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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books podcast, we are discussing Hesiod's Theogony. We'll have a few guests join us as we discuss the creation of the cosmos and the genealogy of the gods. We'll discuss Eros, erotic love with a few references to Aristotle's metaphysics. We'll discuss the Promethean myths and what they mean for humanity. We even get into a conversation on the danger of beauty and an existential unsettledness that it brings. We'll look at the violence and usurpation amongst the gods in the theogony, and we'll even discuss the origin of Athena. So join us for a long but fruitful dialogue on Hesiod's theogy. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. Thank you for being here today. You can check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com you can also follow us on X and YouTube. We're having wonderful conversations about the Great Books. We're kicking off six months on the Greek plays, Greek poetics, which we are kicking off today with Hesiod's Theogony, a wonderful thousand line poem about the origins of the cosmos and the origin of the gods. Today we have some wonderful guests with us. We are missing Adam Minahan, but we have Thomas Lackey, independent scholar, friend of the podcast and member of the Sunday Great Books group. Thomas, how are you doing?
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Thomas Lackey
Very well.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Good, Very good. And we have Dr. Frank Grabowski, who is a professor of philosophy at Roger State, also friend of the podcast and a member of our Sunday Great books. Dr. Grabowski, how are you?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
I'm doing wonderful.
- [02:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Good, good. Okay, so Hesiod's Theogony. So before we kind of get into the text, I'm just curious as to, like, what's your familiarity with the text and like, what, what do you want to get out of tonight's conversation? Like, what are you actually wanting to discuss? So I'll go first. I actually only read this text for the first time maybe six months ago. I read it because of the year of Homer. So we were working through Homer and I was kind of interested, I think, in the more primordial gods of like, love and sleep, if you remember, when love and sleep conquer Zeus. I became very fascinated on like the background of those characters. And so I kind of stumbled upon Hesiod's Theogony, read it for the first time and then in the last couple of weeks, you know, read it a couple more times. I think I'm kind of tethered to that. I'm most interested in having a conversation about love, about Eros and its role in the. In the theogony. Thomas, what about you?
- [03:00]
Thomas Lackey
Very similar. It came up I think first when reading the Symposium and then. But the first time I've read it two or three times. But all this here. Right. So it's all. It's all pretty new to me. And I think what I'm most interested in are the things that are probably going to be the major highlights to a lot of people, which are Pandora, Prometheus, and then I think what might be a little bit different is the connection between the theogony and Achilles.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Prometheus is another good myth. That's going to be a conversation. Dr. Gorowski, what about you?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, gents, yeah, my familiarity with Hesiod, I guess goes back to graduate school when I did my. My master's thesis on pre Socratic philosopher named Anaximander, who was allegedly one of the students of Thales who's considered to be the earliest or the father of Western philosophy. And so I guess what interests me most about Hesiod is his influence on subsequent philosophy, subsequent philosophical accounts of nature and Genesis. And he is mentioned in Aristotle's metaphysics. So that I may, you know, that might come up in the discussion. But certainly Aristotle took him very seriously as being a kind, not a. Well, not a philosopher per se, but perhaps a proto philosopher and the place that he. Or the role that he played in subsequent attempts to give an account of the source, the arche of all things. So certainly that, you know, that is where I guess my interest and that's where my familiarity with the text lies.
- [04:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very good. I think those tether, because I looked up actually that reference in Aristotle's Metaphysics to Hesiod and it's actually very much tethered to the concept of Eros. That's how I stumbled upon it.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
He.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Aristotle mentions Hesiod being a cause or an explanation for how things that are opposites or disparate are able then to come back together again. And so he regards Hesiod as being sort of one of the early thinkers to posit a causal mechanism for change.
- [05:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, very good. Okay, so some good topics ahead of us in Hesiod's theogony. Let's do a few preliminaries just like who is Hesiod? Let's kind of put him in his context. So he's a contemporary of Homer, one maybe that we don't think much of. One maybe that's not nearly as famous, but he's actually a contemporary of Homer, a little bit on the younger side. So if Homer's composing the iliad around, say, 750 BC, the Odyssey around 725, then we have Hesiod writing in the mid-700s and into the 600s. So actually similar to Homer, they believe that he had his roots in Asia Minor, right? It was Hellenized, so that it was a Hellenistic Asia Minor, and that his father was a merchant who moved from Asia Minor over to Mount Helicon in ancient Greece, which is important because this actually gives us the setting for the opening of the Theogony. And actually, it's probably notable that that mountain had several springs at it that were sacred to the muses, which also kind of, I think, informs the beginning. So his family arguably had a prosperous farm, as Hesiod talks about servants and kind of an agricultural life. And so there's kind of this very poetic, realistic picture of him, I guess, of him, like, working the farm and having an agricultural life and then writing poetry, you know, in the off season, if you will. And I actually use writing there particularly because we'll kind of look, I think, at some hints in the text that a lot of people think that he. His poems did not originate as oral, you know, rhapsodies like Homer's did. Like Homer was this inheritor of this, like, great tradition of this oral poetry. Homer's, you know, his mastermind, his brilliance was to be able to kind of weave all those together in a magnificent text. Hesiod is also clearly working with a tradition he's receiving. I don't think he's originating all this, but I think he's writing it down as opposed to coming up with an oral poetry. And we'll see a few hints of this in the text. He has two surviving works. He's got like a dozen works that might be subscribed to him, and there's also debates about whether they're his or not. But the two that he's known for are the Theogony, which is about the origin of the cosmos and also the origin of the gods. And then he also has another one called Works and Days, which actually praises Labor. Any comments or gloss on Hesiod and his background?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, there's just one, other than there's a very interesting work that was allegedly published in the fourth century entitled the Contest between Homer and Hesiod, or the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, or Hesiod. And so I would. I don't want to necessarily Go into all the details. Spoiler alert. Hesiod wins. But it's a work that is little known, but I think is certainly worth visiting if anyone is interested.
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Thomas Lackey
Well, I was just going to add that there was, I think, some debate as to whether or not his name might be a kind of nom de plume and that it means something. Dr. Grabowski could go into this deeper, I'm sure. One of the commentaries I was looking at said it means something along the lines of the voice that calls or something like that. And there's a. There's a kind of idea that there might be a kind of stylization he tells us about himself, but he might actually be presenting a kind of stylized picture of his life.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
That's interesting. Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's also. I noted that, you know, there's several ancients, like 4th, 5th century, that actually hold that Hesiod was the original, that he was older than Homer. And it's not until you move into the classical period that Homer is actually considered the first. And so that kind of changes a little bit how you see their. Their lineages and even, you know, how famous they are amongst the Greeks is who actually came first, Homer or Hesiod. Today, it's pretty secure that Homer came first and that Hesiod is, you know, somewhat downstream of him. But then we'll see that they. Even though they're drawing from the same kind of oral traditions, they are different. There are some distinctions between the Homeric mythologies and what Hesiod presents here.
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Thomas Lackey
I guess one question that'll come up probably better, like, pose it now and then see if we can answer or talk about it at the end, would be, is Hesiod engaging with Homer in an intentional way, you know, making adjustments or corrections to Homer's mythology? Or is it just a parallel track? Because, I mean, not everything lines up perfectly.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a good question. So one of the things that we shared is that the translation I am using, so let's talk about translations, is the Evelyn White translation. This is like the classic Loeb translation from the early 1900s. It's available for free online as a PDF. I actually found it to be a very easy to read. Sometimes those early ones can be slightly overly poetic. They kind of muddle a literal read. It's hard to follow, but I actually found this one to be very clear and an enjoyable read. Thomas, what translation are you working with?
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Thomas Lackey
Well, I've got two. I've got that one, and I've got the Oxford World's Classics edition, translated by ML west, but I think I preferred the Evelyn white translation slightly.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Dr. Gowski, what about yourself?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
I have multiple. I have the Evelyn White, the Loeb edition with the interlinear Greek text. But the translation that I've been working with most closely is one by Richard Caldwell, published by Focus. And in the preface, he indicates that he attempts a very literal translation. And I do have to agree that it is very literal. It's a bit hard to get through. But he mentions that he's trying to not put anything in between the reader and Hesiod. So the idea is he's trying to present it Hesiod in his most, I guess, transparent, Naked Glory. So I would say that, you know, this may not always be the first translation that one turns to if one wants to get through it smoothly, but I do think that it does work for those who are attempting a scholarly interpretation of it.
- [11:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Happen. All right, well, let's look at Hesiod's Naked Glory then, if you will. Let's let him speak for himself. Right. I like that. So I. So just like, you know, how are we following along in the text? So Evelyn White's has subtitles throughout the text, so I'll kind of be referring to those as we kind of track and navigate through the work. And then also on Evelyn White's, she has line numbers to a certain degree. Basically every paragraph, she just lists what line number that starts with. So as I reference them, that's what I'm actually looking at. So let's look at the Hymn to the Muses. So one of the things that, you know, really stood out to me, and one of the things that I had a question about just right at the beginning is, and I'm not sure if we can even answer it now, is what is the purpose? Like, what's the purpose of the text? Right? Like, what is the actual purpose of this? And I think on its face, I think, like, maybe we have a working definition. It's both an origin of the cosmos, which I don't think can be overlooked. Right. Even though it's named Theogony, which is. It's also an origin of the gods in a certain way. These two can't actually be divorced. But I'm also, you know, curious because this whole beginning section, many things that we could pull from here. One thing I'll just point out is, again, we have the importance of the muses. So these are the people, right? These are the nine muses. We actually get them named in Hesiod. All nine were not named in Homer. And These are the people who amuse us, right. They inspire us. And what I noted though about the beginning is two things. One is this comes off the preamble to me very much comes off as this is not just an origin of the cosmos, it's just not an origin of the gods, but really it's a hymn to Zeus. That this is a. This is a praise of Zeus, I think, in his triumph in a certain way. And we kind of have to see what that succession is. It goes through. So one is that I think if we were going to posit another meaning, I think it's a hymn to Zeus. There's something attract there. And two, I really enjoyed that Hesiod kind of. I mean, one thing that caught me off guard a little bit is that Hesiod puts himself very explicitly in the text. And this goes back to one of the signs, I think, that people see this as something that was written as opposed to being oral, right? So if this was like an oral poem that would have been handed down and modified over time, you probably wouldn't have this very personable naming of the bard themselves. And also, again, the Mount Helicon. This is where Hesiod actually lives. Like, this is him engaging his agricultural life. I actually think it's very charming that he presents himself as just this humble sheep herder, right, Living this kind of very poetic life in the very kind of like realist sense of the term. And the muses come down and amuse him, right? They kind of inspire him, slash, take over him. And so I think we see a slight shift here from what we saw in Homer, that Hesiod puts himself in his own text.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. Can I add a little bit to that?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Of course, yeah.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
So this is really interesting. So the first 115 lines or so, these are usually referred to in the scholarship as the proem to the theogony. And so it is quite a bit different. So those who have been listening to the podcast and who are familiar with both the Iliad and the Odyssey will notice that their proems are quite a bit shorter. There is an appeal to the muses, but as you said, Deacon, there isn't a self. There's no self reference. The poet is not referring to himself. And so there's been a lot of scholarly debate about this. And some have speculated that when rhapsodes were reciting the Iliad and the Odyssey, they would include their own personal sort of proems where they would introduce themselves to their audience. And so by drawing attention to himself, because hesiod is very. I mean, he's not bashful when he points out that the Muses picked him, that they gave him a staff or a scepter and they poured their voices into him. And so, you know, he, I guess you could say he's tooting his own horn to his audience. And this is a way of alerting that what is about to be said is authoritative, that he's not just some bum, but that he is a hand, he's been hand picked from the gods and that we should pay attention and that this carries some weight. So I think that that's something to bear in mind as we're reading.
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Thomas Lackey
It certainly reads a lot like the introductory parts of most of the books of the prophets in the Old Testament, right. Where there's some sort of introduction to the, you know, the prophet talking about how and when the word of the Lord came to him. There's a very similar setup face.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
I love it. And so I don't know how your translations read, but there's the opening words of the Muses to Hesiod where they say, rustic shepherds, evil oafs, nothing but bellies. I love that. This insult, right? But they identify this rustic shepherd, this average tender of livestock, namely Hesiod, to be their chosen one to convey. Well, note also, they say, we know how to say many lies as if they were true. And when we want, we know how to speak the truth. So that's always struck me as very interesting because in a way, it does cast some shadow of doubt on what we're about to read, because if they're able to tell lies as though they were truths, there's no way of us knowing whether we're actually hearing the truth or being fed a bunch of lies at that point.
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Thomas Lackey
It definitely diverges from the prophetic literature, that's for sure. But I think it's interesting as well that they don't even make any indication. They say, you know, as you say, when we will, to utter true things. And they don't even then follow that up by saying, and this is one of those. It's just completely, you know, it's a, it's. It is an interesting sort of lacuna there.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Just.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
One thing that occurs to me, right, Is that these are the daughters of Zeus. So you talk about like, you know, the lying and the deceit, right? They are daughters of Zeus. And I wonder too, how much you can push into that if you're gonna start like teasing out, well, wait, what is, what is true and what's false? In this. And there's really no guidepost, I think, to probably do that in any kind of like, legitimate way. But one thing I'm really suspicious of is going back of like, well, what we're getting is an origin. What we're told is we're getting an origin of the cosmos and the gods. But what's actually interwoven in a lot of this is a praise to Zeus. I kind of wonder like, how much of that is. Is bending the hymn towards, you know, the current reigning high God.
