Read Ebook: History of Greece Volume 01 (of 12) by Grote George

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 2123 lines and 215407 words, and 43 pages

Hesiod, Theog. 160, 182. Apollod. i. 1, 4.

Hesiod, Theog. 192. This legend respecting the birth of Aphrodit? seems to have been derived partly from her name , partly from the surname Urania, ???????? ???????, under which she was so very extensively worshipped, especially both in Cyprus and Cyth?ra, seemingly originated in both islands by the Phoenicians. Herodot. i. 105. Compare the instructive section in Boeckh's Metrologie, c. iv. ? 4.

Uranos being thus dethroned and disabled, Kronos and the Titans acquired their liberty and became predominant: the Cycl?pes and the Hekatoncheires had been cast by Uranos into Tartarus, and were still allowed to remain there.

Each of the Titans had a numerous offspring: Oceanus, especially, marrying his sister T?thys, begat three thousand daughters, the Oceanic nymphs, and as many sons: the rivers and springs passed for his offspring. Hyperi?n and his sister Theia had for their children H?lios, Sel?n?, and E?s; Koeos with Phoeb? begat L?t? and Asteria; the children of Krios were Astraeos, Pallas, and Pers?s,--from Astraeos and E?s sprang the winds Zephyrus, Boreas, and Notus. Iapetos, marrying the Oceanic nymph Clymen?, counted as his progeny the celebrated Prom?theus, Epim?theus, Menoetius, and Atlas. But the offspring of Kronos were the most powerful and transcendent of all. He married his sister Rhea, and had by her three daughters--Hestia, D?m?t?r, and H?r?--and three sons, Had?s, Poseid?n, and Zeus, the latter at once the youngest and the greatest.

But Kronos foreboded to himself destruction from one of his own children, and accordingly, as soon as any of them were born, he immediately swallowed them and retained them in his own belly. In this manner had the first five been treated, and Rhea was on the point of being delivered of Zeus. Grieved and indignant at the loss of her children, she applied for counsel to her father and mother, Uranos and Gaea, who aided her to conceal the birth of Zeus. They conveyed her by night to Lyktus in Cr?te, hid the new-born child in a woody cavern on Mount Ida, and gave to Kronos, in place of it, a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he greedily swallowed, believing it to be his child. Thus was the safety of Zeus ensured. As he grew up his vast powers fully developed themselves: at the suggestion of Gaea, he induced Kronos by stratagem to vomit up, first the stone which had been given to him,--next, the five children whom he had previously devoured. Hestia, D?m?t?r, H?r?, Poseid?n and Had?s, were thus allowed to grow up along with Zeus; and the stone to which the latter owed his preservation was placed near the temple of Delphi, where it ever afterwards stood, as a conspicuous and venerable memorial to the religious Greek.

Hesiod, Theog. 452, 487. Apollod. i. 1, 6.

Hesiod, Theog. 498.--

??? ??? ???? ??????? ???? ?????? ?????????? ????? ?? ??????, ??????? ??? ?????????, ???? ???? ???????, ????? ???????? ????????.

We have not yet exhausted the catalogue of beings generated during this early period, anterior to the birth of Zeus. Nyx, alone and without any partner, gave birth to a numerous progeny: Thanatos, Hypnos and Oneiros; M?mus and O?zys ; Kl?th?, Lachesis and Atropos, the three Fates; the retributive and equalizing Nemesis; Apat? and Philot?s , G?ras and Eris . From Eris proceeded an abundant offspring, all mischievous and maleficent: Ponos , L?th?, Limos , Phonos and Mach? , Dysnomia and At? , and Horkos, the ever watchful sanctioner of oaths, as well as the inexorable punisher of voluntary perjury.

Hesiod, Theog. 212-232.

