Stood on Olympus and her sons beside;
There graced with honour and with goodly gifts,
Her Zeus ordained the great tremendous oath
Of deities ; her sons for evermore
Indwellers in the heavens. Alike to all,
E'en as he pledged his sacred word, the god
Performed ; so reigned he strong in might and power."

E. 537-545.

But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence
of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second
stage of the poem. According to Hesiod, Cronus or
Saturn was alive to the faults of his sire's policy of
self-protection, and conceived an improvement in the
means of checking revolutionary development on the
part of his offspring, by imprisoning them in his own
bowels rather than their mother's. Mindful of the
destiny that " to his own child he should bow down
his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny
with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his
consort, Ehea, roused her to a spirit of opposition.
When about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus,
she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth,
in the concealment of his birth :

" And her they sent to Lyctus, to the clime
Of fruitful Crete ; and when her hour was come,
The birth of Zeus, her youngest born, then Earth
Took to herself the mighty babe, to rear
"With nurturing softness, in the spacious isle
Of Crete ; so came she then, transporting him
Swift through the darksome air, to Lyctus first,



THE THEOGONY. 81

And thence upbearing in her arms, concealed
Beneath the sacred ground in sunless cave,
Where shagged with densest woods the iEgean mount
Impends. But to the imperial son of heaven,
"Whilom the King of gods, a stone she gave
In wrapt in infant swathes, and this with grasp
Eager he snatched, and in his ravening breast
Conveyed away ; unhappy ! nor once thought
That for the stone his child remained behind
Invincible, secure ; who soon with hands
Of strength o'ercoming him, should cast him forth.
From glory, and himself the immortals rule."

E. 641-659.

As the gods in ancient mythology grow apace, Zeus
is soon ripe for the task of aiding his mother, whose
craft persuades Cronus to disgorge first the stone
which he had mistaken for his youngest-born, and
then the five children whom he had previously de-
voured. A stone, probably meteoric, was shown at i
Delphi in Pausanias's day as the stone in question, \
and an object of old memorial to the devout Greek.
The rescued brethren at once take part with their de-
liverer. The first act of Zeus was, as we have seen,
to advance Force and Strength, with their brothers
Victory and Eivalry, to the dignity of " a body-
guard," and to give their mother Styx the style and
functions of " oath-sanctioner." His next was to free
from the prison to which their father Uranus had
consigned them, the hundred-handed giants, and the
Cyclopes, who furnished his artillery of lightnings and
hot thunderbolts. His success in the struggle was
assured by the oracles of Gaea (Earth), if only he could

a. c. voL xv. p



82 HESIOD.

band these towers of strength and muscularity against
Cronus and his Titans ; and so the battle was set in
array, and a fierce war ensued

" Each with each
Ten years and more the furious battle joined
Unintermitted ; nor to either host
"Was issue of stern strife nor end ; alike
Did either stretch the limit of the war."

E. 846-850.

Hesiod's description of the contest, which has been
justly held to constitute his title to a rank near Homer
as an epic poet, is prefaced by a feast at which Zeus
addresses his allies, and receives in turn the assurance
of their support. The speeches are not wanting in
dignity, though briefer than those which, in his great
epic, Milton has moulded on their model. Our Eng-
lish poet had bathed his spirit in Hesiod before he
essa} T ed the sixth book of his ' Paradise Lost ; ' and it
was well and wisely done by the translator of the fol-
lowing description of the war betwixt Zeus and the
Titans to aim at a Miltonic style and speech :

" All on that clay roused infinite the war,

Female and male ; the Titan deities,

The gods from Cronus sprang, and those whom Zer

From subterranean gloom released to light :

Terrible, strong, of force enormous ; burst

A hundred arms from all their shoulders huge :

From all their shoulders fifty heads upsprang

O'er limbs of sinewy mould. They then arrayed

Against the Titans in fell combat stood,

And in their nervous grasp wielded aloft

Precipitous rocks. On the other side alert



THE THEOGONY. 83

The Titan phalanx closed : then hands of strength

Joined prowess, and displayed the works of war.

Tremendous then the immeasurable sea

Roared : earth resounded : the wide heaven throughout

Groaned shattering: from its base Olympus vast

Reeled to the violence of the gods : the shock

Of deep concussion rocked the dark abyss

Remote of Tartarus : the shrilling din

Of hollow tramplings and strong battle-strokes,

And measureless uproar of wild pursuit.

So they reciprocal their weapons hurled

Groan-scattering, and the shout of either host

Burst in exhorting ardour to the stars

Of heaven with mighty war-cries either host

Encountering closed."