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Thomas Lackey
Well, I think there's a couple of good points there. One is the word current and two, that I think you can look at this. One way to read this, I think is as an arch towards a defense of the Olympic gods and Zeus's overarching rule as one of, I'm going to say, of justice. I'm not going to say it's a perfect order. I don't think it's actually going that far, but. But I think it's certainly making the argument that it's the best order that has. That has come about and is in is, you know, just and praiseworthy.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, it's the order that they. They currently have. Right. And we'll see the order has stopped a certain cycle of violence and in a certain way that's praiseworthy. I want to go back to what Dr. Grabowski mentioned. I think it was Dr. Grabowski of this line when they kind of critique Hesiod in like this kind of rule, shepherding life. In the Evelyn White translation, it says shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies. We know how to speak many false things as though they were true. And we know, or but we know when we will to utter true things. So the former part of that line, I think it's really interesting because it's very much then juxtaposed with the next paragraph, which is starting with line 29, where then all of a sudden, well, the shepherd has to be elevated. He has to undergo a certain ascension to be able to be worthy, to be this mouthpiece. Right. So it's not just they speak through him, he has to kind of undergo a transformation. So they kind of pluck him, they give him a rod, they give him a laurel, and they breathed into him the divine voice. And the thing I want to point out here, because I like Thomas, what you said earlier, that there, there is a contrast here to the prophets, right. There's an appeal to authority that they're. That he's a true prophet, he's given his Own backstory. I like that very much. The other thing, though, I would point out more on the Greek side of things, is that this is a mania, this is an erotic act, and it's something that we have to kind of unpack because that's not a term that we use in this context. But we'll see that then when we get into Plato. And Joseph Pieper has a wonderful book, if you're not familiar with Joseph Pieper, the. The German theologian, lay theologian, wonderful thinker. He has a lot of very small but profound books, and he has one on the divine madness, and he talks about this, that part of the erotic act between man and the gods. Right. Was that an ecstasy, a certain madness would come over you, that the gods would pick you and you would be elevated. And it really was a type of ecstasy in Pope Benedict xvi, because I think a lot of this can sound very foreign to people who aren't used to this concept, particularly with how we use Eros, erotic, etc, But Pope Benedict 16th talks about this in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, where he talks about that one of the very first kind of nascent understandings of Eros, which is a form of love, was this ecstasy between man and the gods. The gods would come down, breathe life into you, which clearly has Old Testament parallels, and then you would undergo some type of ascension into a madness. But it's not in certain ways, not always, because there's definitely a bad madness. And we'll see that when we read the Bacchae. There's definitely a spiraling down into the bestial that can be because of the divine. But most of the time you're being elevated into a madness that really doesn't make sense to you. It's not that it's irrational, but it's so far beyond your capacity. And that's what we see here. Right. The shepherd is taken way beyond his own capacity, which I think is why they have to critique him. So they have to shove him down to then show how much they're going to elevate him as an instrument of the gods.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Absolutely. And, yeah, I do think it's important to emphasize that while they do breathe into him a voice, he doesn't lose himself, he still remains he. Throughout the whole. Throughout the whole poem.
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Thomas Lackey
I toss out one other thing that's not a fully formed thought, but it's just a. It's at least worth bringing up the idea as well. If here we have a. A shepherd poet, that there's got to be an obvious analogy to the psalmist right to David. I mean, again, I want to be very clear, not by equating the two, but just a kind of repetition of a theme of the lowly shepherd being called out and called towards divine things.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think you're correct. I think that we have to see these parallels between the Greeks and the Hebrews and not be afraid to see how they're similar. Because even though the Hebrews have revelation, right, they have the benefit of being the chosen people of God and receiving God's law directly from him. The Greeks basically are pulling their theology, their mythology from nature, right. From an observation of the world around them. And so of course at times this is going to lead them to incredibly bizarre, violent and you know, grotesque things. But in the midst of that muck, I think, if you will, are some really key parallels and some things where they really got some things right that actually are really beautiful. So no, I. When I read this for the first time and saw that this was, oh, this is a shepherd being, you know, picked by the Muses, my imagination kind of skipped over the fact that they're, you know, critiquing him and that there's an insult and just found it to be very poetic that this rural life, this life that's very much engaged in the real, was what they chose to then be the voice of this theogony. And yeah, I think that has clear Old Testament parallels.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
And, and Deacon, I would just add one more point too, when we finally do get into the creation story. The creation of the gods is very earthly, earthy and tangible. You know, how things come about, the splitting apart of, well, we'll get to it. But the creation, the coming to be of chaos, you know, the castration of Ouranos, the consumption of the children by Kronos, again, these are very tangible events and so perhaps not something conveyed as effectively by an abstract high headed philosopher and perhaps something that could be expressed more clearly by just some lowly shepherd who knows the earth, who knows things that are down to earth, so to speak.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, maybe what we're looking here, like we do with Homer, right, is our thesis wasn't that Homer was a philosopher, but it certainly was that Homer was a teacher. Right. And I think that Hesiod is a teacher very much in the same way. Any other thoughts on this kind of opening prologue, this hymn to the Muses? All right, Hearing none. Let's look at the opening here, the cosmogony, right. And I think this is one of the things that if people are like, what do I need to take away from this. I think one of the things to keep away because I mean, then it's like, oh, by the way, at some point it's like, well, there's also 3,000 of these sea nymphs and here's a thousand different names to remember. And the first time you read the theogony, this can be very overwhelming of just like, I think there's a natural question of what should I pull out of this text? And so I think we should probably flag that as we move through is like, what should I actually be pulling out of this? And I think, I think it's worth remembering the four original kind of primordial gods, because I think they come up over and over again. And I think maybe to Dr. Grabowski, to your point, I think there's a big question of why. Why are these the four? Right. So let's look at them. So who are they? The first, we get chaos. It's interesting, chaos comes to be first. Then we get a wide bosomed Earth or Gaia, the Evershire foundations. Then we get dim Tartarus, right? He's the abyss, the depth in the wide path of the Earth. So it's interesting that one of them is actually inside the other. And then we get erosion, we get love, which I'm not sure if people are expecting that like in a Greek text. When we think of love, we typically think of, right, the, the New Testament. But here we have Eros, love as one of the four primordial gods.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
So can I offer my hot take on this?
- [28:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Of course.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
So I'm, I'm borrowing from a scholar, a 20th century scholar by the name of F.M. cornford. And so one of the questions that had been circulating, or that had really been circulating for some time is what to make of chaos? Because we typically. In the English, chaos typically refers to a kind of disorder. And so is chaos within this context, disorder. And what Kornford argues is that actually chaos, the Greek word chaos, is closely related to the Greek verb canine, which means to split. And he, he regards chaos as a kind of gap, a yawning gap that forms when a primordial whole becomes split or separated. And so Gaia and Tartarus then come to be when this unit, this indistinct indefinite unit, splits open kind of like an egg. And this, actually there are orphic cosmogonies where they refer to it as a wind egg. We read about this in Aristophanes birds. But there's a kind of cosmic egg that cracks and that opens and that Eros flies out. So these are all very early cosmogonies. And it's not entirely clear where Hesiod's getting his idea from. But I tend to like Kornford's interpretation of chaos not being a kind of disorder that comes to be, because that really doesn't make a whole lot of sense that there's disorder that just pops into existence, but rather it's a gap or a chasm that forms when this unitary, this whole splits, and then the top part ends up becoming Gaia and the bottom part ends up becoming Tartarus.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
When do you see Eros, then? Is he. Is he also part of that split?
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, yeah. Well, no, Eros, I think, is going to be. I don't want to say an ad hoc or arbitrary addition, but Eros then becomes necessary in order to bring about additional generation of things, because now things are going to have to come back together again. And so we have an initial separation, but that initial separation then has to be countered with something that would then bring things back together again to then produce other things. And so Eros then is used as, again, as Aristotle points out in his Metaphysics, a kind of causal mechanism that would perpetuate generation.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that very much. I like it because when you look later. So right now, what we're looking at, right, we're looking at broad poetic pictures, and do they present us certain truths that then, downstream of this text, are the philosophers going to pick them up and, you know, parse them out? And so one reason I like that definition of chaos, I'd like to test it. But one reason I like it is because that movement from the 1 to the multiplicity is a very vital step in a lot of these philosophical reflections on the origin of just reality. Something of like Plotinus in his kind of Neoplatonic sense, right? There's always a. They always have to answer there. How did we go from one to more than one? How does that actually occur? Right? So I like the idea of chaos being really, what that means is a multiplicity. Now, it doesn't. It doesn't strike me that that multiplicity then has a lot of order to it. So in that way, it would. It would be more analogous to what we typically think of chaos, right? But the moving from the one to multiplicity. And then I really like the picture of Eros, Eros being that which then binds the parts back together to create new parts, because I think, as we observe in the text, if you look, is that nothing actually comes from Eros, right? Eros doesn't actually create anything directly, but rather he or she is the fecundity. Right. It's the binding, it's the unity between multiple parts that then permits this cosmogony to continue to develop. Yeah.
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Dr. Frank Grabowski
And I would, I'd just like to add maybe two more points. And one is that it isn't entirely clear Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus and Eros, that these are persons, at least in this first. In these first five or six lines. Of course, later things become more personified, but these could just as easily be taken as natural objects that don't have intelligence, that don't have any sort of personality or just forces. Eros is just a force, it's not an individual. And so as we read through, there is this kind of shift eventually where these beings do end up becoming very person like they have will, they have intent. But in the early going here, I think that's left very ambiguous. And so it's no surprise to me that many of the early natural philosophers turn to these opening lines as inspiration when developing their own cosmogonies.
- [33:58]
Thomas Lackey
I was just going to add a couple things. I think one thing is just by way of contrast, to mark that in all these kind of notions of chaos, chaos is a something. Right. So it's, I'm contrasting this only to the, to the, the, the, the, the Christian and, and Jewish idea of creation out of nothing is a different concept. Right. So there were already, they're already just contrasts worth, worth bringing up. And I think the second would be. You mentioned Plotinus. I think another example of where you could see that this, this, this notion of looking at creation as a movement to one, from one to many is a kind of notion of unity. To fracture and back to unity again is actually in origin. Now I am not endorsing this because of course actually his condemned as a heretical notion that the end is like the beginning. Right. But he's still, he's picking this up probably out of the Greek strain. And you can see the attraction of the philosophical idea, at least that you. The question is always then how can things be restored to some sort of primordial order that they had? If you begin with this, with union or unity as the one as the beginning, and you know, obviously later the Christian direction this will take will be one of, you know, creation, fall and redemption. And in some sense this is a contrasting or a different take on a story versus unity, fracture and reunion. Right. To just kind of contrast those two looks kind of holding those in mind.
- [35:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Two things that occur to me, one is, I'm really glad you brought in that Genesis parallel because sometimes we're so habituated to the Christian narrative that we actually forget how unique our creation story actually is. Because basically, in almost every other one I've ever read, which I can't think of anyone that's contrary to this, there's always something in the beginning that's basically unexplained because we should. We should point out here, right? There's really no explanation of, you know, even if chaos represents, you know, a unity that's then fractured, there's no explanation of where the unity comes from. And the same thing in a lot of creation myths. There's always something, and half the time it's completely unintentional, right? So I think about, like, what was it? Tiamat, the sea dragon and the Babylonian myth, right? She gets, like, torn apart and he, like, makes the earth from her, right? Half the time in these narratives, if you look at the Norse myths, et cetera, like, the creation of the world in a lot of ways is completely accidental. So I think that the intentionality and the creation from nothing that ex nelio is really important to compare. So I'm very happy you brought that up. The other thing I'm going to push back into Eros, which is not going to surprise anyone if they're familiar with my own writings and scholarship and what I tend to spend my time on. But is Frank or Dr. Broski, you mentioned earlier some tetherings to aerosols, metaphysics, and he does mention Hesiod. And I'll. I'll leave that alone. I'm going to leave that alone for you. But what I wanted to mention here is Aristotle's use of arrows. Because when Aristotle has to answer the question, how does the unmoved mover, right, which is God. How does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? And if you're unfamiliar with this, right, the unmoved mover can't move. Nothing moves him. But also he doesn't move because movement requires potential. You could potentially be here or there. And God is pure act, right? He's perfect. Nothing can be added or taken away. And so how does God then this kind of goes back to that oneness, multiplicity problem, right? How does the one God create and move all things out from him and then back to him? How is everything actually moving back to him? And it's interesting that Aristotle's answer to that is love is Eros, right? Our Eros is That everything in the universe, not just rational creatures, but the whole created universe, actually has this yearning, this erotic appetite to move back towards God. And so it's really interesting that here, like, in a poetic form, one of the very first things to pop up is that Eros, it's one of the four primordial gods. And then it's from Eros that we have this fecundity that things can actually, you know, have that going out. Right, that exitus. I'm not really sure there's a. Ready to. I'm not really sure there's a return. I think. I think, Thomas, this is what you were mentioning earlier, if I remember right. I'm not really sure there's actually an end of the circle where things actually come back to the unity. But Eros definitely in this passage, has that fecundity of going out.
- [38:51]
Thomas Lackey
Well, this will be so far down the line that, you know, 25 years from now, when somebody's listening to the, you know, year Exitus and Redditus has a strong trinitarian theological bearing as well. So I will say that this idea of going forth and then returning to is strongly taken up in the Christian tradition, but not in this, like, unity to fracture sense, but in this. The sense that you're talking about of the. Of love drawing us towards itself and also the. Our. The. The love that with which we're infused, drawing us towards love itself.
- [39:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, the exitus, right, Our exit are why did. What did God create? Why did he actually give us something rather than nothing and then the ratatouille, the return to him. The Neoplatonic Catholic thinkers of the Renaissance were very fond of saying that love is a good circle, that love is a good circle. Right? That love has this going out and this coming back. And so, yeah, I think right now, not to keep belaboring this point, but I do find it fascinating that Eros, love is here at the beginning of the Greek creation of the cosmos and the different role that it plays. But I am kind of curious to look and then see, like, is there anything that actually looks like that ready to. Is there anything that's. Then draws the universe, the cosmos and man back to some kind of unity? I'm not really quite sure there is, but we could look and see if we find something in the text.
- [40:23]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I mean, we're only maybe 10 or 15 minutes into this podcast, and what the viewer should be noticing. No, but the viewer should be noticing is just the richness of this particular text and how it relates to Christian thought. Christian Theology, how it can be appreciated from a poetic or a literary standpoint. But there's also this sort of deep philosophical content that needs to be engaged. So much so, as I mentioned earlier, that Aristotle takes Hesiod seriously enough as to include him in his historical account of philosophy. There's a passage early in Metaphysics, book one, where he refers to the lovers of myth as being philosophic because they're stimulated by wonder, which is the source of philosophy. So, I mean, Hesiod is clearly trying to give a rational account of creation. This isn't just things arbitrarily pop into existence. There's a mechanism involved, but it's ultimately unsatisfying because he doesn't explain how, if this is a separation, how that happens. It just happens. And so this is what will then press philosophers to ask the question, well, okay, how did this happen then? You can't just say that it happened, but you have to give an explanation why or how. And so, yeah, I mean, on the face of it, this is just a story of how the gods came to be. But, yeah, when you seriously engage this text and you set it aside, the story of Genesis, early attempts to try to give an account of cosmic origins, you really begin to appreciate what Hesiod.
