and Ouranos, Zeus prevents this by swallowing Metis.
- Metis is already pregnant with a daughter, Athena, who is eventually born from Zeus’s head.
- The son who was destined to overthrow his father is never conceived and never born.
- This is one of the very few times that anyone successfully circumvents fate.
Like so much else in theogony, the story of Metis and Athena offers several interesting interpretative points.
- It highlighted the concept of fate, which affects gods as well as humans.
- Fate, or destiny, plays a crucial role in many classical myths.
- Fate works independently of Zeus, a reminder that even Zeus is not omnipotent.
- Fate is sometimes personified as three goddesses, the Fates or Moirai.
- The swallowing of Metis can be seen as the moment at which the male gods assert final power over the goddesses; from now on, the dominance of male over female will be firmly established.
- This act is also important as the point at which Zeus matures. In this regard, an allegorical interpretation works particularly well.
- Zeus is a young ruler who has power and dominance; what does he need to rule well?
- He needs wisdom, which is what the Greek work metis means.
- When Zeus swallows Metis, he is literally incorporating wisdom.
- Despite the very popular modern interpretation, the birth of Athena from Zeus’s head is not emblematic of wisdom, because the Greeks didn’t consider the head to be the seat of thought.
Zeus then mates with various other goddesses and produces several children before marrying his permanent wife, Hera.
- Hera is the patron of marriage and of married woman, yet she and Zeus have difficulties producing acceptable sons.
- They have 2 daughters, Hebe and Eileithyia.
- Despite Zeus’s fecundity with other females, he and Hera produce only one son, Ares the god of war.
- Hera’s other son, Hephaestus, was probably born parthenogenically, because of Hera’s jealousy over Athena.
- Along with these and other goddesses, Zeus also mates with various mortal women, such as Alcmene, the mother of Heracles.
- Hera is particularly disposed to hate Zeus’s sons by mortal women.
- This hatred is a motivating force behind Heracles’s adventures.
Zeus’s amatory exploits are not just a matter of a god behaving badly.
- Many of Zeus’s mating are with conceptual gods, such as Themis and produce offspring, such as Justice. These unions express his attributes as ruler.
- His multiple mating also repeats a pattern we saw in the earlier generations.
- Hesiod is describing the coming-into-existence of everything, including such abstractions as Justice, through the medium of anthropomorphic gods.
- It is reasonable in this context to describe the process through the sexual matings of different gods.
- Because Zeus is such an important god, this will necessarily result in his mating with various females.
- Another explanation for Zeus’s frequent mating with minor goddesses and mortal women is that it reflects the synthesis of various local gods and traditions, or syncretism.
By the end of theogony, what sort of picture of the gods do we have?
- The gods are anthropomorphic, not theriomophic or a combination of the two, sharing many of humanity’s characteristics.
- They have bodies, though it is taken as a given that in their natural state, the bodies of the gods are both much larger and much more beautiful than human bodies.
- They eat ambrosia and drink nectar and have a substance flowing through their veins, ichor.
- The gods are also very different from humans.
- They have the ability to move vast distances, more or less at will; they can appear before a human when they want to.
- Although their normal appearance is anthropomorphic, they can disguise themselves as other creatures or even as non-animate objects.
- The defining difference between gods and humans is that the gods are immortal. Humans must die, but gods cannot die.
- One of the most frequent terms used to describe gods in Greek is athanatoi, the deathless ones.
- Humans, by contrast, are thnetoi, those who are liable to death.
- An oath sworn on the River Styx was, for the gods, the most telling incarnation of their immortality.