E. 883-908.

A pause at this point may be excused, seeing that
it affords the opportunity of noting the contrast be-
tween the heathen and the Christian conceptions of
divine strength. In Milton the Messiah has a super-
abundance of might :

Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked
His thunder in mid volley, for he meant
Not to destroy, but root them out of heaven."

Par. Lost, vi. 853-855.

In the conflict with the Titans, Zeus has to exert all
his might to insure victory :

" Nor longer then did Zeus
Curb his full power, but instant in his soul
There grew dilated strength, and it was filled
With his omnipotence. At once he loosed
His whole of might, and put forth all the god.



84 HESJOD.

The vaulted sky, the mount Olympian flashed

With his continual presence, for he passed

Incessant forth, and scattered fires on fires.

Hurled from his hardy grasp the lightnings flew

Keiterated swift : the whirling flash

Cast sacred splendour, and the thunderbolt

Fell : roared around the nurture-yielding earth

In conflagration ; for on every side

The immensity of forests crackling blazed :

Yea, the broad earth burned red, the streams that mix

With ocean and the deserts of the sea.

Round and around the Titan brood of earth

Rolled the hot vapour on its fiery surge.

The liquid heat air's pure expanse divine

Suffused : the radiance keen of quivering flame

That shot from writhen lightnings, each dim orb,

Strong though they were, intolerable smote,

And scorched their blasted vision : through the void

Of Erebus the preternatural glare

Spread mingling fire with darkness. But to see

With human eye and hear with the ear of man

Had been as if midway the spacious heaven

Hurtling with earth shocked e'en as nether earth

Crashed from the centre, and the wreck of heaven

"Fell ruinous from high. So vast the din

When, gods encountering gods, the clang of arms

Commingled, and the tumult roared from heaven."

E. 908-939.

To heighten the turmoil, the winds and elements fight
on the side of Zeus. The tide of battle turns. Jove's
huge auxiliaries overwhelm the Titans with a succes-
sion of great missiles, send them sheer beneath the
earth, and consign them to a durance " as far beneath,
under earth, as heaven is from earth, for equal is the



THE THEOGONY. 85

space from earth to murky Tartarus/' There, iu the
deeper chamber of an abyss from which there is no
escape, the Titans are thenceforth imprisoned, with
the hundred-handed giants set over them as keepers,
and with Day and Night acting as sentries or janitors
in front of the brazen threshold :

" There Night
And Daj T , near passing, mutual greeting still
Exchange, alternate as they glide athwart
The brazen threshold vast. This enters, that
Forth issues, nor the two can one abode
At once constrain. This passes forth and roams
The round of earth, that in the mansion waits
Till the d ue season of her travel come.
Lo ! from the one the far-discerning light
Beams upon earthly dwellers : but a cloud
Of pitchy darkness veils the other round :
Pernicious Night, aye leading in her hand
Sleep, Death's twin brother : sons of gloomy Night,
There hold they habitation, Death and Sleep,
Dread deities : nor them doth shining sun
E'er with his beam contemplate, when he climbs
The cope of heaven, or when from heaven descends.
Of these the one glides gentle o'er the space
Of earth and broad expanse of ocean waves,
Placid to man. The other has a heart
Of iron : yea, the heart within his breast
Is brass unpitying : whom of men he grasps,
Stern he retains : e'en to immortal gods
A foe." E. 992-1014.

Of these sentries the readers of Milton's * Paradise
Lost ' may recall the description at the opening of the
.sixth book; whilst the counterparts of the twin cliil*



86 HESIOD.

dren of Night may be found in the Iliad,* as well as
in the iEneid.t

Another wonder of the prison-house, in Hesiod's
account of it, is Cerberus :

" A grisly dog, implacable,
"Watching before the gates. A stratagem
Is his, malicious : them who enter there,
With tail and bended ears he fawning soothes,
But suffers not that they with backward step
Repass : whoe'er would issue from the gates
Of Pluto strong and stern Persephone,
For them with marking eye he lurks : on them
Springs from his couch, and pitiless devours."