- [42:23]
Thomas Lackey
Has done here as an outside kind of reference. Anyone that would interested in the later Christian thought on the idea of Exodus and Reditus and the idea also and the role that love plays, Father Dominic Legg has a fantastic book called the trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas. It's not an easy read, but it's highly recommended. So I'll leave that there. We can move on to other things. I'll just throw out that reference.
- [42:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's good. Yeah. Leg is. Father Legg is a wonderful thinker. Wonderful thinker, yeah. So moving from the beauty of the creation of the cosmos, let's switch to the next section, which is the castration of Uranus.
- [43:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Beauty to ugliness. Yes.
- [43:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I. I mean, let me just maybe sketch a little bit this out. So we end up having Uranus is the sky, Right. The heaven. Sometimes it's translated and he comes together with Gaia. And so this is kind of that primordial eros is implicitly the way they can come together and be fecund. And so now we're getting offspring. And it's amazing to me, and I think this has to be taken quite seriously, that this immediately starts to create antagonisms. I mean, this is like immediately when there. There's a Father Son relationship, that this is immediately translated as a source of strife and it's antagonistic to one another. I think that's something we need to watch. So in short, we have the Titans that are born. And it says this is like paragraph line 147, that they were hated by their own father. And so he hid them away in a secret place of the Earth. And so what's up happening? And I. One thing I thought was really interesting here is that then this makes Gaia very upset. But one thing I think there's like a. I don't know if you want to call it an allegory, but there's something to notice here is that as Uranus and Gaia are having these children and Uranus finds them to be a threat and he hates them, it's almost as if he's shoving them back in the womb, right?
- [44:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Because he's.
- [44:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Where is he? Where is he putting them? He's putting them in the earth. He's putting them back in their mother. And this causes her an immense amount of pain, which I think is not just emotional pain, right? It says, but vast earth groaned within, being straightened and she made. So then it's an immediate juxtaposition. She's in pain. And so what does she do? She makes a sickle and then basically tells her plan to her sons, which is basically, you know, which one of you wants to cut off your father's genitals, Right? This is. This is the immediate plan. So we're only like, what are we in? We're like 160 lines deep. We're not even that deep into. I mean, we started the cosmogony at 1, 116, and all of a sudden we have mutilation, we have violence, we have antagonistic relationships between husband and wife, between husband and her father and children. And of course, what's up happening is that Kronos is the one that decides to do this and that he does actually then in this kind of scheme and ambush. So we have deceit as well. Quote, swiftly lopped off his own father's members, right? So he has stopped this kind of erotic act that his father connects to be the one, the genesis of things. What do we make of this?
- [45:55]
Thomas Lackey
Well, yeah, it's incredibly graphic.
- [45:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But you've already mentioned Deacon, the Mesopotamian myth involving the mutilation of Tiamat, that this does seem to be a recurring theme in early accounts of creation, where it's through the destruction that brings about some creation. And so, yeah, my first. I mean, I think Everybody who reads this for the first time is caught quite off guard by this particular scene. But yeah, in fact, much of the theogony is characterized by violence, by strife. For Hesiod, this really seems to be a fundamental metaphysical principle in operation, that it isn't just all love and peace and the coming together, that there does have to be a separation if one is to sort of balance things out.
- [46:58]
Thomas Lackey
I think there's a couple of things that come out right off the bat too. One is that Uranus's rule is completely despotic. It's. It's power and nothing else. And I think that's going to come into play later as contrasted to how Zeus is portrayed, I think another is that depending on translation here, when she addresses her children, she addresses children gotten of a sinful father or another translation, an evil father. So there's already beginning to begin this kind of euthyphro like question, which is, where does justice come from? Right. Because the action that Uranus is taking here is being appealed to in the sense that there's some yet outside concept he is doing something wrong. And I have been wronged and I deserve to be avenged is the sort of the subtext here. And so this, you know, this outside appeal to justice begins essentially right at the beginning.
- [48:03]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I mean, the act of violence itself, as we see, is generative. That the blood is received by Gaia that gives rise to these, to the Furies and to the giants. And then we have the birth of Aphrodite from the genitals being received by. How is it put? It's the foam, Right. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's very semen. Like, without getting too graphic.
- [48:33]
Thomas Lackey
Well, and this is a contrast to something Homer says, right, because he puts Aphrodite as a daughter of Zeus, as I recall correctly.
- [48:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. What was her mother's name in the Iliad? Dione. Di Dione, Something like that.
- [48:50]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
- [48:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
When she go, when she gets speared in the wrist, when she goes up to Olympus, she's comforted by her mother. So there is a distinction here in the mythologies, because, and I like what Dr. Grabowski said is that, you know, something about the Greek mythology that we have to keep in mind is that the entire earth is personified. And so just like, you can miss things. I know I miss things like when I first read it where it's like, oh, well, then Uranus puts the Titans right back into a deep pit in the earth. We have to realize he's reinserting them into their mother. Even here. What Dr. Grouse, he pointed out is like, well, he tosses the genitals, but then the blood and the tossing of genitals is what then received by the earth. And there's a fecundity there again. So I. And I. I do. I do agree and appreciate it that I think the. The ones that I think are important. There's many here. But the ones I think that are most important to point out is one, that this is where Aphrodite comes from. Her name is the. Her etymology means foam. That's where she comes from. Her mom's name, though, in the Iliad, is based off the sea. So you see two parallel myths of where she came from. But very clearly, I mean, I could be wrong, but very clearly, her just arising from the sea became the predominant myth for her and is what basically all of her art depicts. But I think if you're looking at, okay, in all of this and all these gods and these things coming out, what do I need to know? I think one is to know the Aphrodite arose from the sea. I think two is the Furies come from this. And so it's like, wait, well, who are the Furies? Well, the Furies, again, are actually another female goddess. Goddesses, immortals. And the Furies, I mean, I guess, in short. But they're gonna be important because when we read the Oresteia, the Furies have a very prominent role. And so the Furies are these women, these very kind of primordial women that hunt down those who have acted contrary to justice, particularly a very primordial justice. So someone who strikes and kills like their own father or mother. Right. That there's actually been this violation of the blood bonds. And then they basically will hunt these people down in these. These kind of vicious, unending way. Right? They kind of have this unsatiable appetite for that person's blood until they can find them. And so I. The Furies, I think, play a very interesting role in Greek mythology. So I simply wanted the flag that of all the names here, they're one to remember.
- [51:21]
Thomas Lackey
Well, yeah, I think so, for sure. I mean, one of the interesting things about that here is that the Furies have this arc towards justice, but at the same time, and I think this is something that taken up later in the Arstaya, have sort of stand slightly outside of justice at the same time, because they seem to be a kind of vengeance against a familial attack. Whether or not that attack was just right. So you could take for example, Kronos's part that in fact he was doing in this case, that he was actually. It was a proper vengeance. At least you could make that argument. But all I'm saying is that even if that were true, that doesn't necessarily mean that the Furies would be satisfied. Right? They're not really. It's not. It's not just a purely abstract justice. There's a kind of relational vengeance to it as well.
- [52:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's. It's. No, I very much agree. It is lex talionis. Right? It's eye for an eye. It is these very nascent concepts of justice. Again, I think one of the problems with, like, reading Homer or Hesiod is that we want to read in our own very robust Catholic intellectual tradition to it, but even reading in, like, Plato's definition of justice or Aristotle's is a bit too thick. And actually to set this up for our now six months of Greek poetics and working through the plays is that this is the very question that the Oresteia is going to take up with the Furies is basically the concept of what is justice? So I think for the purpose of this conversation, I simply want to flag this is their origin. They're an immortal or a group of immortals that you should take note of if you're just trying to hit the high points of, like, what should I pull from Hesiod?
- [53:14]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I think we can also pull this back slightly if we. Because we're just finishing the year of Homer and you have the book 24 of the Odyssey. I think part of the question is, how do we stop this blood feud cycle? This is the site, the cycle that the Furies are part of. And the answer there is not, I will say, entirely dramatically satisfying, because the answer is essentially just a lightning bolt and Zeus saying, stop it. But there's still this. The idea that the cycle had to be broken somehow is implicit. And I think that, you know, this mythology is underlying that, that if you don't, if the cycle is not broken, vengeance will continue.
- [53:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I really appreciate you tethering that to the end of the Odyssey, because I think that's a great picture of the gods having to intervene to stop that cycle of violence. All right, let's push forward a little bit. And so we have the Titans now are ruling. Kronos is the head of the Titans, is what we would call them. They are gods. They're immortals. We get a interlude here of the spirits of the night. So this is one of those sections that, I mean, we just get this large family tree. Not sure if anyone wants to pull a whole lot out of this. One thing I would note is that here we have listed a lot of the primordial gods that we actually saw active in the Iliad. So we have fate. And notice this is fate, this isn't the Fates. They come in a little bit later, right? The women that kind of personify fate and the threat of man's life and etc that people are somewhat familiar with. This is just fate. And we spent a whole lot of time in the year of Homer and reading the Iliad and the Odyssey talking about this nameless fate and how much does it actually govern the actions of men and even the actions of God. We also get death, sleep, dreams. So again, these are a lot of our players that we actually saw in the Iliad that are actually born from night. One thing too, I neglected to say up above that I found interesting is that when Aphrodite comes, Eros goes with her, which I found kind of fascinating for multiple reasons, because in a lot of the traditions we'll see later on, Eros is actually then reinterpreted. And by the way, the. The Roman name for Eros is Cupid. And Eros will be reinterpreted as a son of Aphrodite. That Eros was actually came from Aphrodite. Not that Eros actually was probably the generative force that actually ended up producing Aphrodite. But it's also interesting me from like a hierarchical standpoint that you have this kind of primordial God that then seems to attach to a lesser God. And then basically the rest of their mythology is tethered to them.
- [56:08]
Thomas Lackey
Right?
- [56:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
For the rest of it, Aphrodite is known as the goddess of love. And Eros kind of takes a back seat in a certain way. Actually, it occurs to me that the whole premise of the Symposium is that Eros is not praised enough and does not actually have adequate praise. And so they try and praise Eros, right? That's the kind of the. One of the underlying premises of this, of Plato's Symposium. So it's a short line, but it's something that caught my attention of why does he do that? And why. Why is this primordial God one of the original four, kind of tether himself to a newer God?
- [56:40]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But we will see throughout this text the old being replaced by the dew. You have this sort of replacement of the old gods by the new gods and the ultimate ascension of Zeus as being the supreme. So that is a theme, I think that Works its way throughout the theogony.
- [56:57]
Thomas Lackey
Well, and I think that there's a sense of progress in that. Kronos seems perhaps slightly less oppressive and wicked than his father, but not much so. Right. He does more or less the same things that his father did. He rules purely by force.
- [57:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [57:18]
Thomas Lackey
He eats his children. He. He keeps some of them locked away and eats others. He doesn't free all of the children of Uranus. Right. He only frees some of them. And then he eats some of his own children in the same fear. And the fear of being supplanted by a son that will be stronger than he is. Right. And that's going to come up repeatedly.
- [57:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. A lot of times you'll see this mentioned as. Right, this kind of myth of succession. Then there's this continually replacing of the primary God. And then, you know, how does this. I think one of the questions for us to ask is how does the cycle actually stop? Like, when we get to it, how does that cycle actually stop? So we get pushing on. We get the sea gods. And so we get introduced to the old man of the sea. You might remember him. That's who Menelaus had to wrestle. Remember, he's like changing shapes and doing all these different things. Menelaus actually wrestled the old man of the sea. We also get Iris. Remember Iris? She's associated with the rainbow. She was the messenger goddess. Very prominent in the Iliad. Kind of faded away in the Odyssey. And then we also have the harpies. They come up in a lot of Greek mythology. Not sure if anyone else has any commentary about the sea gods.
- [58:45]
Thomas Lackey
I thought the old man was only interesting again in this external kind of reference, that he doesn't forget the laws of righteousness. Right. But thinks just and kindly thoughts. But this is obviously some sort of appeal to a righteousness and justice that is distinct from the gods themselves.
- [59:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And what does that even mean? Like, what does righteousness mean in this context?
- [59:09]
Thomas Lackey
That's an excellent question.
- [59:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I guess one of the questions as we kind of parsing, parsing out the theogony is like, well, what is your external standard that you apply to? Like, what are you applying to natural law? Doesn't seem to make sense. You're applying to God as goodness itself doesn't seem to be here. Like, so when you say someone's righteous, I mean, I realize very clearly that I'm about to re articulate the entire problem of Plato's Euthyphro and that Plato's going to take up this question explicitly. So I guess my point Here is. In this poem, you see the problems with this type of mythology, this pantheon, is when you say, oh, he's righteous, but you have all these conflicting, warring, violent gods. There's a. There's a big question of, like, well, what. To what standard? What canon are you righteous to?
- [60:00]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, and it's. I guess one question to the side of that would be, to what extent? See, I think we made an argument that. That Homer may have been creating a kind of implicit critique of the gods in certain parts in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And I guess the. The parallel question would be, is Hesiod doing the same thing? My sort of instinctive reaction is, no, I think he is appealing. At least my read would be that he seems to be appealing to a kind of moral intuition without making a distinct moral argument, which is fine. I mean, I'm not actually making any complaints about moral intuition. But the. I don't think he's. Yeah, I don't think this is a fully developed question in this poem.
- [60:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. Let's look at the Bestiary is the next section where we get a listing of many of the. The beasts, some of the ones that we know quite well. We have Medusa is in this section. Perseus, you might remember, cuts off her head. And this is where Pegasus, the winged horse, comes from. Oh, if you go down a little bit to, like, 306, we get a lot of the monsters that are very common in, like, the stories of Bellerophon and Heracles. So we get the Chimera, we get the Nemean Lion. It actually mentions Bellerophon there. We get the Sphinx, which comes up as well.
- [61:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
As. Well.
