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HesiodTheogony
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Themes
Kingship Theory: Chaos to Order
In his Theogony, Hesiod addresses a question of paramount importance to philosophers in the ancient world: What constitutes a good king? Hesiod’s contemporary, Homer, explores similar themes in his Iliad and Odyssey. Their literary successors—including Plato, Aristotle, and later, Roman thinkers like Virgil and Seneca the Younger—will heavily reference Homer and Hesiod in their arguments.
Hesiod defines a good king in the prologue of the Theogony:
The people
All look to him as he arbitrates settlements
With judgments straight. He speaks out in sure tones
And soon puts an end even to bitter disputes.
A sound-minded ruler, when someone is wronged,
Sets things to rights in the public assembly,
Conciliating bother sides with ease.
He comes to the meeting place propitiated as a god,
Treated with respect, preeminent in the crowd (Lines 85-93).
This is the ideal ruler in Hesiod’s eyes: A man who embodies the qualities of Zeus, the primary model of kingship as lord of heaven and earth. But kings were not always just and wise arbiters. One of the main narrative arcs of the Theogony details how each generation improved on the model of kingship, culminating in the ascension of Zeus and the establishment of a just and orderly society.
In the Theogony, the universe’s earliest kings are defined by their comfort with violence towards their subjects. The first king, Ouranos, locks his own children in the dark spaces beneath the earth, “Keeping them from the light, and awful thing to do / But Heaven did it, and was very pleased with himself” (Lines 157-59). His son Kronos hates him. “I can’t stand Father,” he tells his mother Gaia. “He doesn’t even deserve the name. / And after all, he started this whole ugly business” (Lines 172-73). But as good as Kronos’s intentions may have been in castrating the villainous Ouranos, his act of interfamilial treachery is equally unjust. According to Ouranos, Kronos and the other Titans had “over-reached themselves and done a monstruous deed / For which vengeance later would surely be exacted” (Lines 209-10). “Over-reaching” refers to the cardinal Greek sin of hubris, the use of violence to exceed one’s natural station or limits in life. Just as it is unnatural and disordered for Ouranos to push his children back inside their mother, so it is unnatural for Kronos to remove the genitals which created him, for a son to “de-father” his own father.
Kronos perpetuates this cycle of poor kingship, even if he represents a slight improvement to his father. Fearing a coup from his subjects—that is, his children—Kronos swallows them whole as soon as they are born, an act Hesiod describes as “a fit of idiocy” (Line 504). Again, the king’s poor decisions are punished, as Zeus “would soon wrest / His honors from him by main force and rule the Immortals” (Line 494). Zeus’s siege is still violent—an unwilling Kronos is forced to regurgitate Zeus’s siblings—but it is bloodless. Notably, the other Olympians characterize Zeus’s actions as “charity and in gratitude / [They] gave him thunder and the flashing lightning bolt,” the symbols of Zeus’s authority over heaven and earth (Lines 505-06).
Zeus represents an important deviation from the previous models of kingship. He retains his ancestors’ ability to funnel rage into punishment but does so only when righteously angered. For example, when Prometheus tries to humiliate him at a feast of men and gods, Zeus, “eternally wise, / Recognized the fraud and began to rumble in his heart […] Anger seethed in his lungs and bile rose to his throat” (Lines 552-56). This new kingly trait—wily wisdom—will become one of Zeus’s defining characteristics. Its importance is solidified when Zeus consumes his first wife Metis, the personification of craftiness, making her one with himself. For the Greeks, a good king was able to take stock of any given situation and see the truth of it.
Zeus also displays another important kingly virtue: Mercy. He is not the first kindly king in the Theogony; other minor characters exhibit the trait too. Nereus, for example, the Old Man of the Sea, is so named “Because he is unerring and mild, [he] remembers / What is right, and his mind is gentle and just” (Lines 234-36). But Zeus is the first character to extend an olive branch to an old enemy: Ouranos’s sons, the monstruous Hundred-Handers. Acting on the suggestion of his advisor, Gaia—another important kingly quality—Zeus releases them from their prison in Tartaros. Crucially, he does not immediately demand their help. He treats the Hundred-Handers as guests (Lines 644-47). After they eat their fill, one of their number, Kottos, recognizes that Zeus’s “thoughts are supreme, [his] mind surpassing […] Our minds are bent therefore, and our wills fixed / On preserving your power” (Lines 660-66). This act of mercy and hospitality turns out to be Zeus’s most important play in securing victory over the Titans. While the Titans and the Olympians were previously perfectly matched in strength (Line 643), the Hundred-Handers turn the tides.
Only by combining these most important qualities for early Greek concepts of kingship—righteous anger, wisdom, and mercy—can Zeus enact order and structure on a universe defined by violent chaos. Hesiod encourages mortal kings to emulate these virtues in ruling their kingdoms.
