this line is so raw you’d think it was from tumblr but actually it is from M.L. West’s commentary on hesiod
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"Fair wreathed Kytherea"
-Hesiod's Theogony, Gany translation
Aphrodite of the golden crown
The lustrous hand mirror
Seafoam from the cosmos rains down
The mist grows clearer
Kytherea blew in
From warm Cyprus winds
Enchanting the Seamen and Seafarers
I hope you enjoyed today's tale of legend and lore, come back next week and there will be even more
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Prometheus
In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus had a reputation as being something of a clever trickster and he famously gave the human race the gift of fire and the skill of metalwork, an action for which he was punished by Zeus, who ensured everyday that an eagle ate the liver of the Titan as he was helplessly chained to a rock.
Continue reading...
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‘three fair-cheeked Kharites…from whose eyes as they glanced flowed love that unnerves the limbs’
- hesiod, theogony
The Three Graces - detail from La Primavera, Sandro Botticelli (Uffizi Gallery, Firenze)
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Chapter 11: Ekleipsis | Epilogue: Philomel
read now on ao3 | start from the prologue
the end :)
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For even now, when someone of mortals living on earth
Seeks favor, duly performing comely sacrifices,
He calls on Hecate; and great honor follows him
Quite easily—him, that is, whose prayers the goddess readily
Receives; and she grants him wealth, since this power is hers.
καὶ γὰρ νῦν, ὅτε πού τις ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων
ἔρδων ἱερὰ καλὰ κατὰ νόμον ἱλάσκηται,
κικλῄσκει Ἑκάτην. πολλή τέ οἱ ἕσπετο τιμὴ
ῥεῖα μάλ᾽, ᾧ πρόφρων γε θεὰ ὑποδέξεται εὐχάς,
καί τέ οἱ ὄλβον ὀπάζει, ἐπεὶ δύναμίς γε πάρεστιν.
-Hesiod, Theogony 416-420
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Rhea leaving baby Zeus in Gaia's care.
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hi just hopping on to start that @clare-with-no-i is a genius and theogony is a masterpiece that I will never get over !!!!!!!
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I really fuck with the idea that Kronos does feel guilt and shame for eating his children, bc not only does it make him a more layered character, it actually makes him an even more menacing and disturbing antagonist. Bc even tho he knows he breaks Rhea’s heart over and over, even tho he knows he robs his children of their childhood and condemns them to long years of pain, even tho he dearly loves his wife and would’ve loved his children just as deeply if he raised them, he still loves power even more and his love for his wife and children will never come first.
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young goddesses // demeter, hera, hestia
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@clare-with-no-i you are an absolute miracle worker, theogony is so well written and perfect that it feels like I'm tainting it just by reading it
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The other wives of Zeus
Everybody keeps talking about Zeus and Hera. Everybody knows that Hera is the wife of Zeus, and how their love life is a stormy one (no pun intended).
But not many people talk about the fact that Hera wasn’t Zeus first wife. I am here referring to Hesiod’s Theogony: according to the Hesiodic version of Greek mythology, Zeus had at least three wives in succession, of whom Hera was the last.
First Zeus married Metis, “wisest among all gods and men”, embodiment of prudence, counsel and cunning, but he had to swallow her in his belly when she was pregnant thanks to a prophecy by Gaia and Ouranos according to which, after birthing a daughter (Athena), she would birth a boy that would overthrow his father. (And fun fact: Metis is technically still alived inside Zeus, as the poem clearly indicates she now exists as Zeus’ internal voice of reason, telling him what is good and what is bad from inside him). Of course Athena was still born later, jumping out of Zeus’ head, but that’s another story.
Then Zeus married Themis, his aunt and the embodiment of justice, and with her he had two sets of triplets. On one side, the Horae, the goddesses of seasons that organize the cycles of time. On the other side, the Moirai, the embodiment of fate ruling the human lives. (Yes I know the idea of the Moirai as primordial cosmic entities is very popular, but according to the Hesiodic tradition they are not that “old”, being the daughters of Themis and Zeus).
And then he married Hera, that gave him three children: Ares, god of war, Hebe, goddess of youth, and Ilithyia, goddess of birth. Wait... three children you ask? What about Hephaestus? Well this is another story people forgot. According to the Hesiodic tradition Hephaestus isn’t the child of Zeus... In this version of Greek mythology, after giving birth to Zeus’ three children, Hera saw Zeus give birth to Athena all on his own. And given she had become mad at Zeus and the two were quarreling and fighting, she decided that her next child would be produced by herself, all on her own, without any masculine help: and thus she birthed Hephaestus.