- [61:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, yeah, Cerberus is in there. So is the Hydra. Hydra would be another kind of famous monster in there. All coming from. What's his name? Typhus. Typhon. Typhus. So just a. I don't really know if I have a strong Hesiod the teacher philosophical veneer here, but I think is like, you read Greek myths to your kids or you're trying to track some of the main stories. There's a lot of the main characters that you actually see pop up in mythology are in these couple paragraphs. All right, let's look at the Titan gods. That's our next section. Line 334. I think it kicks off off at the Titan gods, which we get a listing of them which includes some of the ones that I think are important. Metis. Metis. Metis. Dr. Gabowski. What is that? Metis?
- [62:22]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, yeah. Or Metis. Yeah. I mean, it's I'm just going to.
- [62:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Make a general principle on this podcast that if I pronounce something and then Dr. Grabowski pronounces something and we don't pronounce them the same.
- [62:33]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I'm pronouncing.
- [62:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Everyone needs to go follow Dr. Grabowski. We don't follow. Follow deacons from rural Oklahoma on how to pronounce old Greek terms. So I'm just going to throw that as a pending rule for the podcast.
- [62:44]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But council. Yeah, Metis.
- [62:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Metis. As as this like we have wisdom. I think her. She's going to come in.
- [62:54]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
That's Zeus's first wife, correct?
- [62:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So she comes into the narrative here a little bit. Sticks, I think is another one. The river Styx is another kind of key character. It's interesting because I never really thought of Styx as something personified, but the river Styx that flows through Hades, very famous river in Greek mythology.
- [63:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Daughter of Oceanus.
- [63:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you also have the 3,000 neat ankled daughters of the ocean.
- [63:25]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right.
- [63:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Which he luckily does not name. Right.
- [63:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You know, the ocean is interesting because something I was going to just mention earlier is that although Homer does not spend much time developing a robust theogony, there is this one line in it's book 14 of the Iliad where this is Hera outflanks. Outflanks Zeus and she's talking to Aphrodite and she refers to Oceanus or the ocean as the. I think the Faglist translation renders it as the fountainhead of the gods. And I looked up the Greek and it's Genesis. So at least Homer. Now again, I don't know how much weight to put on this, but Homer seems to elevate or give some sort of pride of place to ocean. And of course this is brought out when Hephaestus makes the shield of Achilles and then ocean becomes the outer perimeter. So there does seem to be a bit of a competition here between a Homeric cosmogony or theogony that seems to give a priority to ocean. Whereas Hesiod places Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus in the front of the line.
- [64:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's a great catch on kind of the competing myths there, because I remember reading that in Fagles and Faggles has a note that this is like a reference to a mythology that no one else plays out. We don't know what the story is. That ocean somehow is the. The genesis, which I really liked because that this, the water being the genesis, would have run more parallel with our Christian text. Yes, right.
- [65:11]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Because you know, up on that Thales, the so called father of Western philosophy, says that the arche, or the source of all things is water. So he identifies water as the beginning. So the only other thing I would point out too that came to mind is that, you know, Hesiod is just really interested in providing these mechanisms of creation. You know, even when the blood falls upon Gaia, the blood from the genitals of Uranus falls upon, there's a chemical reaction. Right. It's not an act of will that gives rise to the giants and the furies, but it's a chemical reaction. And so again, you're beginning to see with Hesiod an appreciation for naturalistic explanations of phenomena. I mean, he doesn't tell you how the blood gives rise, but there's still an awareness that these things happen and these aren't just acts of divine will.
- [66:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I think you and I had had spoken briefly offline as well, that as you kind of look at the Greek mind trying to move towards an ordered cosmos, which is really what the cosmos even means, Right?
- [66:28]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Exactly.
- [66:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Like the entire. I mean there is a rationality in an order to this theogony. Right. So the gods that come from night or the gods that come from ocean are not random. I mean, the fact that they bring, you know, they bring dream and death and sleep and all these things come from night, I mean, they're thematic. Right. There is a cause and effect there. And I think that really is, as you mentioned, that is an early attempt in a lot of ways to map how does the cosmos actually function.
- [67:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah. And so these long lists of mythological characters that we've been going through can sometimes seem tiresome and even I will sometimes just kind of skim through them. But it's Hesiod's attempt to indicate that these things just did not appear out of nowhere. They all have a source, they all have some kind of origin, some place or person of origin. And I think this goes back to something that either you or Thomas said, which is that, you know, there is no creation ex nihilo in Hesiod. I think the Greeks really avoided trying to say, well, there is no reason. It's the principle of sufficient reason is what we're seeing here that for every event or for every effect, there's always going to be some cause that you can trace this back to.
- [67:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree.
- [67:56]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
This hymn that he sings to Hecate. I thought that was really. I thought that was really interesting that he devotes. He devotes nearly 30. It's over 30 law. Over 30 lines. Close to 40 lines. It's a Hecate and all wonderful things that she does. Well, and maybe some of the not so wonderful things she does which I.
- [68:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Don'T remember her mentioned in the Homeric texts at all.
- [68:24]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I have to admit the first. When I first read this, the first thing that came to mind was, oh, so that's what a hecatomb is. Which I'm sure if I had looked up earlier, would have answered this question. But it just sort of, you know, it just immediately snapped into place.
- [68:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I had to. I had to look up who she was. I didn't have any because, I mean, coming off of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I had no concept. So I don't know if this is just a particular culture that was that for whatever reason, Homer doesn't incorporate or just didn't find need to reference because my understanding is that, you know, she's associated with the underworld. She's not really mentioned with Homer, but she's a source of blessing for man, for victory, for glory. I mean, once, you know, we get this hymn of her and it also says that she is honored amongst all the deathless gods. I mean, her absence in the Homeric text is somewhat palpable.
- [69:19]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, she obviously has a very. That Hesiod holds her close to his heart for some reason, but, but, but, but it's. But he devotes a great number of lines to her, praising her and what she does for man. And so I'm not exactly sure if I have much to say other than this really struck me as. As unusual, but pleasantly so. And it reveals that this particular goddess for Hesiod was very special.
- [69:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, because do we. I mean, I'm not even familiar with her really being the focus or picked up by anyone after this. I mean, I'm sure she's mentioned. I don't think she's, you know, tethered specifically to Hesiod. But I mean, I'm trying to think about, like, you know, the Platonic dialogues, just the general Greek myths. Like, I don't really remember her coming up outside of this.
- [70:16]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I don't either.
- [70:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, well, I just wanted to.
- [70:19]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I just wanted to mention that that was one of my favorite little moments within this very well, very burdensome poem.
- [70:28]
Thomas Lackey
I'll bring up, like, an unanswered question, which is we'll have shortly regarding Prometheus somewhat detail of the relationship of man's sacrifice to the gods. But I guess the other question is we just had a bit about her role in sacrifice, but the two aren't that I see. The two stories don't get connected. Right. So there's just an interesting, like, opening question. There is like, how do we tie these. These two bits?
- [70:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
That's a good question.
- [71:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Let's. Let's sally forth into the children of Kronos, which is somewhat of a famous passage. So Kronos ends up having his own children. So again, as we've already mentioned, there's this kind of successive myth, the succession that goes through the theogony. And so, of course, I think, as Thomas already mentioned, Kronos is worried about a usurper, right? He's worried about one of his own sons, one of his own children doing to him what he did to his father. And so, very famously, Kronos swallowed. So this is line. I don't know. 453 or so Kronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with his intent that no other of the proud sons of heaven should hold the kingly office amongst the deathless gods. For he learned from Earth and starry heaven that he was destined to overcome by his own son, strong though he was, though the contriving of great Zeus. So a few things there. One, it's. It's Zeus, son of Kronos. Remember, if we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, that epithet was there all the time. And so, you know, this isn't a surprise. So the, The. The son that's going to overthrow him is Zeus. I do think it's kind of interesting that he overthrew his father and castrated him, and now his father's just, like, hanging around being the heavens. But I can't generate anybody. So now I'm just, like, giving advice. I'm not like. It's an interesting. Because I'm not really sure you can kill anybody. Right. Like amongst the immortals. I'm not really sure you can, like, properly just murder your father, if that makes sense. But I find it kind of funny here that now this, like, you know, castrated dad is just hanging out in the heavens parsing out advice. And really, it's not advice. Right. There's a poetic justice here, by the way. What you did to me will be done to you.
- [72:58]
Thomas Lackey
Again, it goes to the question of fate.
- [73:00]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Right, well, good. Excellent. Because in my translation it does say fate, and there seems to be a relationship between the fate and the will of Zeus, which is a question that comes up repeatedly. And Homer. So my translation reads, he learned from Gaia and Starry Urnas that it was fate that his own son would overthrow him by the plans of great Zeus. So, you know, we've read, we've been reading, we've been going through these epic poems and again, it isn't very clear. It hasn't been made, the point hasn't been made explicitly whether fate and the will of Zeus are one of the same, whether there is some fate hanging over and above Zeus. That is where the gods are subjected to this fate. But Hesiod here once again seems to be tying fate or destiny somehow to Zeus and Zeus's will. Again, even though it's not made concrete and explicit, it does seem to at least be there at least seems to be some connection here.
- [74:14]
Thomas Lackey
Well, yeah, and it's, it's an interesting one because it, it, the, how to put it, you can either tie this, this destiny to Zeus's will or you can make Zeus the instrument of this destiny. Right. And it, either one seems to be an acceptable reading of our kind of sparse line.
- [74:39]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
See, I meant to look up whether this is the first appearance of the word fate in theogony. I'm going to have to do a little bit of homework because if this is the first appearance of the word fate and it's in relation to the plans of great Zeus, then that I think would be significant.
- [74:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We've already had fate show up as a primordial God, right? We've had that, yeah, but not, but I, I, I'm somewhat captured because mine says destined. So I, I, I completely just blindly read over that. But I'm, I'm really captured now from our conversations of the Iliad between Zeus and the nameless fate that Zeus is introduced. So I think, actually, I think a better question is when is Zeus introduced into the narrative? Not just the hymn at the beginning, but when's he introduced? And the fact that he's introduced in the context of something that is fated, that seems very fitting for him.
- [75:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
You said something really interesting earlier, Deacon. And how Eros gets tied to Aphrodite, becomes subject to her somehow that they become linked. And this may be just another instance of one of the primordial gods, namely fate being tied to Zeus.
- [75:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that. I like that a lot. Okay, so let's kind of parse out like this famous myth just to, you know, give it in some. So obviously, just like Gaia did. What's her name? Rhea the Titan. Kronos's wife doesn't like what's happening, so she beseeches her own parents, earth and sky, right? Or heaven, and they devise a plan which basically somehow they get Kronos to swallow a stone and he thinks he swallowed Zeus, but he actually swallowed the stone. I have a lot of questions of how that worked, but that's okay. And Zeus goes off. And this is kind of interesting because to me, this is like that very first. This is like a trope. This is like a pattern in Greek mythology of like the young hero who then has to go off into exile and is trained by some, you know, mythological character to be a great hero. I mean, I think we saw this with Achilles, we saw this with Heracles. Like, this becomes like a pattern. And Zeus is really the first one to do this, right? He goes off and he has to have this time of exile and he's formed and then he comes back to overthrow Kronos.
- [77:06]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I mean, there would be an interesting parallel there too, as well. The idea that Zeus in some sense is formed by suffering. Because of course, later Aeschylus will set. Will bring out the idea that Zeus has set in order. That man is formed also by suffering, that man learns through suffering. And there would be a tie between these things that Zeus himself has learned his craft, learned to be, or a better God through what he's suffered.
- [77:36]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, Thomas, remember that, because when we finally get into the Oresteia, we're going to come across a famous Greek expression which literally means to learn through suffering. This idea of agon, of contest as being. I mean, the Greeks were just enamored with agon, as, I mean, not only necessary for human relations. I mean, we see this manifested most clearly like in the Olympics, through contests. But the Greeks, I think, were quite keen in noting that it's only through these contests, it's only through agony, that we're able to grow and learn and thrive. Zeus is growing, he's swiftly then the strength and noble limbs of the future lord grew. This is my translation. At the end of a year, tricked by the clever advice of Gaia, great, crafty Chronos threw up his children, defeated by the craft and force of his own son.
- [78:38]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I will, by the way, make this an important contrast that at least in this translation, Cronos is usually said to be wily or crafty. And this is, I think, contrasted to some extent against Zeus, who is cast more as intelligent or wise. Right, so there's a. There's a. There's a. I mean, I know that the translation, you just sort of use the word craft twice, but even there, I would say that the inflection is, as it were, somewhat different, that the craftiness of Kronos is being shown to be inferior to the intellect and wisdom of Zeus.
- [79:13]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I'm wondering if it's, if it's techne. I'd have to look it up if that's the word that's being used to describe Chronos, wisdom. Whereas like you said with, with Zeus it tends to be more whatever maybe Phronesis or Sophia or something that's a bit more elegant and high minded.
- [79:36]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I think this is something that, this will be kind of one of a central theme point. I think Hesiod is drawing out some differences here to the purely self interested and despotic rule of Uranus and Kronos and to Zeus who overcomes Kronos in fact not by himself, even though he is the strongest of the gods, but with the aid of his siblings. Right. He has a kind of coalition if you will. But the idea I think is that is not so much one of saying that Zeus needs the help and strength, although there may be something to that. But I think of a simply a different kind of rule. Zeus is still a monarch. I mean there's no doubt about that. I mean Zeus is, this is not a democracy, but there's still an idea that it's not an absolutely despotic rule, but that the Olympian gods are in some sense a united whole with Zeus at their head, but not strictly alone.
- [80:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, one thing too that occurs to me, kind of going back to our conversation about Eros or Eros, is that the immortals, Titans, gods, wherever you want to say, when they, when they couple, it's always fecund. Even if they, if, even if they don't want the children or I think it's really interesting that they like, like Kronos does not want his children. Like he's literally eating them as they're born, but he keeps having them. And I think that's interesting that, that it's that then every time that they actually come together it's, it's always a fecund act and it doesn't seem to be something that they can contracept. It's just like you come together, you have the gods even if you don't want them. And I think this is true too. When we see in the later Greek mythology when Zeus has run around coupling with everything, it's always, I mean, I can only think of one. There's like one myth in which I'm not going to remember which one it's with Apollo. I just read her. That's not an Oresteia, is it? That's Not Cassandra. Is that why Cassandra's cursed? One of the women Apollo was coupling with, and she literally, like, I think not to be overly graphic, but I think she literally pulled away and stopped him from actually, like, impregnating her, which then. Which broke this thing of, like, the immortals are always, like, fecund always. And she's cursed for it. I can't remember, but I think it just occurs to me that, you know, you have these immortals who don't want their children, their progeny, but somehow can't figure out how to not have them.