Generational Succession: From Matriarchy to Patriarchy
The Theogony features three major transitions of power from one generation to the next. Examining these episodes through the lens of gender theory illuminates an important theme: For Hesiod, women represent an innately chaotic and even evil threat to civilization. Only when they are removed from a position of influence can the king of the gods, Zeus, establish security and order as the supreme being in the universe.
In the first succession story, the primordial sky god Ouranos fears and hates the monstruous children of his union with his mother Gaia (or Earth). As soon as the children are born, Ouranos stuffs them back inside of their mother. Gaia eventually outwits this strategy by recruiting her youngest son, Kronos, who reaches out from inside of Gaia and castrates his father. Gaia’s power here is clear. Not only does she overthrow Ouranos, the male god in power; her corruptive influence and proximity to her children enable her success.
In the second succession story, Kronos behaves in much the same way as his father Ouranos, but with a few important distinctions. Fearing a prophecy that his children would overpower him, Kronos swallows the infants whole. In doing so, he removes agency from his female consort, Rheia. While Ouranos had stuffed the children back inside Gaia—allowing Gaia and her children to plot against him—Kronos removes the possibility by distancing Rheia and isolating their children inside of himself. Still, the wily Rheia manages to scheme up a counterattack. She tricks Kronos by feeding him a rock and spirits Zeus away to be raised in secret on the island of Crete. As an adult, Zeus returns to challenge his father with important new allies. On his grandmother Gaia’s advice, Zeus recruits his uncles, the Hundred-Handers, who were themselves abused by their father, Ouranos. Together, this alliance of mistreated sons acts on the advice of their mothers and destroys the earlier generation, the Titans. The universe, it seems, is finally at peace.
Still, even after this victory, the female element continues to present a threat to order. Gaia’s last son, the monster Typhoeus, “would have ruled over Immortals and men” (Line 844), threatening the supreme male god Zeus. After Zeus decisively beats Typhoeus down, he finally breaks the cycle of father-son successional conflict by removing the maternal element completely. Again, a prophecy foretells Zeus’s defeat at the hand of his second child by Metis, a son. But unlike his predecessors, Zeus breaks the internal logic of the prophecy by swallowing the pregnant mother whole. By making Metis part of himself, Zeus neuters her power to plot against him. He also restricts her ability to produce a king-slaying son by limiting their progeny to their first child, a daughter: Athena.
Zeus’s swallowing of Metis releases him from reliance on a female consort to produce children. As Hesiod states earlier in the poem, women are a necessary evil for mortal men because without a wife, a man cannot produce heirs (Lines 605-11). Zeus has no such concerns. He “gives birth” to his daughter on his own. The resultant being, the war goddess Athena, rejects her female nature and has no fondness for human women, though she is a loyal friend of heroes (Athena is the primary divine ally of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey).
If Zeus is now able to create life independently, Hesiod is careful, too, to mention that women cannot do the same. When Zeus’s jealous wife Hera responds to Zeus’s infidelities with a virgin birth of her own, the result is Hephaistos, a god with disabilities who therefore—in the ethically dubious worldview of the ancient Greeks—presents no threat to his father (Lines 932-34). As if to solidify this victory of male sexuality, Hesiod spends the rest of the poem cataloguing Zeus’s many sexual partners and their children. With Hera sidelined, Zeus flourishes.
While the Theogony’s first succession story ended with the castration of the father, the last succession story succeeds by removing the female reproductive element completely. Hesiod’s direct misogyny in the Theogony and his second poem, Works and Days, had an important influence on Greek cultural misogyny towards women.
The Outsized Role of Tricksters
Even in Greek civilization’s earliest myths (that is, the stories found in Homer and Hesiod), Greek heroes are characterized by their cunning. While many cultures have tales of tricksters—wily beings who use their wits to steal food, power, and more—few enshrine them like the Greeks. One of Greek literature’s most important heroes, Homer’s Odysseus, is defined primarily by this virtue. He is polutropos, literally “of many turns” or “of many ways of speaking.” Other ancient cultures noted this Greek propensity for wiliness and subterfuge: as the Roman poet Virgil famously wrote in his Aeneid, “I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts” (Aeneid 2.49).
Tricksters play an outsized role in the Theogony too. As Hesiod programmatically states in the poem’s prologue, the Muses “know how to tell many believable lies, / But also, when [they] want to, how to speak the plain truth” (Lines 28-29). Notably, the Muses simply observe their proficiency in truth and lies; they make no promise to Hesiod to tell the truth. The text’s first upstart hero, Kronos, has a “mind [which] worked in strange ways” (Line 169). His successor Zeus is smarter still; Kronos is “[Overcome by the wiles and power of his son]” (Line 499). Zeus’s cleverness is further enhanced when he consumes the personification of cunning, Metis.
The ability to think quickly on one’s feet and to stay ahead of one’s enemies was a highly valued trait in Greek literature—at least for men. In the Theogony, civilization is repeatedly threatened by the schemes of female characters like Gaia and Rheia. Elsewhere in Greek literature, the smartest women are cast as those who should most be feared, femme fatales like Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and Euripides’s Medea.
