Myth lecture

1. Zeus and The Reign of the Olympians
Zeus’s rise to power and his consolidation
of that power through allocating spheres
of influence to his brothers.
Zeus’s role as the god of Justice and of
xenia (the guest-host relationship).
Zeus’s marriages and the possible
implications of his first marriage to Metis
and the subsequent birth of Athena from
Zeus’s head.
Some implications of Hesiod’s Theogony
for our understanding of these
anthropomorphic gods

2. After overthrowing the Titans, Zeus consolidated his power and became the
primary ruler of the gods, which he will continue to be for as long as the
universe lasts.
There will be no further struggles of sons to
overthrow their fathers and no further shift of
power down the generations.
Hesiod does not explicitly state that the
universe became fixed with Zeus’s
ascendancy to power. This omission is
justified by reasons that are important to
remember throughout the study of myth.
Hesiod and his audience assume the reality
of Zeus and the other gods.
“Everyone knows” that Zeus will remain in
power and that the point of the whole story
was Zeus’s rise to power.
Narrative points that may seem arbitrary from
outside the culture that created the myth
seem necessary from inside the culture.
Zeus and Europa

3. Zeus divides power among himself and his brothers, in
what is often called the “triple division.”
Hades becomes the ruler of Tartaros and lord over
the souls of the dead.
Poseidon becomes the ruler of the sea and waters in
general.
Zeus becomes ruler of the sky.
Theoretically, all three brothers have power over the
earth. In practice, the earth too is Zeus’s domain, and
the division of power is far from equal.
Zeus’s sister also have their particular roles.
Hera is the patron goddess of marriage.
Hestia is the goddess of the hearth.
Demeter is the goddess of grain and agriculture.
The Temple of Apollo

4. As ruler, Zeus not only gains physical control over the sky and the earth,
but his domain also includes various abstract concepts that concern the
orderly functioning of human society.
Zeus oversees Justice; in this aspect,
he is the patron of oaths and punishes
oath-breakers.
He also is the god of xenia, a very
important concept usually translated as
the “guest-host relationship.”
He oversees prophecy, particularly at
his shrine at Dodona.
Zeus’s son Apollo is also a god of
prophecy, but it is quite clear that
Apollo derives his control of prophecy
from Zeus.
Zeus’s connection with prophecy
emphasizes both his wisdom and his
power; prophets often say that they
foretell “the will of Zeus.”
Apollo’s tripod

5. Once he is established as the ruler of the gods, Zeus marries his first wife,
the minor goddess Metis.
Metis is fated to bear a son who will
overthrow his father, thus repeating the
pattern seen in the earlier generations.
On the advice of Gaia and Ouranos, Zeus
prevents this by swallowing Metis.
Metis is already pregnant with a
daughter, Athena, who is eventually born
from Zeus’s head.
The son who was destined to overthrow
his father is never conceived and never
born.
This is one of the very few times that
anyone successfully circumvents fate.
Athena born out of
Zeus’s head

6. Like so much else in Theogony, the story of Metis and Athena
offers several interesting interpretative points
It highlights the concept of fate, which
affects gods as well as humans.
Fate, or destiny, plays a crucial role in
many classical myths.
Fate works independently of Zeus, a
reminder that even Zeus is not
omnipotent.
Fate is sometimes personified as three
goddesses, the Fates of Moirai.
The swallowing of Metis can be seen as
the moment at which the male gods
assert final power over the goddesses;
from now on, the dominance of male over
female will be firmly established.
This act is also important as the point at
which Zeus matures. In this regard, an
allegorical interpretation works particularly
well.
Zeus is a young ruler who has power and
dominance; what does he need to rule
well?
He needs wisdom, which is what the
Greek word metis means.
When Zeus swallows Metis, he is literally
incorporating wisdom. Hesiod and his
contemporaries believed that thought took
place in our torsos, not our heads.
Despite the popular modern
interpretation, the birth of Athena from
Zeus’s head is not emblematic of wisdom,
because the Greeks didn’t consider the
head to be the seat of thought.

7. Zeus then mates with various other goddesses and
produces several children before marrying his
permanent wife, Hera.
Hera is the patron of
marriage and of married
women, yet she and
Zeus have difficulties
producing acceptable
sons.
They have two
daughters, Hebe (“Bloom
of Youth”) and Eileithyia,
the goddess of childbirth.
Despite Zeus’s fecundity
with other females, he
and Hera produce only
one son, Ares, the god of
war.
Hera’s other son,
Hephaistos, was
probably born
parthenogenically,
because of Hera’s
jealousy over Athena.
Along with these and
other goddesses, Zeus
also mates with various
mortal women, such as
Alcmene, the mother of
Heracles.
Hera is particularly
disposed to hate Zeus’s
sons by mortal women.
This hatred is a
motivating force behind
Heracles’s adventures.

8. Zeus’s amatory exploits are not just a matter of a god
behaving badly.
Many of Zeus’s matings are
with “conceptual” gods, such
as Themis (“right order”), and
produce offspring, such as
Justice. These unions express
his attributes as ruler.
His multiple matings also
repeat a pattern we saw in the
earlier generations.
Hesiod is describing the
coming-into-existence of
everything, including such
abstractions as Justice,
through the medium of
anthropomorphic gods.
It is reasonable in this context
to describe the process
through teh sexual matings of
different gods.
Because Zeus is such an
important god, this will
necessarily result in his mating
with various females.
Another explanation or Zeus’s
frequent matings with minor
goddesses and mortal women
is that it reflects the synthesis
of various local gods and
traditions, or syncretism.

9. By the end of Theogony, several important characteristics
of our picture of the gods are beginning to emerge:
The gods are anthropomorphic, not
theriomorphic or a combination of the two,
sharing many of humanity’s characteristics.
They have bodies, though it is taken as a
given that in their “natural” state, the bodies
of the gods are both much larger and much
more beautiful than human bodies.
They eat (ambrosia) and drink (nectar) and
have a substance flowing through their
veins (ichor).
They share human emotions and passions,
both good and bad.
The gods are also very different from
humans.
They have the ability to move vast
distances, more or less at will; they can
appear before a human when they want to.
Although their normal appearance is
anthropomorphic, they can disguise
themselves as other creature or even as
inanimate objects (such as a shower of
gold).
The defining difference between gods and
humans is that the gods are immortal.
Humans must die, but gods cannot die.
One of the most frequent terms used to
describe the gods in Greek is athanatoi, the
deathless ones. Humans, b contrast are
thnetoi, those who are liable to death.
An oath sworn on the River Styx was for the
gods, the most telling incarnation of their
immortality.