- [82:28]
Thomas Lackey
This is something. Just a throwaway line. I believe it's in the Odyssey that when I think there might even be book 11 where it's. It's. It. The gist of it is that one of the gods is talking to one of the women and saying, basically, don't. You'll. You'll have a son. Because, no, no. How shall we say? Action of the gods is ever in vain. And. And it. And it's just. It's left again as one of these almost truisms, you know, it's. It's taken for granted. We don't need to explain it because everybody knows that this is the way things are.
- [83:05]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Usually when the Olympian gods, Zeus, Apollo, decide to approach and seduce a mate, they're very selective about who they pick, and it usually has to do with their beauty, for instance. Whereas these titanic beings, these Titans, are not very discriminate about who they impregnate or who, you know. So it's, again, it's very raw, it's very carnal, it's very naturalistic, you know, completely bereft of any kind of reason, of any kind of seduction. So I think.
- [83:46]
Thomas Lackey
Well, you know, I think that that's a good point, because I think as well, there's kind of like talking about the switch from the. The. The sort of. The. The rule of pure power to something a little bit. I think there's. There's a general notion of civilization marching through this. Right. That the Olympian gods are, in fact, more of a civic order of a sort. Right. I mean, and obviously by. There's much to criticize about the Olympian gods, which Homer and Plato do at length, but there's still some idea that you've gone from this very violent primordial system to something more just and more ordered.
- [84:30]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, in. And there's. Yeah. And in the Iliad, for instance, the gods, when they produce offspring, they tend to care about the offspring. When you think of Zeus and Sarpedon, for instance, and how Zeus is just torn apart knowing that Sarpedon is destined to die. And the gods then fight over whether or not Zeus should intervene and contradict fate. In both cases of Uranus and Kronos, they take these violent actions to try to not destroy their children, but to at least hide their children, to remove them from the equation. And they're not at all subtle about it.
- [85:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think one thing you mentioned that might be a good segue is with the Titans being indiscriminate is also just the fact of, like, what exactly is humanity at this point? Are there beautiful maidens walking around right now? Like, it's a good question. Like, what. Where is humanity?
- [85:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, there are no women. We know where women come from, according to.
- [85:35]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, right.
- [85:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a good. Which I think. Yeah, we need to bring up some. Some Genesis parallels there. So, I mean, that's a good segue into Prometheus. Right. Which is our next section. Does anyone want to. Does anyone want to lead us and kind of sally forth into the myths on Prometheus? Probably some of the most famous myths, I think, in the text.
- [85:57]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, Deacon, why don't you. Right. It's the idea of the Titan who provides man with fire or that provides man with wisdom or intelligence. Right. He hides it in a fennel stalk.
- [86:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. There seems to be two. So my understanding here is that traditional.
- [86:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Way of presenting the myth.
- [86:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So my understanding is that there's two myths here that I think are really important. Really important. So, one, some of the chronology of this is interesting. So we kind of start off with a list of characters, and one of them is Prometheus, who we actually are told was a match himself in wit, for the almighty son of Kronos. So Prometheus, which is. I don't remember anyone else having that title. Athena being literally the embodiment of Zeus's witness and intellect, might be the closest. But Prometheus actually challenges Zeus in his wisdom. To use that term that might be slightly too robust here.
- [86:59]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Possible usurper.
- [87:01]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
- [87:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So he's. He's a threat. Right. So again, because I think one thing I appreciated of the theogony when I read it in preparing for just this conversation, was Zeus. Zeus's reign is not really confirmed until later in the poem. So even though he's overthrown Kronos, he has multiple other adventures, hurdles, barriers that he has to overcome before Hesiod, you know, inspired by the Muses, actually will give him, I think, the accolades that he. That Zeus wants as the chief God. And so this narrative with Prometheus Yeah, he's a potential usurper. I think that's one way to see him. He has a very famous punishment that we're told, right, where, in short, he's chained to a rock. And a lone eagle will come every day and eat his immortal liver. So it tears his liver out of his body and the eagle flies away. And then, because he's an immortal, he heals. And then the next day, the eagle comes again. So Zeus, at certain times in the mythology invents incredibly creative punishments. And we're kind of noted that Heracles is the one that eventually will actually set Prometheus free. But there's two myths on Prometheus that I think are worth noting. I believe one we actually mentioned in our year of Homer, which is Prometheus. So Prometheus has a bent towards caring for humanity. So there is this humanity, which I don't think Hesiod goes. Did Hesiod actually mention humanity's origin?
- [88:36]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Humans dine with the gods. And so at one point in history, in history, the gods and men seem to have almost a kind of equal status. I mean, men are perhaps mortal, but. But it isn't. There isn't a hierarchy where men have to supplicate themselves or mortals have to supplicate themselves.
- [89:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. I know there's a myth in which Prometheus actually creates man, and that's what actually engenders in him his affinity towards humanity. Is that his brother. Who's an idiot, right, the other Titan. I'll defer to Dr. Grabowski on how to pronounce his name. But if I remember right, there's another myth that's not in Hesiod that his brother makes all of the animals, the sensitive animals. And it's. There's almost this comparison of, like, look at this mighty elephant I made in its strength, the bear and its strength, the cheetah and its speed. You know, the eagle can soar and his brother's like, look at all these amazing things I made. There's nothing left for whatever creature you want to make. And Prometheus makes man, which at this time is. You know, he's. He's almost the dregs of creation. But Prometheus has this bent towards helping humanity because that's. That's the underlying premise of both of these myths, right? Where the first one is about the sacrifice. We mentioned this in the Iliad because I think it takes people by surprise that, long story short, man needs to offer some kind of sacrifice to Zeus. You know, we would say probably out of natural religion. Right. It's a virtuous act for man to give God his due. And so they have this, hey, Zeus, what do you want? Like, when we sacrifice an animal, what parts do you want? And Prometheus, very famously, you know, hides all the good parts of the animal that man would actually want to retain under kind of like the stuff, the sinews, the bones, everything that you wouldn't want. And then he takes all the other stuff that man doesn't want and hides it under the glistening fat, where you typically would find all the meat. And Zeus picks the glistening fat. And again, I don't think Hesiod's is clear, but Homer is that, you know, once. Once Zeus gives his nod, he gives his ascent, then there's no. He can't renege. Right. He can't take it back. And so Prometheus tricks him. And this is one of the ways, because we don't really see a whole lot of narratives of Zeus being outwitted, but we do see it with Prometheus. And this is why then in the Iliad, you know, we talked about. I think in our year of Homer, we talked about when Agamemnon kind of gives his first main sacrament, sacrifice. The sacrifice always has a horizontal or a vertical element of giving Zeus due, but because they can keep the good parts that you can eat. Now it has a horizontal element where they have a feast. And I think, as Thomas mentioned earlier, sometimes in the darkness of pagan mythology, you can find some pearls. And I actually think this is one that sacrifice is something that you offer to God, but it's also a feast, that there's a vertical and a horizontal element. And we see this very clearly, I think, today in the. You know, in the Blessed Eucharist.
- [91:52]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [91:52]
Thomas Lackey
Although I think there's an interesting idea, if you want to contrast the idea of communion. There's. There's no real. There's a kind of. There's a kind of antagonism here between the gods and men. And it's kind of funny, too, because it's. It's a kind of good. Good natured argumentativeness or combativeness. I mean, I think there's a kind of. I don't know how to characterize it, because it says already that they were. There was an argument or dispute that had arisen between men and the gods as to what they owed. Now, the idea wasn't that they owed nothing, but there's a kind of familiarity here where there's a sense of them. We'll just Argue about it. We'll argue it out, you know, well, come, let us reason together, you know. And so I think that that kind of. But. But the result, and Prometheus taking the part of men is. Cements a kind of slightly. So let's just put it this way, not purely communal relationship. So you have a. You have a notion of sacrifice, but distinct from communion as such.
- [93:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's notable that deceit is even integrated into the relationship between man and God. So Zeus, whose will moves all things to its end, like man, actually has integrated deceit into that relationship, which I think then shows you why a character like Odysseus in a lot of ways can be right. He's. He's like Zeus, right? It's funny that we don't ever get a character that's like Prometheus. We only get these, like an Olympian God. I think that actually just occurs to me. It's interesting that we don't ever get any kind of mention, actually. I don't think we. Did we get any mention of Prometheus in the Homeric text.
- [93:46]
Thomas Lackey
I don't know. Maybe regarding sacrifice, there might have been a hint that. I don't know, I don't remember. But one thing I will say is that Zeus. Hesiod's very clear, very defensive that Zeus isn't really taken in by the trick. So I think within there's like two parallel strains of this story because in one strain Zeus is just fooled, but once he's given his assent, there's nothing he can do about it. Hesiod says that Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick. And there's a kind of curiosity about this because one you might see in some translations of Job where he's admonished to, quote, bless God and die. Because even within the text, the translators wouldn't translate the idea of. Of cursing God, right? So there's this kind of like pious restraint, if you will. You could wonder if Hesiod's doing some sort of pious restraint where he won't. He simply won't allow Zeus to be tricked.
- [94:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because. How do you read that overall? Right? I mean, because it's a really interesting coupling of a multiple sentences. There were. I mean, just in the translation I'm using, but Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick. And in his heart he thought mischief against mortal man, which also was to be fulfilled with both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart in wrath, came to his spirit when he saw the white ox bones craftily tricked out. And because of this, the tribes of men upon the earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars. How do we read those two senses together? Right.
- [95:32]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. I mean, like I said, one, you could read them in this kind of like this restraint way that I was mentioning. I think the other way to read it is that maybe there's a question again here of fate. Right. That there's a choice that he knows he has to make. And essentially Prometheus has arranged things such that the choice he has to make frustrates him, but he still has to make it. But that would imply relationship to fate, that something. Again, we're back to the question of Sarpedon again, right? Because he questioned whether or not he not only should, but in some real sense, there seems to be the question of could he save him? Right. Is this something that will, you know, sort of is it. Has it. Would it go too far?
- [96:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there was a. In that passage when he. When Zeus and Iliad is discussing saving Sarpedon with Hera, there's also almost an implication that Zeus could save Sarpedon, but it will. It will usher in chaos to go against fate. Like, Zeus has the power, the capacity to go against fate. But if he does, like, it's going to unleash something that is far, far more awful, and basically Zeus backs off. That was the only time. I'm glad you brought the example, because I think in the Iliad, that's one of the clearest examples that we see Zeus and fate being two separate things. And we get kind of a parsing out of can he actually do anything about it? And that was my read is like, there's the implication that, yes, he can, but it could bring chaos back.
- [97:13]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I think where that connects here is that I think what Hesiod is doing is saying that Zeus's reign is one that is of a kind of harmonious order and that that involves some restraint on Zeus's part as well. In that. Yeah. Oh, no, that's. That's. That's pretty much what I had to say.
- [97:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I was gonna say, I kind of like your. Your take that this is Hesiod being somewhat pious because it's hard to. It's hard to read unless Zeus is just simply play. Acting this out. Right. Because it actually. It basically says that he. He has wrath, and he. When he saw the white ox bones, craftily tricked out. So without the former sentence, you basically think like, okay, so he's tricked and he Sees what's happened to him and he has an emotional reaction. But with the sentence beforehand you're like, wait, he knew. So what is this? What is he doing now? He's play acting this out. Like he, he thinks that fate has deemed this for mankind. Yeah, it's a hard juxtaposition, I think, to ferret out.
- [98:19]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I would only add one point in my translation. Caldwell renders the Greek as in his heart he foresaw evils. And here I think the, the Greeks are just really struggling with this idea of omniscience, especially as it applies to gods that exist within time and what that could possibly. So I mean, by the time we get to Augustine and Boethius, they can relocate God, so to speak, outside of time. And so omniscience then doesn't involve a kind of seeing into the future as you would see across the room. And so I don't necessarily think that Hesiod has a coherent philosophically or theologically coherent understanding of what it is that Zeus knows when he foresees these evils. But I think that they're trying to, he's trying. And other Greeks are trying to grope at making sense out of gods that have a kind of temporal existence and yet they still have some kind of knowledge of all things or knowledge of things to come.
- [99:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Let's look at the next myth. So there's two, there's the sacrifice and then he has this other one which is probably his most famous one, which is the stealing of the fire. So I mean, just to quickly map this out, which actually Hesiod doesn't spend a whole lot of time parsing this out, but basically the implication here is that mankind existed in darkness. Right? Mankind was basically a race of suffering. And Prometheus having, you know, empathy or sympathy towards mankind, steals fire from the hearth on Olympus and you know, hides it and brings it down to man. And I think that, you know, this is really where we get the term like Promethean. Like this is a Promethean thing. And what I want to spend a moment and maybe get your guys opinions on, like what, what this myth actually means. So I think to get us started, we have to acknowledge that, you know, so you have to think of mankind without fire. And we have to acknowledge then mankind without fire basically lacks technology, right? So he, he can't work, the smith, he can't cook his food. There's lots of things he cannot do. He can't create light. So we really have this kind of dark backward race of man who can't really do anything and it's fire then that brings civilization, right? It brings a certain technological advance to mankind that he doesn't have before. Prometheus does this and notably Zeus gets angry at him and we can kind of talk about what Zeus does. I think it's kind of a fascinating narrative itself. I think all I want to mention right now is, is that he immediately turns to the God of the smith. He, he turns to the fire God to craft a vengeance upon man for having fire. I, I, I just, it's hard to imagine that parallel is not intentional. But the Promethean act, like you see this presented as a positive like most of the time I see it like oh, this is going to be Promethean for humanity. What does that mean? It means well, we're going to get some new thing right now I think about the horrors of A.I. right. Like we're, this is going to be a Promethean act. It's going to change everything about our civilization and culture, right? This is why sci fi movies are named after this, right? This is the thing that's going to change everything and we're going to move from darkness into light.
- [102:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But I think too neutral though, right?