Now, you might have noticed I said “Zeus had at least three wives”. Yes, because in the Theogony, Zeus is only described as having explicitely married three goddesses. However those three goddesses are part of a list of seven primordial lovers of Zeus. The list opens up with Metis, “first wife of Zeus”, followed by Themis that “Zeus next took as his wife” and the list concludes with Hera that he took “as his final wife”. And in between, there are goddesses he is said to have slept with, to have loved, to have children with - but it is not explicitely said that he was married to them. As a result this leads to some open interpretation. Were all seven of them his wives in turn, and the poet simply avoided repeating himself? Were only Metis, Themis and Hera Zeus’ legal wife, while the other four goddesses were unmarried lovers? There is a great opening for a lot of interpretations.
But overall the other “primordial lovers” of Zeus, and possibly other four first wives, are:
# Eurynome, Oceanid that gave to Zeus the Charites, the trio of goddesses embodyig grace, pleasure and beauty. This took place after Zeus’ marriage to Themis. (Or at least it is listed next in the list of Zeus lover, right after he was said to marry Themis).
# After Eurynome, Zeus slept with his sister Demeter and from their union was born Persephone.
# Next was Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and another aunt of Zeus, who birthed with him the nine Muses, the goddesses of the art.
# Then he took Leto as his next lover and she birthed Apollo and Artemis (that’s right, in the Hesiodic tradition, Zeus and Leto’s love took place BEFORE he married Hera, so Apollo and Artemis aren’t “bastard children”).
In conclusion, the full list of Zeus “primordial lovers” goes: Metis (confirmed to be first wife) - Themis (confirmed to be second wife) - Eurynome - Demeter - Mnemosyne - Leto - Hera (confirmed to be the last wife).
And it is only AFTER that Hesiod lists other love affairs of Zeus, this time explicitely taking place after his marriage to Hera, aka this is his “true” extra-marital, “cheating” affairs, in order: Maia, who birthed Hermes ; Semele, who gave birth to Dionysos ; Alcmene, who gave birth to Herakles. A list which does make sense and actually presents a “logical order” of Hera’s growing jealousy: with Hermes we never heard of Hera persecuting his mother or him ; but then, with Dionysos and Herakles, Zeus’ second and third unfaithfulness to Hera, this is when she gets mad and starts throwing curses and monsters left and right.
It should also be noted that the fights and feuds between Zeus and Hera are noted by Hesiod to have taken place BEFORE he was unfaithful to Hera - more precisely, we know that when Hera birthed on her own Hephaestos (so after Athena’s birth) she was already in deep fights and feuds with Zeus, quarrels which notably involved her refusal to have anymore children from him.
Looking back at Hesiod’s structure and chronology of these divine loves puts what “people” “know” or rather repeat about Greek mythology in a whole different light.
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Theogony (Generations of the Gods) by Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
An infographic illustrating Hesiod's Theogony (literally meaning "Birth of the Gods") - the earliest known and the only complete account of the origins of the universe and the gods according to ancient Greek mythology and tradition. Traditionally, Theogony and other works by Hesiod are dated slightly after Homer's (although such relative placement is speculative), around the 8th century BCE. Consisting of about 900 hexametric verses, the poem starts at the very emergence of the cosmos and leads from more abstract entities and forces to anthropomorphic powers and then to a succession of gods locked in power struggles for domination, culminating with the victory of Zeus over the older generations of deities and the imposition of the "current" order of the universe.