Gaea, too, intermarrying with Pontus, gave birth to Nereus, the just and righteous old man of the sea; to Thaumas, Phorkys and K?t?. From Nereus, and Doris daughter of Oceanus, proceeded the fifty Nereids or Sea-nymphs. Thaumus also married Elektra daughter of Oceanus, and had by her Iris and the two Harpies, All? and Okypet?,--winged and swift as the winds. From Phorkys and K?t? sprung the Dragon of the Hesperides, and the monstrous Graeae and Gorgons: the blood of Medusa, one of the Gorgons, when killed by Perseus, produced Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus: Chrysaor and Kallirrho? gave birth to Gery?n as well as to Echidna,--a creature half-nymph and half-serpent, unlike both to gods and to men. Other monsters arose from the union of Echidna with Typha?n,--Orthros, the two-headed dog of Gery?n; Cerberus, the dog of Had?s, with fifty heads, and the Lernaean Hydra. From the latter proceeded the Chimaera, the Sphinx of Th?bes, and the Nemean lion.

Hesiod, Theog. 240-320. Apollod?r. i. 2, 6, 7.

A powerful and important progeny, also, was that of Styx, daughter of Oceanus, by Pallas; she had Z?los and Nik? , and Kratos and Bia . The hearty and early co?peration of Styx and her four sons with Zeus was one of the main causes which enabled him to achieve his victory over the Titans.

Zeus had grown up not less distinguished for mental capacity than for bodily force. He and his brothers now determined to wrest the power from the hands of Kronos and the Titans, and a long and desperate struggle commenced, in which all the gods and all the goddesses took part. Zeus convoked them to Olympus, and promised to all who would aid him against Kronos, that their functions and privileges should remain undisturbed. The first who responded to the call, came with her four sons, and embraced his cause, was Styx. Zeus took them all four as his constant attendants, and conferred upon Styx the majestic distinction of being the Horkos, or oath-sanctioner of the Gods,--what Horkos was to men, Styx was to the Gods.

Hesiod, Theog. 385-403.

Still further to strengthen himself, Zeus released the other Uranids who had been imprisoned in Tartarus by their father,--the Cycl?pes and the Centimanes,--and prevailed upon them to take part with him against the Titans. The former supplied him with thunder and lightning, and the latter brought into the fight their boundless muscular strength. Ten full years did the combat continue; Zeus and the Kronids occupying Olympus, and the Titans being established on the more southerly mountain-chain of Othrys. All nature was convulsed, and the distant Oceanus, though he took no part in the struggle, felt the boiling, the noise, and the shock, not less than Gaea and Pontus. The thunder of Zeus, combined with the crags and mountains torn up and hurled by the Centimanes, at length prevailed, and the Titans were defeated and thrust down into Tartarus. Iapetos, Kronos, and the remaining Titans were imprisoned, perpetually and irrevocably, in that subterranean dungeon, a wall of brass being built around them by Poseid?n, and the three Centimanes being planted as guards. Of the two sons of Iapetos, Menoetius was made to share this prison, while Atlas was condemned to stand for ever at the extreme west, and to bear upon his shoulders the solid vault of heaven.

Hesiod, Theog. 140, 624, 657. Apollod?r. i. 2, 4.

The battle with the Titans, Hesiod, Theog. 627-735. Hesiod mentions nothing about the Gigantes and the Gigantomachia: Apollod?rus, on the other hand, gives this latter in some detail, but despatches the Titans in a few words . The Gigantes seem to be only a second edition of the Titans,--a sort of duplication to which the legendary poets were often inclined.

Thus were the Titans subdued, and the Kronids with Zeus at their head placed in possession of power. They were not, however, yet quite secure; for Gaea, intermarrying with Tartarus, gave birth to a new and still more formidable monster called Typh?eus, of such tremendous properties and promise, that, had he been allowed to grow into full development, nothing could have prevented him from vanquishing all rivals and becoming supreme. But Zeus foresaw the danger, smote him at once with a thunderbolt from Olympus, and burnt him up: he was cast along with the rest into Tartarus, and no further enemy remained to question the sovereignty of the Kronids.

Hesiod, Theog. 820-869. Apollod. i. 6, 3. He makes Typh?n very nearly victorious over Zeus. Typh?eus, according to Hesiod, is father of the irregular, violent, and mischievous winds: Notus, Boreas, Argest?s and Zephyrus, are of divine origin .