- [102:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And that's the thing that I think that what's interesting there is that the underpinning of this I actually think is very Luciferian where Prometheus, right this act is actually contrary to the gods, right? Man, man actually blossoming into his own civilization is contrary to the divine will. And that's not a small facet to this story.
- [102:28]
Thomas Lackey
No, I think that's obvious contrast or analogy here to make to the knowledge, the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, right? It's transgression of a boundary and something that was proper to the gods has been stolen, grasped. I'm trying to get the right word for something being sort of like kind of a sneak thievery. I don't know that what, what count. It takes that in this case it's, it's though it's a secondary agent, right? There's no moral imp quality. There's a punishment meted out to man, but it's not strictly speaking a moral crime on man's part.
- [103:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean certainly, I mean could you contextualize this as a usurpation or at least an attempted one, right? We become like God. I mean isn't that, is that not what the snake, right with Lucifer offers Eve? I mean also, I mean the whole nother shoe to drop here is then the role of the woman. But for right now Right. Lucifer speaks to Eve and that's the temptation. Right. Is to become like God. Not to rebel against God, but to become like God. Right. They play off that affinity. I mean, it seems very clearly here that that's what the Promethean act does is it allows man to become much more like God. He can create, he can build. I mean, think about fire. I mean, fire is absolutely central to civilization. Getting off the ground.
- [103:53]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, it's another separation. I think it's an. It's a declaration of independence. It affords us humans the capacity to provide for ourselves. So we don't need, as you said, we don't need the gods anymore. We don't need the gods to provide us with the natural resources, food we can use, agriculture, we can form different ways of transporting ourselves through space and time. And so, yeah, I think that it's. Well, on the one hand, it's a very, you might say a very good thing because it does afford us certain liberties and certain powers. But as with all powers, they have their dark side as well.
- [104:39]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously with fire as the chosen analogies, fire, it warms, it lights, but it also burns and destroys. Right. So there's this double quality, and it's not controllable.
- [104:52]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
I mean, fire doesn't necessarily have, you know, once you set fire to something, even, even a candle, you can't contain it. You know, water, earth. I mean, there are containers that you can put. You can put these things in. But fire has this sort of unpredictable quality to it. And so I do think that it's very deliberate that it's fire that Prometheus decides to give humans. And of course, fire then ends up playing a very important role in Heraclitus's philosophy. If fire becomes the source, the arche.
- [105:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, it's the most divine element. Right. I mean, it's unique amongst the elements and it's the, it's the divine one. Yeah. That has both a creating element and a destruction destroying element to it. Yeah, I mean, I just, you know, you hear this all the time, Promethean. And so I think it's good. You know, we talk about. You read the great books to reclaim your intellect, to know the origin of ideas. And this very much is one of those ideas that's thrown out a lot. But I think when you kind of dig into the myth, I think it raises a lot of antagonisms. You know, I very much agree with the parallels to the Garden of Eden in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So let's look at the punishment. Right.
- [106:10]
Thomas Lackey
By the way, I think the punishment, if you think about this kind of double quality that they're calling about, you're. Let's take a Homer analogy. But you've got the Penelope versus Helen or Clytemnestra. Right. There's still this idea of something that's creative or destructive.
- [106:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, why don't you lead us into it?
- [106:32]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I mean this has to be perhaps the most famous part of this, of this work. Although funny enough, the name of this gift, Pandora is not in this book book, it's in the works and days. So here we have the story and the story is of the price of fire. Right. So I'll read a little bit. Just. It'll be simpler. The limping God formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Kronos willed and the goddess bright eyed Athena girded and clothed her with silvery raiment. Skip down a little bit. But when he had made this beautiful evil to be the price of the blessing, he brought her out delighting in the finery which the bright eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her to the place where the gods and men were. And from her is the race of women and female kind. And of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble. No help meets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. But I will say it's not, it's a very negative approach. I mean at first, but I think there actually is a little bit of a. I think there's something else going on here. But let's, let me, let me pause there and get everybody's thoughts.
- [108:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I mean the phrase beautiful evil, that's also what this translation used. I'm using white. The problem with beauty is, right, it can have this allurement on something that's actually terrible. And yeah, I think you see it in the Garden of Eden and you see it here too. But the narrative here too. I mean another thing too to go back to Dr. Grabowski's point is the women become not just a temptation for the mortal men, but also for the deathless gods. They almost do too good of a job, right? I mean, what does it say? The deathless gods were also held in wonder, not just the men. And this goes back to your statement earlier about the Titans being somewhat non discriminate. And now the Olympians have this lower race, right? These, these women, these mortal women that actually kind of catch their attention. It's hard in certain ways not to make parallels here to St. Paul's mysterious statement about why women have to veil in church. Right. For the sake of the angels. And then he just, you know, doesn't elaborate.
- [109:07]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
This reveals a great deal about the psychology of these Olympian gods. I mean, they are not pure noose. They are not just pure mind or intellect. They have desires. They have, you know, Thumas, they have epithumos. They have these other parts of their psychological makeup that interfere with their ability to. To do the good and to choose the good. Thomas, I'm sorry I interrupted.
- [109:37]
Thomas Lackey
Oh, no, no. I was just thinking. I just wanted to call back to Deacon's point about the transcendentals, because I think. I think that's a really important idea and that the transcendentals are hierarchical, right? Goodness, truth and beauty are not just the order we often say them in, but are actually a hierarchical order in being. And that I think this is a danger when beauty is pushed too far forward from an evangelical dimension. Because as you're talking about, apparent beauty is much more alluring and much more deceptive than. I mean, there are apparent good, you know, apparent goodness, apparent truth. But apparent beauty is of an entirely different kind because beauty is, according to coinage, that's which. How do we put it? Something about which we behold and pleases, or something to that effect. So it's already in that act of beholding that we begin to desire something. And it's much easy to be led astray than it is by goodness or truth. So we always have to maintain goodness and truth as in their primary places, goodness in its primary. And essentially calculate and check beauty against goodness and against truth. And if those get out of order, it's very, very easy to get led down the wrong path.
- [111:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I was gonna say. I'm currently reading Dionysius, right. And he talks much about Eros, actually, today. I. Yeah, not. Not the God, but the, you know, early church Father. And, you know, he speaks. Actually, I read today he has. He gives a defense of. Of using eros and erotic in his text to talk about God. And God is beauty itself, right? The. What Augustine talks about, right. The ancient beauty ever new. And I agree with you, Thomas, that there's. There's an element of beauty that can be incredibly dangerous and unsettling, but in certain way. And I agree because I like Thomas, and Thomas is very systematic, and I like him. I really do. But there's also something about beauty, though, that I find it to be almost primary of the transcendentals, because it's the one that is to seems to me to be far less tameable, right. There's something about it that just. That will not fit into our preconceived notions. And it causes a fear in us that I think is really unique. When a man fears beauty, it's not because he doesn't want it, it's because he does want it and it causes him to crumple, to implode, right? Beauty immediately judges us about whether or not we're worthy for it. It's actually the most beauty in that context. So you think of like a young man and like a beautiful woman walks into the room and how many young men can immediately stumble over themselves, right? And it's not. They have a fear, but it's not a fear because they, they want to get away from the beauty. It's because they actually want the beauty. So it's actually the most natural analog that I know of to the fear of the Lord in the Old Testament, right? Because we constantly talk about, oh, that means respect, which I find. Sure it does. I mean, I think it's a flat read. But the problem is that I want the Lord, I want the God, but he's so beyond me and so unsettling. Like to seek him has a certain existential unsettledness that comes into it. Not because I don't want him, but because I want Him. And so I think beauty. And I realize I'm deviating, but I'm giving my defense of beauty a little bit against Thomas here, my friend, not the saint. But where I think that beauty, I agree it's dangerous, but in certain ways I think I find it and follow some of the Neoplatonic fathers and into the Renaissance, that it's also the most akin to God because it's the most untamable and the thing that undoes us the most. And so I find it really fascinating to try and tether this back to Hesiod, that in the punishment of man is a beautiful evil.
- [113:52]
Thomas Lackey
What I would, what I would say in response to that is that I agree with almost all of it, right? So that would be the, that would be the thing is that beauty, beauty has this, this immediately impactful and sort of pre intellectual reaction from us. It just, it hits you all at once. It is some very often, if we even asked to describe what about it was beautiful or what about this, what about this piece of music, this piece of art, this person, this something that it just, it attracts and it draws us. And I think that danger is not, how to put it, the danger itself is not the bad thing. The danger would be. The bad thing would be in forgetting the order. Right? Because it's true that this thing that we've seen and seeing we loved and desired, and it begins to draw it towards us. The next question is going to that next level, perceiving for things as they truly are. And if going into that next level to see the truth of the thing and the goodness of the thing, then the beauty is serving its proper function in the same way that, say, an emotion is serving its function when it's in the aid of reason. I would say that beauty is serving its proper function when it's in the aid of. Of truly appreciating the goodness. And I think it's, it's. It's only if the only. The danger is only in getting these things out of their. I would say, I would put it this way, their order in, in ontology. Not necessarily. Not their order in. In. In time. Because the order in time is almost always going to be beauty first and then understanding the truth and. Or goodness.
- [115:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Father Facino, who was the head of the Medici Neoplatonic Academy in the Renaissance, after they had kind of a reawakening with the orthodox and were reintroduced to a lot of the Platonic text, he will talk about beauty as the flowering of the good. Right. It's that this, there's this allurement that draws us in the sweetness and beauty in its best sense. Right. Actually, this tethers back to our conversation on Eros, because the proper object of eros is beauty in the Platonic sense. And so, yeah, in its best sense, beauty is actually an invitation to ascend. Beauty is actually an invitation to climb the ladder of love and to move from lesser things to greater things. I should say goods probably to be more particular in our life. And this is what Plato's going to pick up when we read this symposium. So no, I, I just, I think it's not hilarious, but it's kind of darkly comedic that Zeus then decides to undo man. Because, I mean, you have to think of the duality here. Man. So now we're realizing, oh, mankind actually just means man, right? And so in this reading of Hesiod here, at least that's how I read it, because I again, I was waiting for Pandora. But we didn't quite get the full Pandora myth, right, As I read this. I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe I skipped the line. We didn't get the full Pandora's box myth here, but we did get women basically as the curse. And I Find that fascinating, that basically man gets a technological advancement which is very masculine, right. We're gonna. We're gonna conquer the gods. We're gonna have civilization. We're gonna do all these things and have techne and have advancements. And how does Zeus decide to impede man? He gives him, you know, something beautiful. He gives him women. But in the description of women, just to be clear, I mean, because there's a poetic side to this that I like, but Hesiod's statements here are quite heavy. Right. So from her, this creature that Hephaeus, that Hephaestus made, which is a whole question there then, about whether women are actually truly human. Right? Because they're. They come from this construct from Hephaestus, which, I mean, so in a certain way they're artificial. So from her is the race of women. The female kind of her is the deadly race, the tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no help, meets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. Right. Zeus made women to be an evil to mortal men with a nature to do evil. I mean, someone hurt Hessian. That's what I'm gonna. That's gonna be my theory here, is that someone hurt Hessian.
- [118:20]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. You know, it's weird to try to think, I mean, to make Hesiod the kind of anti. Dante. Right. If you think about.
- [118:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [118:31]
Thomas Lackey
I don't know that you could have two perspectives on women more opposed than Dante and Beatrice and Hesiod and unnamed woman.
- [118:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That I like that a lot.
- [118:44]
Thomas Lackey
But I would say. So he gives this idea that they're basically. Well, one. I think you're perfectly right to bring up the Genesis analogies. So of course, you have Eve being taken from Adam's side, so they are of one flesh. But here you have a completely artificial construction. I think, as the way you put it, as well with Hephaestus. And Hesiod's reading here seems to be the race of women and all the rest of it, that he's making a distinct opposition. They're not. They're not even of the same race in Hesiod's very bleak accounting of things. But there's still, I think, an acknowledgment because he says so, okay, if you get married, your life's going to be terrible according to Hesiod. But if you don't marry, then you're going to be alone in your old age and your name will die out. All right, there's no. There's no. It is not possible to deceive beyond the will of Zeus, basically, there's no getting out of this negative fate. But I think there's a kind of silver lining ish there. I think there's an idea that he's ultimately describing simply the lot of man underneath the gods in this last line where he says, the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good for whatever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart with him. And this evil cannot be healed. So there is an idea that there is a good wife, there is such a thing as a good marriage, but there's no such a thing as an untroubled life. Even the most harmonious, I mean, you can think of Odysseus and Penelope, even the most harmonious of husbands and wives will have illness and old age and poverty and sickness mixed in with the times of plenty and joy. And I think that's the sort of like, if you want to do a sort of the upbeat reading of Hesiod, which, you know, admittedly I'm straining to get to this upbeat reading, but I think this upbeat reading is just a sort of like I am now at this moment simply describing the lot of man, you know, in. In his mortal flesh.
- [121:07]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think, I think somewhat as an antecedent to Plato. We do see here, you know, Plato will present that man's Eros for the beloved. So, you know, that erotic, how we. How we mainly know it, right, that man comes together and couples with woman and finds her beautiful, that Eros always seeks immortality, our souls are immortal and are seeking immortality. And we do this through various means. And one of the means that we do it is that when we couple with a beloved, we have children. We talked about earlier, where the gods are always fecund. And so it's interesting to me here that he actually kind of pitches this, that you can try and stay away from these antagonisms that he says particularly are not helpmates. So there's a completely contrary Genesis concept here about who women is, right, or who women are. And. But then saying that, then trying to stay away from that erotic desire, right, which we've seen throughout the entire text of Eros. This is bringing together this coupling and there's this fecundity trying to stay away from that will also bring sorrow. And it's particularly kind of predicated on children, right? So I think that actually tracks pretty well with what we're going to see the traditional pick up with in this concept.
- [122:26]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I'd add as well, I mean, this is just kind of reiterating something we've already said. But as much as there is a kind of consonance with some of the Greek approach and some of what one understands from the Hebrew scriptures, there's a real dissonance here as to, as to the harmonious and complementary ordering of man and woman, where the vision, I mean, obviously the vision of Genesis is not, you know, is not unalloyed with grief as we look at the fall. But in the beginning at least, all is harmony and love and joy and beauty.