Image by Simeon Netchev
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✦ A L T A L U N A & V A L E R I A N O ✦ Research
INTRODUCTION: "Corresponding to the human metis in Homer and the animal metis in Oppian [the fox & the octopus], in Hesiod we find the goddess Metis, the daughter of Tethys and Oceanus […] She is the first wife of Zeus, the wife he takes to bed as soon as the war against the Titans is brought to an end and as soon as he is proclaimed king of the gods, and thus this marriage crowns his victory and consecrates his sovereignty as monarch. There would, in effect, be no sovereignty without Metis. Without the help of the goddess, without the assistance of the weapons of cunning which she controls through her magic knowledge, supreme power could neither be won nor exercised nor maintained." - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant
HOW SHE HELPED ZEUS WIN THE THRONE (Part 1): "When Zeus was grown, he engaged Okeanos' (Oceanus') daughter Metis as a colleague. She gave Kronos (Cronus) a drug, by which he was forced to vomit forth first the stone and then the children he had swallowed." - Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 6 (trans. Aldrich)
HOW SHE HELPED ZEUS WIN THE THRONE (Part 2): "Metis […] is the ‘foreseeing’ one who, knowing everything in advance, possesses that type of knowledge essential to anyone engaged in a battle whose outcome is still uncertain. Metis ‘knows more things than any god or mortal man." - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant [Note: She is the foreseeing one because, by her cleverness, she is always three steps ahead, so to speak. She is not 'all-seeing' in the sense that she has a psychic ability to 'see' the future].
ZEUS TURNS ON METIS AND SUBSUMES HER GIFTS (Part 1): "Zeus, as king of the gods, took as his first wife Metis, and she knew more than all the gods or mortal people. But when she was about to be delivered of the goddess, gray-eyed Athene (Athena), then Zeus, deceiving her perception by treachery and by slippery speeches, put her away inside his own belly. This was by the advices of Gaia (Gaea, the Earth) and starry Ouranos (Uranus, the Sky), for so they counselled, in order that no other everlasting god, beside Zeus, should ever be given kingly position. For it had been arranged that, from her, children surpassing in wisdom should be born, first the gray-eyed girl, the Tritogeneia Athene . . . but then a son to be king over gods and mortals was to be born to her and his heart would be overmastering; but before this, Zeus put her away inside his own belly so that this goddess should think for him, for good and for evil." - Hesiod, Theogony 886 ff (Trans. Evelyn-White)
ZEUS TURNS ON METIS AND SUBSUMES HER GIFTS (Part 2): "Metis, inside Zeus’ belly, will make known to him everything that will bring him good or evil fortune.” - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant
HOW SUBSUMED METIS HELPS ZEUS MAINTAIN POWER: “Forewarned of the danger that awaits him [the birth of a son that would supplant him on the throne], as his father was, he goes straight to the root of the evil […] Appropriating the wiles of Aphrodite, he treacherously seduces his wife with caressing words (haimulioisi logoisi), and having beguiled her wits by cunning (dolly phrase expatesas), he engulfs her within himself […] So this time Zeus was able to make the weapons which made the goddess invincible rebound against her, namely cunning, deceit and surprise attack. His victory eradicates forever from the course of time the possibility of any cunning trick which could threaten his power, by taking him by surprise. The sovereign Zeus is no longer, like Kronos or any other god, simply a deity who possesses metis [cunning]. He is metieta, the Cunning One, the standard gauge and the measure of cunning, the god himself becomes entirely metis." - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant
CONCLUSION OR WHY ZEUS NEEDS METIS SO BADLY: In every confrontation or competitive situation - whether the adversary be a man, an animal or a natural force- success can be won by two means, either thanks to a superiority in ‘power’ in the particular sphere in which the contest is taking place, with the stronger gaining the victory; or by the use of methods of a different order whose effect is, precisely, to reverse the natural outcome of the encounter and to allow victory to fall to the party whose defeat had appeared inevitable. Thus, success obtained through mētis can be seen in two different ways. Depending on the circumstances, it can arouse opposite reactions. In some cases, it will be considered the result of cheating since the rules of the game have been disregarded. In others, the more surprise it provokes, the greater the admiration it will arouse, the weaker party having, against every expectation, found within itself resources capable of putting the stronger at his mercy. […] It [Mētis] is, in a sense, the absolute weapon, the only one that has the power to ensure victory and domination over others, whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conflict. - Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant
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content is done. just editing left. this might take a day or two, please be patient with me — I've never been so emotionally attached to a story's conclusion in my life so I'm just giving it a lot of care
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"Hesiod is a less familiar name to the general reader than Homer, Aeschylus, or Plato, and no one would claim that he is as great a writer as they...If I have sometimes made Hesiod sound a little quaint and stilted, that is not unintentional; he is."
--M.L. West, introduction to his translations of the Theogony and Works and Days (Oxford World's Classics)
"Oh, yeah? Let's see whether anything you wrote is still read and discussed 2,700 years later, you pompous and now-deceased blowhard! ...Ahem. Sorry. I do get worked up sometimes."
--Me
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