With Zeus begins a new dynasty and a different order of beings. Zeus, Poseid?n, and Had?s agree upon the distribution before noticed, of functions and localities: Zeus retaining the AEth?r and the atmosphere, together with the general presiding function; Poseid?n obtaining the sea, and administering subterranean forces generally; and Had?s ruling the under-world or region in which the half-animated shadows of departed men reside.

Hesiod, Theog. 885-900.

Apollod. i. 3, 6.

Hesiod, Theog. 900-944.

Homer, Iliad, xviii. 397.

See Burckhardt, Homer, und Hesiod. Mythologie, sect. 102. .

From the gods we slide down insensibly, first to heroes, and then to men; but before we proceed to this new mixture, it is necessary to say a few words on the theogony generally. I have given it briefly as it stands in the Hesiodic Theogonia, because that poem--in spite of great incoherence and confusion, arising seemingly from diversity of authorship as well as diversity of age--presents an ancient and genuine attempt to cast the divine foretime into a systematic sequence. Homer and Hesiod were the grand authorities in the pagan world respecting theogony; but in the Iliad and Odyssey nothing is found except passing allusions and implications, and even in the Hymns there are only isolated, unconnected narratives. Accordingly men habitually took their information respecting their theogonic antiquities from the Hesiodic poem, where it was ready laid out before them; and the legends consecrated in that work acquired both an extent of circulation and a firm hold on the national faith, such as independent legends could seldom or never rival. Moreover the scrupulous and sceptical Pagans, as well as the open assailants of Paganism in later times, derived their subjects of attack from the same source; so that it has been absolutely necessary to recount in their naked simplicity the Hesiodic stories, in order to know what it was that Plato deprecated and Xenophan?s denounced. The strange proceedings ascribed to Uranos, Kronos and Zeus, have been more frequently alluded to, in the way of ridicule or condemnation, than any other portion of the mythical world.

But though the Hesiodic theogony passed as orthodox among the later Pagans, because it stood before them as the only system anciently set forth and easily accessible, it was evidently not the only system received at the date of the poem itself. Homer knows nothing of Uranos, in the sense of an arch-God anterior to Kronos. Uranos and Gaea, like Oceanus, T?thys and Nyx, are with him great and venerable Gods, but neither the one nor the other present the character of predecessors of Kronos and Zeus. The Cycl?pes, whom Hesiod ranks as sons of Uranos and fabricators of thunder, are in Homer neither one nor the other; they are not noticed in the Iliad at all, and in the Odyssey they are gross gigantic shepherds and cannibals, having nothing in common with the Hesiodic Cyclops except the one round central eye. Of the three Centimanes enumerated by Hesiod, Briareus only is mentioned in Homer, and to all appearance, not as the son of Uranos, but as the son of Poseid?n; not as aiding Zeus in his combat against the Titans, but as rescuing him at a critical moment from a conspiracy formed against him by H?r?, Poseid?n and Ath?n?. Not only is the Hesiodic Uranos omitted in Homer, but the relations between Zeus and Kronos are also presented in a very different light. No mention is made of Kronos swallowing his young children: on the contrary, Zeus is the eldest of the three brothers instead of the youngest, and the children of Kronos live with him and Rhea: there the stolen intercourse between Zeus and H?r? first takes place without the knowledge of their parents. When Zeus puts Kronos down into Tartarus, Rhea consigns her daughter H?r? to the care of Oceanus: no notice do we find of any terrific battle with the Titans as accompanying that event. Kronos, Iapetos, and the remaining Titans are down in Tartarus, in the lowest depths under the earth, far removed from the genial rays of H?lios; but they are still powerful and venerable, and Hypnos makes H?r? swear an oath in their name, as the most inviolable that he can think of.

See G?ttling, Praefat. ad Hesiod. p. 23.

Iliad, xiv. 249; xix. 259. Odyss. v. 184. Oceanus and T?thys seem to be presented in the Iliad as the primitive Father and Mother of the Gods:--

??????? ?? ???? ???????, ??? ?????? ?????. .

Odyss. ix. 87.

Iliad, i. 401.