- [123:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. Think of the parallel though between the Genesis myth of woman being pulled from man and being something from him, as opposed to here woman being something created as an artifice, as being something designed as an antagonist against him and something alien to him. Almost to the degree that you can argue that they're not even the same race. Right.
- [123:28]
Thomas Lackey
Well, and also the ordering. Right. Because man and woman are created before the fall in the one, and woman is simply the consequence and punishment of the fall in the other.
- [123:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, there's a lot of parallels here, I think, but let's push on to the fall of the Titans. So we haven't even had, we haven't, haven't had Zeus reach his pinnacle or his zenith yet. So just to kind of sketch this out on a quick narrative, Zeus and the Titans. So you've got these two kind of now groups of gods. You have the older Titan gods and you have the newer, what will be called, you know, the Olympian gods, which are led by Zeus and they actually have a 10 year war which I don't think anyone listening to that can't think of the Iliad. Right. And actually the entire Homeric text was based off two 10 year cycles of the Trojan War and then Odysseus's journey home. So I'm not really sure how much you can play into that, but I just noted that it's another ten year war. So long story short, they're kind of stuck in this. And then Zeus, with, if I remember right, a little prompting from Gaia, they released these hundred armed giants from Tartarus. You might remember from the beginning of the poem, they're one of the ones that I believe Uranus threw into the depths of the Earth. They're released to actually wreak havoc against the Titans. And this works. I mean this is actually part of this and also that Zeus. Then we kind of get these statements of Zeus stepping into his full might, that Zeus almost was intentionally holding back for some reason, and remember, the Homeric concept here is that Zeus is not just the most powerful God, he is actually more powerful than all the other Olympian gods combined. And the one thing I noted here, kind of towards the end of the fall of the titans, is maybe Dr. Kabowski has a good insight here, is that chaos returns to the poem, which I. It's hard to imagine that's not substantive in some way, kind of like when the muses come back in. So chaos returns insofar as, you know, Zeus now is releasing these lightning bolts and there's this awesome flame and it talks about this heat then upon the Earth that actually is so intense that the heat actually seized chaos. Right. Almost. It almost bled back down into these primordial structures of reality. Is trying. I mean, I felt very clearly here that Hesiod was trying to pick or present a very apocalyptic, chaotic scene. And then, of course, then Zeus is triumphant and the Titans are thrown down into Tartarus, which is also where Kronos ends up going. So unlike Uranus, Kronos is down in Tartarus. And this, in my opinion, or is my recollection, this then starts to solidify. He actually might have one more labor, if I remember correctly, but really starts to solidify Zeus's reign as the chief God.
- [127:01]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah, I would, I would say it's worth noting, among other things, the role that the hundred armed, the hunter, or the hundred handed hundred armed creatures, the role they play, the role that Poseidon plays, the role that the Cyclops plays because. Play, because of course, it is from the Cyclops that Zeus receives his thunderbolts. And so he, despite all of his power, despite all of his wisdom, Zeus still, it's not as though he needs these other beings, but he still uses them. He enlists their help. They become participants in the overthrow of these Titans. And at the very end, we're told that, right, for them there's no escape. These Titans, who've been imprisoned since Poseidon, put in the bronze doors. And so there's a kind of coming together because whereas with the early Titans, I mean, they are desperately trying to suppress anyone that could possess, potentially usurp them, overthrow them, and they violently suppress them by either shoving them down into Gaia or eating them in the case of Kronos. But Zeus is certainly willing to allow these other very powerful creatures into his plan. And so he's very, in a, in a sense, very diplomatic, and he's sharing the glory and he's sharing the power with them, even though he still remains the Chief, the king of the gods. So, yeah, I do think that that's worth noting.
- [128:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And bearing in mind you talk about Zeus being diplomatic is whether he does that in good faith, right. Whether. Whether we'll see just whether Zeus is actually going to be a just ruler and duly reward all these people who helped him. I mean, I think it's very true. And I like how you point that out.
- [129:02]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
His part.
- [129:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think so, too. But I think it's a good contrast that you point out that Kronos lacked that capacity. Right. So even if we say Zeus is just going to be a betrayer and that none of this is real and it's all facade, it's still a skill set that Kronos seemed to lack.
- [129:20]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
And we see that in Homer. We see that in Homer. A scene comes to mind at the end of the Odyssey where Zeus makes use of Athena to bring peace to Ithaca. I mean, that's certainly he could have done on his own. I mean, these are things that he could easily do just by himself. But he delegates, right? He says, you do this, you do that. Which is another progression, you might say, in terms of political rule. It isn't just one individual making the calls, making things happen, but allowing other people to serve a particular role. And that in itself is, I think, an effective way of keeping people in line and making sure that they don't turn on you.
- [130:09]
Thomas Lackey
Well, there's also a question there, like, if you want to turn this into a philosophical and theological direction about primary and secondary causality, Zeus is fine with, even if you look at him as the first cause of these things, that he's fine to use secondary causality and instruments. Right. In a way that Ernest and Kronos were not. And so that'd be an interesting question, and just in general, within the Greek idea as to how many things happen through a true but secondary agency.
- [130:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Let's look at the cosmography, which we kind of get an interlude here, in which we're told a lot of the attributes of the cosmos, I guess, if you will. And so we're kind of told about Tartarus. The unfruitful sea knight comes back. We get some attributes there. We're told about Hades and Persephone and the feral hounds that guard the house, which we saw earlier, that Cerberus Styx comes back, and I mentioned earlier that.
- [131:28]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Say again, not the band.
- [131:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Not the band, that's correct. The river that's personified that runs through Hades. And this is really interesting that, you know, there is a way to hold the Gods accountable. And so this was a fascinating passage from this that basically the gods will make an oath on the river Styx. And you know, if they then go against that oath, they will literally lie paralyzed, breathless until a full year is completed and never come near to the taste of ambrosia and nectar, but lies spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed. A heavy trance. So basically they're paralyzed for a year and then they have another penance, which is for nine years they're cut off from the eternal gods never join their councils of feasts. Nine full years. But in the 10th he comes again to join the assembly of the deathless gods. So there is a. It's interesting here that with the river Styx that there is a way that the gods can hold each other accountable by making oaths on the river Styx. And you know, then you have to suffer these punishments of this basically 10 year cycle of being ostracized, right? Because you'd have one year being paralyzed, nine years of being excluded from the feasts. I can't quite think of a God that that happens to. But I know it's a. You see this in the literature. I think we saw this in Homer where they swear upon the river Styx, right? Like Hera will say something and she'll swear upon the river Styx. And this is why they do that. They have this oath that's attached to the river in Hades. All right, well, do we want to move on to what I think is Zeus's last hurrah before he finally can claim rule or sovereignty over the cosmos? And this goes back to. What is his name? Typhon. Typhon.
- [133:33]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, in my translation it's Typhoeus, but.
- [133:37]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah, mine is also Typhoeus or something to that effect.
- [133:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So this is the hundred headed dragon, if you will. We actually saw him earlier in the poem. I think it's interesting. One of the questions I had about this passage was why are the children of Gaia and Gaia always at odds? Right. Or what? Why, why does she seem to live in peace with everyone, right? Except like these, these monsters, like these are her children. I guess this kind of goes just into this, this general succession thing and there's these antagonism and no one's family in the Greek myths seems to be, you know, well adjusted and well ordered. But there just seems to be these monsters, right, that then remain in her bosom, they remain in the earth and then they're either released or they serve as these kind of, you know, antagonistic characters. As I read this, and again, Throwing out the thesis that this is also a hymn to Zeus, I read this as this is like his last hurrah. This is what he has to do to secure his sovereignty, which he does. Right. He defeats the hundred headed dragon. I think he tosses it into Tartarus where the Titans are living with Kronos and the. The dragon becomes a maimed wreck, which was a phrase that I actually greatly enjoyed as I read that.
- [135:06]
Thomas Lackey
So I'm going to make the argument that his reign is really cemented much later. But we'll wait for just a second till we get there.
- [135:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that'd be great.
- [135:20]
Thomas Lackey
Well, I don't. I'm trying to think of it. I do think that there's a sense of where Zeus is being made the hero of this story though. That much I want to, or I want to like I want to agree with. There's a. There's a kind of labors of Hercules thing going on here where we're going through all the different things that Zeus has done to not just cement his rule, but in some sense pacify and make better the order of things. Things are more peaceful, more ordered, more in some real sense less dangerous, having been brought into some sort of. I don't know what the pacification is, too strong a term, but at least some sort of stability. Stability, that's the better. Yeah, that's a much better word.
- [136:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well then we see this at the end of that narrative. So the end of that passage at like 881, right when. But when the blessed gods have finished their toll and settled by force their struggle for honors with the Titans, they pressed far, seeing Olympian Zeus to reign and to rule over them by Earth's prompting. So he divided the dignities amongst them. So I mean, him conquering the dragon ends with the Olympian gods requesting that he rule over them.
- [136:40]
Thomas Lackey
That's interesting. I mean, it also cements the kind of idea of that his rule is not. I mean already there's a very distinct difference between Uranus and Kronos, where the rule was imposed and now it's requested. And so therefore in some sense there's a kind of notion of consent to this rule. Not that Zeus is always liked by any stretch, as we well know, but that there is nonetheless some notion that his role, that his rule is not purely by conquering and imposing.
- [137:18]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
It isn't through power, that's what you're saying?
- [137:20]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah. At least not purely force.
- [137:23]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, I think that's right. You know, it's interesting. Theogony strike, as you know as we're, as we're nearing the end of this poem, it strikes me that theogony is a very aristocratic. It's very pro Zeus. You know, when you compare or contrast this with Homer, and I've often wondered where Homer stands on the whole Zeus, Olympian God issue. Because there are all these moments when reading either the Iliad or the Odyssey where I think we're deliberately invited to question the role, the moral status of these gods and perhaps even their existence. I don't want to press that necessarily too far, but Zeus does not emerge from the Theogony in a negative light at all. Whereas in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I do think that there are these moments where we are clearly not meant to take their side. And I think I would just make one other point too, and that is, I mean, there's a big difference between the Achaians and the Trojans in that the Trojans have a clear leader, that is Hector, and his rule is very rarely questioned by anyone. Whereas the Achaians are a collection of kings. And while there is one clear leader in Agamemnon, we often get other kings who oppose him, most notably Achilles. And so if, you know, if we take the Achaians to be the heroes, to be the ones that Homer is siding with, then I do think that what emerges from Homer is a critique of a one, one man rule or a one God rule system. Whereas in Hesiod, clearly Zeus is being elevated throughout this poem to the title of king of the Gods. And as Thomas said, the elevation isn't simply by force or compulsion, but it's through a kind of wisdom and prudence.
- [139:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Somewhat obscure antecedent to those. But he's certainly more. He's certainly more clever than, say, Kronos. Right. He can actually, actually get the Olympians to. Because that, that line actually really surprised me when I read the Theogony first time because Zeus and the Iliad definitely rules by force.
- [140:06]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
He's more sympathetic, I mean, worthy of our admiration and sacrifice.
- [140:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because I agree with you, there's whole sections of Homer that very much read like Homer is wanting to critique the gods in an indirect way or lead you to that conclusion. Hesiod doesn't seem to have that. And this is very much, again, like I said earlier, a hymn, I think, to Zeus.
- [140:32]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Absolutely.
- [140:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So in that mindset, let's look at then the quote unquote, Olympian gods. So now we're going to have another. I kind of saw this as like, Zeus has solidified his reign. He's been Named basically king of the gods. There's a certain peace at least as the absence of conflict now in the Greek cosmos. And so now we have this explosion of theogony, right? We have another giant genesis of the gods. Probably the most famous here I think is Athena happy for pushback. But I think the most famous is Athena who pops out of the head of Zeus. So Zeus in this narrative eats his first wife. He, he swallows her, he absorbs her to a certain extent and, but it's like the reason I say absorb is because he very much is characterized like Metis is wisdom and he's very much characterized as absorbing her power. Like she's, she's still in him and this is actually part of his divine wisdom is benefited from her. But she was pregnant when he did this. And so you know, basically you can read this that she basically gives birth while in him and Zeus starts to get a headache and you know, Hephaestus comes and cracks open his head and out comes Athena, an adult and fully armored. And there's actually, it's not in this one I don't think. But I read another mythology in which the reason that Zeus had a headache was not just because the capacity of having a full grown woman inside his head, but because Athena was actually making her armor. She was in his head like, like hammering this out, right? And being a smith inside of his, of his head, which I found to be a funny take on why he had this. But, but in short, Hephaestus cracks open his head, Athena comes out and then as we saw in the Iliad and the Odyssey, she becomes the embodiment of his wisdom.
- [142:42]
Thomas Lackey
So this is where my. It's not, it's not. This is not all mine by the way. I want to throw this out. I'm very much drawing on the Glen Arbery's take here. But if you look at this cycle there we have already gone through the cycle of Uranus being overthrown by his son Kronos, Kronos being overthrown by Zeus. And now they advise Zeus, I'll read this line. So talking about Metis, Zeus craftily deceived her with cunning words and put her in his own belly as earth and starry heaven advised. For they advised him so to the end that no other should hold royal sway over the eternal gods in place of Zeus. For wise children were destined to be born to her. First the maiden bright eyed Tritogenia, that's Athena, equalled her father in strength and wise understanding, but afterwards to bear a son of overbearing spirit King of gods and men. So this Zeus is trying to avert the fate that has. And there's also. We here see again the notion of a fate as something external to Zeus, something that maybe Zeus is in some sort of relationship to, but it's still not completely under his control. And the question here is, can Zeus avoid. Stop this cycle of. Of more powerful sons overthrowing their fathers, in this case a more powerful pair, a woman and a man, or let me say a. A female God and a male God. But so his. There's a. There's a few things to draw out, but the one that I want to go with is that in various versions of the story, this is not just Metis, but Thetis. And the reason that Pindar picks this up and the reason that Zeus is so insistent so both Poseidon and Zeus wish to marry Thetis. And the reason that it imperative that. That Thetis, though not be wed to a God is that this prophecy of the. The powerful son to overthrow the ruler of gods and men is through Thetis. And so she must be married to a mortal and so is married to Peleus. And so in this sense, and I'll grab this line from Pindar because it's, it's important that her son would be. She must come rather to a mortal bed. Let her look upon her son slain in battle. But, but a son like Ares for strength of hand, like the Thundershaft for speed of his feet. So this is, this is the, the origin of Achilles. And in Arbery's tape, which is very fascinating and I recommend why literature matters, his chapter on the sacrifice of Achilles is that the final security of Zeus's reign rests precisely on the mortality of Achilles.