E. 1018-1026.

In close proximity to this monster was the fabled
Styx, in some respects the most awful personage in
the 'Theogony.' The legend about her is somewhat
obscure, but it is curious as being connected with that
of Iris, the rainbow, whose function of carrying up
water when any god has been guilty of falsehood
seems a vague embodiment of the covenant sealed by
the " bow set in the cloud : "

" Jove sends Iris down
To bring the great oath in a golden ewer,
The far-famed water, from steep, sky-capt rock
Distilling in cold stream. Beneath the earth
Abundant from the sacred river-head
Through shades of darkest night the Stygian horn
Of Ocean flows : a tenth of all the streams
To the dread Oath allotted. In nine streams
Circling the round of earth and the broad seas

* II. xiv. 231, &c. t iEn. vi. 278, &c



THE THEOGONY. 87

With silver whirlpools twined with many a maze,
It falls into the deep : one stream alone
Glides from the rock, a mighty bane to gods.
Who of immortals, that inhabit still
Olympus topped with snow, libation pours
And is forsworn, he one whole year entire
Lies reft of breath, nor yet approaches once
The Hectare d and ambrosial sweet repast :
But still reclines on the spread festive couch
Mute, breathless : and a mortal lethargy
O'erwhelms him ; but his malady absolved
With the great round of the revolving year,
More ills on ills afflictive seize : nine years
From everlasting deities remote
His lot is cast : in council nor in feast
Once joins he, till nine years entire are full.

So great an oath the deities of heaven
Decreed the waters incorruptible,
Ancient, of Styx, who sweeps with wandering wave
A rugged region : where of dusky Earth,
And darksome Tartarus, and Ocean waste,
And the starred Heaven, the source and boundary
Successive rise and end : a dreary wild
And ghastly, e'en by deities abhorred."

E. 1038-1072.

Such, according to Hesiod, are the surroundings of
the infernal prison-house which received the vanquished
Titans when Jove's victory was assured. Not yet, how-
ever, could he rest from his toil : he had yet to scotch
the half-serpent, half-human Typhosus, the offspring of
a new union betwixt Earth and Tartarus, a monster so
terror-inspiring by means of its hundred heads and voices
to match, that Olympus might well dread another and



88 HMSIOD.

less welcome master should this pest attain full devel-
opment. Zeus, we are told, foresaw the dangei :

" Intuitive and vigilant and strong
He thundered : instantaneous all around
Earth reeled with horrible crash : the firmament
Roared of high heaven, the ocean streams and seas,
And uttermost caverns ! While the king in wrath
Uprose, beneath his everlasting feet
Trembled Olympus : groaned the steadfast earth.
From either side a burning radiance caught
The darkly-rolling ocean, from the flash
Of lightnings and the monster's darted flame,
Hot thunderbolts, and blasts of fiery winds.
Glowed earth, air, sea : the billows heaved on high
Foamed round the shores, and dashed on every side
Beneath the rush of gods. Concussion wild
And unappeasable arose : aghast
The gloomy monarch of th' infernal dead
Trembled : the sub-Tartarean Titans heard
E'en where they stood and Cronus in the midst ;
They heard appalled the unextinguished rage
Of tumult and the din of dreadful war.
Now when the god, the fulness of his might
Gathering at once, had grasped his radiant arms,
The glowing thunderbolt and bickering flame,
He from the summit of th' Olympian mount
Leapt at a bound, and smote him : hissed at once
The horrible monster's heads enormous, scorched
In one conflagrant blaze. When thus the god
Had quelled him, thunder-smitten, mangled, prone,
He fell : beneath his weight earth groaning shook.
Flame from the lightning-stricken prodigy
Flashed 'mid the mountain hollows, rugged, dark,
Where he fell smitten. Broad earth glowed intense
From that unbounded vapour, and dissolved :



THE THEOGONY. 89

As fusile tin, by art of youths, above

The wide-brimmed vase up-bubbling, foams with heat ;

Or iron hardest of the mine, subdued

By burning flame, amid the mountain delis

Melts in the sacred caves beneath the hands

Of Vulcan, so earth melted in the glare

Of blazing lire. He down wide Hell's abyss

His victim hurled, in bitterness of soul."

E. 1108-1149.

The italicised lines may recall the noble image in the
'Paradise Lost;'* a passage w T hich Milton's editor,
Todd, pronounces grander in conception than Hesiod's.
But, as Elton fairly answers, it is only in Milton's
reservation that he is superior. " The mere rising of
Zeus causing mountains to rock beneath his everlast-
ing feet, is sublimer than the firmament shaking from
the rolling of wheels."

After quelling this monster, Zeus is represented be-
thinking himself of a suitable consort, and espousing
Metis or Wisdom, so as to effect a union of abso-
lute wisdom with absolute power. As, however, in the
Hesiodic view of the divinity, there was ever a risk of
dethronement to the sire at the hand of his offspring,
Zeus hit upon a plan which should prevent his wife
producing a progeny that might hereafter conspire with
her to dethrone him, after the hereditary fashion. He
absorbed Metis, with her babe yet unborn, in his own
breast, and, according to mythology, found this task

* " Under his burning wheels
The steadfast empyrean shook throughout,
All but the throne itself of God,"

vi. 832-834.