Iliad, xiv. 203-295; xv. 204.

Iliad, viii. 482; xiv. 274-279. In the Hesiodic Opp. et Di., Kronos is represented as ruling in the Islands of the Blest in the neighborhood of Oceanus .

In Homer, then, we find nothing beyond the simple fact that Zeus thrust his father Kronos together with the remaining Titans into Tartarus; an event to which he affords us a tolerable parallel in certain occurrences even under the presidency of Zeus himself. For the other gods make more than one rebellious attempt against Zeus, and are only put down, partly by his unparalleled strength, partly by the presence of his ally the Centimane Briareus. Kronos, like La?rtes or P?leus, has become old, and has been supplanted by a force vastly superior to his own. The Homeric epic treats Zeus as present, and, like all the interesting heroic characters, a father must be assigned to him: that father has once been the chief of the Titans, but has been superseded and put down into Tartarus along with the latter, so soon as Zeus and the superior breed of the Olympic gods acquired their full development.

That antithesis between Zeus and Kronos--between the Olympic gods and the Titans--which Homer has thus briefly brought to view, Hesiod has amplified into a theogony, with many things new, and some things contradictory to his predecessor; while Eum?lus or Arktinus in the poem called Titanomachia also adopted it as their special subject. As Stasinus, Arktinus, Lesch?s, and others, enlarged the Legend of Troy by composing poems relating to a supposed time anterior to the commencement, or subsequent to the termination of the Iliad,--as other poets recounted adventures of Odysseus subsequent to his landing in Ithaka,--so Hesiod enlarged and systematized, at the same time that he corrupted, the skeleton theogony which we find briefly indicated in Homer. There is violence and rudeness in the Homeric gods, but the great genius of Grecian epic is no way accountable for the stories of Uranos and Kronos,--the standing reproach against Pagan legendary narrative.

In the Titanomachia, the generations anterior to Zeus were still further lengthened by making Uranos the son of AEth?r . AEgaeon was also represented as son of Pontus and Gaea, and as having fought in the ranks of the Titans; in the Iliad he is the fast ally of Zeus.

How far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself is impossible to determine. They bring us down to a cast of fancy more coarse and indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resembling some of the Holy Chapters of the more recent mysteries, such as the tale of Dionysos Zagreus. There is evidence in the Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with local legends current both at Kr?te and at Delphi; for he mentions both the mountain-cave in Kr?te wherein the new-born Zeus was hidden, and the stone near the Delphian temple--the identical stone which Kronos had swallowed--"placed by Zeus himself as a sign and wonder to mortal men." Both these two monuments, which the poet expressly refers to, and had probably seen, imply a whole train of accessory and explanatory local legends--current probably among the priests of Kr?te and Delphi, between which places, in ancient times, there was an intimate religious connection. And we may trace further in the poem,--that which would be the natural feeling of Kr?tan worshippers of Zeus,--an effort to make out that Zeus was justified in his aggression on Kronos, by the conduct of Kronos himself both towards his father and towards his children: the treatment of Kronos by Zeus appears in Hesiod as the retribution foretold and threatened by the mutilated Uranos against the son who had outraged him. In fact the relations of Uranos and Gaea are in almost all their particulars a mere copy and duplication of those between Kronos and Rhea, differing only in the mode whereby the final catastrophe is brought about. Now castration was a practice thoroughly abhorrent both to the feelings and to the customs of Greece; but it was seen with melancholy frequency in the domestic life as well as in the religious worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it even became the special qualification of a priest of the Great Mother Cybel?, as well as of the Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination familiar with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected with and partially resembled the Kr?tan. And this deduction becomes the more probable when we connect it with the first genesis of iron, which Hesiod mentions to have been produced for the express purpose of fabricating the fatal sickle; for metallurgy finds a place in the early legends both of the Trojan and of the Kr?tan Ida, and the three Idaean Dactyls, the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one and sometimes to the other.