- [146:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's the last prophecy that he gets that he has to avert.
- [146:17]
Thomas Lackey
It's the last one he has to avert. He's averted in a sense by consuming Metis and having Athena. He's. She's. She is the born daughter, but also in a sense the averted son. And there in Achilles is this final aversion of the prophecy by. He is. He's the son that he. He's essentially Achilles is the son Zeus should have had and didn't. But it's, it's the entire. His, his Olympian reign essentially pivots on whether or not Achilles is mortal or immortal. Or immortal.
- [146:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I mean, one only has to imagine what Achilles would be like as an immortal. So we get into what are these? The seven wives of Zeus. Right. So next one we have is Themis, which I think earlier, Dr. Krabowski, to your point, when we talked about, you know, when you see this cascade of the gods, it very much seems like Hesiod is making a commentary on how the cosmos works, you know, here in a lot of ways, with Themis. I thought this is where you see him being almost his most philosophical. Where you see him making philosophical connections. So she's the goddess of justice, law and custom. And so, of course, she starts giving birth to gods of hours, order, justice, peace. The fates come from her as well. I mean, this is. It's a deeply kind of philosophical rendering of, you know, Zeus's second wife and what she kind of brings to the table of this kind of order and justice. What? Now, some of these thoughts have to be kind of played out. We'll see in the Oresteia that I think they're played out. But anyway, I enjoyed that passage.
- [148:14]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No, I think you're right. I mean, this entire poem, we've seen all these moments where it's clearly intended to be an etiological account of, for instance, why human beings suffer, or where these various natural features of the world come into being, or in this case, where justice comes from. I mean, this is. This is. It's such a remarkable achievement by Hesiod insofar as he covers so much ground in just a thousand lines. And so I think in writing this, he's really trying to. One way of putting it is to set a standard. This is the standard by which all subsequent etiological accounts or theogonies are to be measured. So I think that. I mean, I think this is perhaps one of his aims, is to say, look, if you're going to outdo me, you're going to have to cover way more ground than what I've covered in this particular poem.
- [149:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, yeah. No, I very much agree with that. And if you kind of track the wives, you know, the second one or third one is daughter of ocean. Should we mention that we get the graces from them. The fourth one, Demeter, we get Persephone. And so there's a whole myth there about the seasons. Persephone is tied to the seasons and to this kind of fecundity on the earth. And so she ends up being kidnapped by Hades. Over two seasons of the year, she's taken down the Hades, that's fall and winter, and then she's brought back into the world. And so that's spring and summer. And so it's interesting to see just where she comes from. I think probably one of the kind of. Another one that has a certain philosophical packaging to it, is his next wife is memory. And that's where the nine golden crowned muses come from, which in Hesiod, all have names, patronages. It's just a beautiful thing to a people, right, that now they're understanding, like, okay, this is the memory. They're the muses. We have to keep telling our story through various arts. I like it. I very much like the muses and what they represent. Leto gives birth to Apollo and Artemis. These are main characters. We saw them in the Iliad as well. And lastly, his, you know, charming wife, sister wife, Hera. Right? And you kind of get this funny narrative of that Hera is actually jealous of Athena that Zeus was able to basically give birth. You know, at least from the outside perspective, he was able to give birth without the aid of a woman and gives birth to this wonderful goddess, Athena. And so Hera basically wants to do this as well, except she gives birth to Hephaestus.
- [151:19]
Thomas Lackey
One thing I would. I can't remember where I. Where this comes from, but I think even within Hesiod, there's a hint of it, that there's some. There's a difference in the relationship between Zeus and Hera and between Zeus and the other women that are listed before him as his wives. And I mean, this is very clear in Homer, where Hera is simply his wife and everyone else is a kind of paramour. And there's a. There's another story that obviously Zeus goes around sleeping with basically everyone and he. He desires Hera and she will. She doesn't. She will not consent to this unless he agrees to be married. And he's like. His response is something to the effect of. What's that? And she basically extracts some sort of promise. Again, I'm doing this from memory, so I wish I could find the source. But the gist is that he'll be. That he'll never leave her and that he won't eat their children. I mean, I'm. I'm totally making that part up. But I mean, that's the ultimate idea here. There's a kind of faithfulness here. That this is. This is a life lifetime is interesting, but is a. It is a forever bond between them in which he has certain duties to respect. For example, to be. To. To not destroy their children.
- [152:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And it's interesting that Zeus's kind of piggybacking off your point that Zeus's affinity towards mortal women is also a way for him to kind of satiate his lust without worrying about siring a USURPER.
- [153:10]
Thomas Lackey
Yeah.
- [153:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, it still drives Hera nuts, which is kind of interesting. Right, because they're not immortals. Because you kind of think Hera would, like, maybe not care, but she very much cares. And that's an impetus for a lot of mythology is what she does to these poor young women. But I do think it's interesting to tether Zeus's focus on women with the fact that he's not trying to sire or usurp her.
- [153:33]
Thomas Lackey
Well, and I think as well, when you look at his relationship in our. With Hera, where she's, you know, sort of extracted a commitment from him, and so she. So there's. Their marriage becomes not just one commitment among others or one kind of law, but it becomes the very basis of. Of Nomos itself, that all the laws flow out of and fall from this primal and first sort of ordering and commitment between Hera and Zeus. And that's a very interesting thing within Greek law. I think this will actually play out later in the Oresteia to a degree, because there's questions there about what's, you know, what's owed, husband and wife, child, father, all these sorts of things going on. And those ultimately call back to this question of the nature of law and marriage. And in some real sense, law within this context being related to this fundamental root of marriage. And I guess another way to put it is marriage isn't just like one law among others. It actually becomes a kind of a foundational property of law.
- [154:47]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
But I think the key. The key word there, Thomas, is it becomes. Because what we've seen throughout this poem is an evolution, things becoming more civilized, things becoming more. More governed by, as you said, nomas, and not so much fusis, not so much the law of nature, you know, red and tooth and claw, but in terms of something that's a bit more civilized and noble.
- [155:18]
Thomas Lackey
Although whether Zeus ever quite gets there as regards his marriage is its own. Its own podcast in itself.
- [155:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, so we get a few. There's a few other famous characters here. You see the origins of Hermes, you see Dionysus as well, who we'll pick up in the. In the Bacchae. It should be noticed that Hephaestus is married to one of the graces for Hesiod, which is what Hephaestus was in the Iliad, but not in the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, he was married to Aphrodite. In the later classical tradition, he's married to Aphrodite. And Aphrodite's adultery with Ares is a source of a lot of Literature and art, we see Heracles. I mean, anything else on this kind of second to last kind of cascading genealogy of the Olympian gods?
- [156:15]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
No other than. I think he. Well, he may include them for a number of reasons, but once again, I think this is him staking a claim to giving an authoritative account of who these gods are, who these heroes are and where they come from. So it's almost encyclopedic in a. In a way. And, you know, I'm not saying he's just throwing them in there to throw them in there, but I think that they need to be included if this is going to be complete or as near complete as possible.
- [156:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. Let's look at the. Of goddesses and men. So this is, you know, the interesting setup in which we have female goddesses who have mortal male lovers. So a few of these are going to be, you know, familiar to us. That probably caught people's attention as they, you know, they kind of worked through the text. I thought it was interesting on, like, line 984 that dawn had a. Had a child with Tithonus, if you remember. Right. That was. He kind of played a really interesting esoteric role in the Odyssey, where he's basically mentioned in the opening with dawn, when Odysseus is on the island of Calypso. But he kind of serves as this very subtle, clever warning about immortality, about mortals seeking immortality, because he's the one that Zeus grants immortality to but doesn't really want to. And so he asks for immortality, but not for eternal youth. And so he kind of just crumples and shrivels into this small creature because he can't die. But he also just keeps getting older. So he's a character. We see him kind of in this genealogy. What's interesting is that his son then. So it's dawn and his son Memnon, who is the king of the Ethiopians. And again, this is line 984, if you remember. That is a character who comes in, in the interim period between the Iliad and the Odyssey, and that is the last great battle, for Achilles is killing the king of the Ethiopians, because that's Troy's real last defender. And so we have a whole podcast episode on the interim mythology and stories and narratives between the Iliad and the Odyssey. But this is this guy's genealogy, because when you first. When I first heard about the king of the Ethiopians showed up, it sounded quite random to me. We have Jason, as in, like, Jason and the Argonauts. We also Have Thetis and Peleus, which brought forth Achilles, probably as you guys were talking about earlier, probably one of the most famous, you know, children from the coupling of a goddess and a mortal is Achilles. That's a line 1003. The next one is Aphrodite came together, and that is Aeneas, another character from the Iliad that we should be familiar with then. I love this. The first time I read it. Oh, by the way, Odysseus had a son with Calypso.
- [159:31]
Thomas Lackey
Oh, and Cersei. Right.
- [159:34]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Yeah.
- [159:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And with Circe. And so I just. I love this because. Yeah. And this is one of the things, too, that I wonder, does Homer not mention that? Or is it just like. It's too easy. It's too easy to graft on a narrative, as a later poet, to the. To the Iliad and the Odyssey, or particular to the Odyssey by the fact, like, okay, you were there for, you know, however many years sleeping with a goddess, and you had no children. Because I guess one question to ask is, is the reverse true? So if you have a mortal lover with a female goddess, is that coupling always fecund? Right. Right. Do all these children start popping up? But I love the fact that Odysseus has all these kids that are running around. So probably the one that I would mention the most, I don't really know anything about the one from Calypso, but the one from Circe is the one that we talked about when we did the end of The Odyssey, book 24, and we kind of talked about what happens to the characters afterwards. That character, his son, Odysseus's son by Circe, gets picked up in that epic cycle and tries to go find Odysseus, and, long story short, ends up killing him. So if you want to talk about, you know, love as a circle, you talk about these things come around, Right. He. He ends up being killed by him accidentally. The son doesn't realize that it's him. And then in a very bizarre twist, the son takes Telemachus and Penelope and Odysseus, who's dead, back to Circe's island, and the son marries Penelope and Circe marries Telemachus after Circe makes both of them immortals, which is a very odd ending to that whole narrative that doesn't seem to track well with me. But anyway, as an aside, I find it interesting that Odysseus has all these kids running around.
- [161:33]
Thomas Lackey
Well, and there's no. If he'd only had one. You could probably. Unless you're gonna. Unless we're gonna Posit twins. You could make some sort of argument of him not knowing, but in the case of Calypso, they named two children and so I. It seems like maybe he should have mentioned that to Penelope when. When he got back.
- [162:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, so then the last line, which is somewhat fitting. Right. The last line ends with an invocation to the Muses. However, it doesn't seem to have too robust of a conclusion here, but we do get an ending that. That invokes the Muses. Well, gentlemen, any other thoughts on Hesiod's Theogony? We're coming up on three hours. I think this is the longest Ascend the Great Books podcast episode to date. As we record this, I just have.
- [162:39]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
One quick comment, and that is.
- [162:43]
Thomas Lackey
You.
- [162:44]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Know, we know that there are more talking about Socrates. We, we know that Plato was not the only author to write about Socrates. The other notable one is Xenophon. And we know that both Plato and Xenophon wrote apologies or the wrote recounted the defense. And they're very different. If you read both of them, I mean, there are similarities, but there are market differences. And some have argued that Xenophon's was written as a kind of corrective to Plato. And I bring that up only to note that Theogony might. Hesiod's doing something very different in Theogony than what Homer does in Iliad and Odyssey. But I think the Theogony can be read as a bit of a corrective to Homer. If we understand Hesiod to be living after. He might be contemporary, a younger contemporary. But at any rate, I think one needs to read, if one has read both Iliad and Odyssey, one must read Theogony if one is to have an understanding of the pre philosophical conception of the world or the pre philosophical conception of man and of government and politics. So I think that even though the works themselves, the poems themselves reach very different conclusions and present the material in very different ways, I think one arrives at an incomplete understanding of the Greek mind if one ignores this particular work.
- [164:28]
Thomas Lackey
I think another thing to look at is there. There is obviously there's standing behind Homer this pre Homeric conception of the gods and the mythologies that it seems that Homer is providing some level of critique to. Then as you move from Homer to Hesiod, there seems to be an additional development in the idea of Zeus's role in justice and the right ordering of. Of the cosmos. You keep moving forward again and again. I think you could see these as stepping stones from the pre Homeric to the Homeric Hesiod. Then on to Aeschylus and from Aeschylus to Plato, where you have a conception of the divine that is getting more and more recognizable to us as it goes forward. No, I would say, actually, I think Homer's overall depth is more, I find more in Homer than Hesiod. But nonetheless, I think this idea of the divine is showing a distinct progression across each of these steps until you reach something. The conception that Socrates offers is much closer to what we would recognize as divinity than what you're seeing here, but nonetheless, you're seeing it drawn out.
- [165:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I very much agree. I mean, that's why we're doing this. You know, we just got off our year of Homer and now we're doing about six months on the Greek plays. And really, are they. They are that intellectual bridge, right? That kind of tilling of the soil between Homer and the classical Greeks. Right? Particularly then, most robustly, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And so, yeah, I think we are seeing a maturation of Greek thought. I do think that Hesiod demands to be taken seriously. And I really do appreciate both the comments of Dr. Frank Hrabowski and Mr. Thomas Lackey helping us to parse out the theogony. So gentlemen, any. Any last words? Anything we missed?
- [166:39]
Dr. Frank Grabowski
Well, I'm sure we, we could continue this for another three hours, but maybe we ought to.
- [166:45]
Thomas Lackey
I.
- [166:46]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
If we do that, I'm done. You guys can chit chat, you guys can have an after party about the Hesiods Theogony. I am done. Is way past my bedtime. So anyway, okay everyone, thank you for joining us for this conversation on Hesiod's Theogony. This has Been a Sin the Great Books Podcast. Check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com we will actually have a guide. Should have mentioned that. We'll actually have a written guide up on Hesiod's Theogony that you can use and guide you through the text. And we will see everyone as we actually continue through six months on the Greek plays. The Oresteia is next. Thank you everyone.