90 HESIOD.

easier through having persuaded her to assume the
most diminutive of shapes. Thenceforth he blended
perfect wisdom in his own body, and in due time, as
from a second womb

" He from his head disclosed, himself, to birth
The blue-eyed maid Tritonian Pallas, fierce,
Rousing the war-field's tumult, unsubdued,
Leader of armies, awful, whose delight
The shout of battle and the shock of war/'

E. 1213-1217.

Yet, notwithstanding so summary a putting away of
his first wife, Zeus, it appears, had no mind to remain
a widower. Themis bare him the Hours ; Eurynome
the Graces

"Whose eyelids, as they gaze,
Drop love unnerving ; and beneath the shade
Of their arched brows they steal the sidelong glance
Of sweetness ; "

E. 1196-1199.

and Mnemosyne, a daughter of Uranus, became the
mother by him of the Nine Muses, celebrated by
Hesiod at the beginning of the poem. With Deme-
ter and Latona also he had tender relations, before
he finally resigned himself to his sister Hera (Juno),
who took permanent rank as Queen of the Gods.
From this union sprang Mars and Hebe, and Eilei-
tbyia or Lucina : whilst according to Hesiod, who
herein differs from Homer, Hephcestus or Vulcan
was the offspring of Hera alone, as a set-off to Zeus's
sole parentage of Athena. Of the more illicit amours
of the fickle king of the gods, and of their issues, and



THE THEOGONY. 91

the marriages consequent upon these children of the gods
espousing nymphs or mortals, Hesiod has still much
to tell, in his fashion of genealogising, "before we reach
the Heroogony, or list of heroes horn of the union of
goddesses with mortal men, which is tacked to the ' The-
ogony' proper, as it has come down to us. It is indeed
a list and little more ; tracing, for example, the birth of
Plutus to the meeting of Demeter with Iasius in the
wheat-fields of Crete; of Achilles, to the union of Peleus
with Thetis ; of Latinus, Telegonus, and another, to the
dalliance of Ulysses with the divine Circe.

" Lo ! these were they who, yielding to embrace
Of mortal men, themselves immortal, gave
A race resembling gods."

E. 1324-1236.
Thus virtually ends the * Theogony ' in its extant
form, but our sketch of it would not be complete were
we to ignore the story of Pandora and Prometheus,
which has been passed over at its proper place in the
genealogy, with a view to a clearer unfolding of the
sequence of the poem. In the I. Works' this legend
is an episode ; in the * Theogony ' it is a piece of gen-
ealogy, apropos of the offspring of Iapetus, the brother
of Cronus, and Clymene. Atlas, one of their sons, was
doomed by Zeus to bear up the vault of heaven as an
eternal penalty ; Menoetius, another, was for his inso-
lence thrust down to Erebus by the lightning-flash.
Of Epimetheus, who in the * Works ' accepts the gift
of Pandora, it is simply said in the * Theogony ' that
he did so, and brought evil upon man by his act.
Nothing is said of heedlessness of his brother's cau-



\Tb r a ^p*

OF THE

"UNIVERSITY



/



92 HESIOD.

tion ; nothing of the casket of evils, from which in the
'Works,' Pandora, by lifting the lid, lets mischief
and disease loose upon the world. The key to the
difference between the two accounts is to be found
in the fact that in the ' Works ' Hesiod narrates the
consequences of the sin of Prometheus ; in the ' The-
ogony,' the story of the sin itself. In the order ol
events that story would run thus : Prometheus enrage?
Zeus by scoffing at sacrifices, and by tricking the sage
ruler of Olympus into a wrong choice touching the
most savoury part of the ox. In his office of arbitrator,
he divides two portions, the flesh and entrails covered
with the belly on one hand, the bones under a cover
of white fat on the other. Zeus chooses after the
outward appearance, but, as Hesiod seems to imply,
chooses wittingly, for the sake of having a grievance.
Thenceforth in sacrifice it was customary to offer the
whitening bones at his altars. But the god neither
forgot nor forgave the cheat

" And still the fraud remembering from that hour,
The strength of unexhausted fire denied
To all the dwellers upon earth. But him
Benevolent Prometheus did beguile :
The far-seen splendour in a hollow reed
He stole of inexhaustible flame. But then
Besentment stung the Thunderer's inmost soul,
And his heart chafed With anger when he saw
The fire far-gleaming in the midst of men.
Straight for the flame bestowed devised he ill
To man."

E. 749-759.

Outwitted twice, he roused himself to take vengeance



THE THEOGONY. 93

upon Prometheus as well as his clients. On the latter
he inflicted the evil of winsome womankind, repre-
sented by Pandora, and placed them in the dilemma
of either not marrying, and dying heirless, or of find-
ing in marriage the lottery which it is still accounted.
As to Prometheus and his punishment, Hesiod's ac-
count is as follows :

" Prometheus, versed
In various wiles, he bound with fettering chains
Indissoluble, chains of galling weight,
Midway a column. Down he sent from high
The broad-winged eagle : she his liver gorged
Immortal. For it sprang with life, and grew
In the night season, and the waste repaired
Of what by day the bird of spreading wing
Devoured."

E. 696-704.

This durance was eventually terminated by Hercules
slaying the vulture or eagle, and reconciling Zeus and
the Titan. Hesiod's moral will sum up the tale :

" Nathless it is not given thee to deceive
The god, nor yet elude the omniscient mind ;
For not Prometheus, void of blame to man,
Could 'scape the burden of oppressive wrath ;
And vain his various wisdom ; vain to free
From pangs, or burst the inextricable chain."

E. 816-821.

The foregoing sketch will, it is hoped, have enabled
English readers to discover in Hesiod's 'Theogony ' not a
mere prosy catalogue, but a systematised account of the
generation of the gods of Hellas, relieved of excessive



94 HESIOD.

detail by fervid descriptions, stirring battle-pieces, noble
images, and graceful fancies. Such as it was, it appears
to have found extensive circulation and acceptance in
Greece, and to have formed the chief source of infor-
mation amongst Greeks concerning the divine antiquity.
This is not the kind of work to admit of a comparison
of the so-called Orphic Theogony, which, in point of
fact, belongs to a much later date, with that of Hesiod.
Enough to state that the former, to use Mr Grote's ex-
pression, " contains the Hesiodic ideas and persons,
enlarged and mystically disguised." But those who
have the time and materials for, carrying out the com-
parison for themselves, will be led to discover in the
development of religious belief, in the bias towards a
sort of unity of Godhead, and in the investment of the
powers of nature with the attributes of deity, which
characterise the Orphic worship and theogonies, in-
direct corroboration of the opinion which assigns a
very early date to the simple, unmystical, and, so to
speak, unspiritual view of the divine foretime, hai ded
down to us in Hesiod's theogonic system.



CHAPTEE V.



THE SHIELD OF HERCULES.



It was remarked at the outset that one class of Hesi-
odic poems consisted of epics in petto on some subject
of heroic mythology. The ' Shield of Hercules ' sur-
vives as a sample, if indeed it is to be received as
Hesiod's work. Its theme is a single adventure of
Hercules, his combat with Cycnus and his father, the
war-god, near Apollo's Temple at Pagasae. Shorn of a
preface of fifty-six verses borrowed from the ' Catalogue
of Women,' and having for their burden the artifice
of Zeus with Alcmena, which resulted in the birth of
Hercules, a preface manifestly in the wrong place, the
'Shield ' is a fairly compact poem, constructed as a frame
for the description of the hero's buckler, to which the
rest of the poem is ancillary. Among the ancients the
balance of opinion leaned to the belief that it was
written by the author of the ' Theogony ; ' but though
there is insufficient ground for the wholesale deprecia-
tion cast upon it by Mure, in his ' History of the Lan-
guage and Literature of Ancient Greece/ it can hardly
be maintained that the ' Shield of Hercules ' is a poem



96 HESIOD.

of the same age and authorship as the ' Works * or the
* Theogony.' The sounder criticism of Muller deems
it worthy to be set side by side with Homer's account
t>f the Shield of Achilles in the 13th book of the
Iliad, and characterises it as executed in the genuine
spirit of the Hesiodian school. Were it desirable, it
might be shown from the writings of the same critic*
that the objects represented on Hesiod's shield were in
fact the first subjects of the Greek artificers in bronze,
and that there are proofs in the accoutrement of Her-
cules, not with club and lion's skin, but like other
heroes, of a date for this poem not posterior to the
40th Olympiad.

It has, no doubt, been the ill-fortune of this poem
to have attracted more than its fair share of botchers
and interpolators, and the discrimination of the true
gold from the counterfeit and base metal belongs rather
to a critical edition of the Hesiodic remains ; but in
the glance which we propose to bestow upon the work
as it has come down to us, it will be shown that, after
considerable allowance for interpolated passages, a
residuum of fine heroic poetry will survive the pro-
cess.

The poem proper, it has been said, begins at v. 57.
Hercules, on reaching manhood, had undertaken an
expedition against a noted robber, Cycnus, the son of
Ares and Pelopia. This Cycnus used to infest the
mountain-passes between Thessaly and Eceotia, and