That the Hesiodic Theogony is referable to an age considerably later than the Homeric poems, appears now to be the generally admitted opinion; and the reasons for believing so are, in my opinion, satisfactory. Whether the Theogony is composed by the same author as the Works and Days is a disputed point. The Boeotian literati in the days of Pausanias decidedly denied the identity, and ascribed to their Hesiod only the Works and Days: Pausanias himself concurs with them , and V?lcker maintains the same opinion, as well as G?ttling : K. O. M?ller thinks that there is not sufficient evidence to form a decisive opinion.

Under the name of Hesiod passed many different poems, belonging to three classes quite distinct from each other, but all disparate from the Homeric epic:--1. The poems of legend cast into historical and genealogical series, such as the Eoiai, the Catalogue of Women, etc. 2. The poems of a didactic or ethical tendency, such as the Works and Days, the Precepts of Cheir?n, the Art of Augural Prophecy, etc. 3. Separate and short mythical compositions, such as the Shield of H?rakl?s, the Marriage of Keyx , the Epithalamium of P?leus and Thetis, etc. .

The Theogony belongs chiefly to the first of these classes, but it has also a dash of the second in the legend of Prom?theus, etc.: moreover in the portion which respects Hekat?, it has both a mystic character and a distinct bearing upon present life and customs, which we may also trace in the allusions to Kr?te and Delphi. There seems reason to place it in the same age with the Works and Days, perhaps in the half century preceding 700 B. C., and little, if at all, anterior to Archilochus. The poem is evidently conceived upon one scheme, yet the parts are so disorderly and incoherent, that it is difficult to say how much is interpolation. Hermann has well dissected the exordium; see the preface to Gaisford's Hesiod .

K. O. M?ller tells us , "The Titans, according to the notions of Hesiod, represent a system of things in which elementary beings, natural powers, and notions of order and regularity are united to form a whole. The Cycl?pes denote the transient disturbances of this order of nature by storms, and the Hekatoncheires, or hundred-handed Giants, signify the fearful power of the greater revolutions of nature." The poem affords little presumption that any such ideas were present to the mind of its author, as, I think, will be seen if we read 140-155, 630-745.

The strongest evidences of this feeling are exhibited in Herodotus, iii. 48; viii. 105. See an example of this mutilation inflicted upon a youth named Adamas by the Thracian king Kotys, in Aristot. Polit. v. 8, 12, and the tale about the Corinthian Periander, Herod. iii. 48.

It is an instance of the habit, so frequent among the Attic tragedians, of ascribing Asiatic or Phrygian manners to the Trojans, when Sophocl?s in his lost play Troilus introduced one of the characters of his drama as having been castrated by order of Hecuba, ?????? ??? ?????? ??????? ?????????? ?????,--probably the ??????????, or guardian and companion of the youthful Troilus. See Welcker, Griechisch. Trag?d. vol. i. p. 125.

Herodot. viii. 105, ????????. Lucian, De De? Syri?, c. 50. Strabo, xiv. pp. 640-641.

Diod?r. v. 64. Strabo, x. p. 460. Hoeckh, in his learned work Kr?ta , has collected all the information attainable respecting the early influences of Phrygia and Asia Minor upon Kr?te: nothing seems ascertainable except the general fact; all the particular evidences are lamentably vague.

The worship of the Diktaean Zeus seemed to have originally belonged to the Eteokr?tes, who were not Hellens, and were more akin to the Asiatic population than to the Hellenic. Strabo, x. p. 478. Hoeckh, Kr?ta, vol. i. p. 139.

Hesiod, Theogon. 161,

???? ?? ???????? ????? ?????? ?????????, ????? ???? ????????, etc.

As Hesiod had extended the Homeric series of gods by prefixing the dynasty of Uranos to that of Kronos, so the Orphic theogony lengthened it still further. First came Chronos, or Time, as a person, after him AEth?r and Chaos, out of whom Chronos produced the vast mundane egg. Hence emerged in process of time the first-born god Phan?s, or M?tis, or H?rikapaeos, a person of double sex, who first generated the Kosmos, or mundane system, and who carried within him the seed of the gods. He gave birth to Nyx, by whom he begat Uranos and Gaea; as well as to H?lios and Sel?ne.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet