“This is what the goddesses first said to me, the Olympian Muses, daughters of AEGIS-wielding
Zeus: ‘Shepherds who live in the wild, wretched disgraces, mere bellies, we have the skill to
recount many falsehoods in the guise of truth, but we can also tell the truth when such is our wish.’
So spoke the smooth-tongued daughters of mighty Zeus, and they gave me the branch of an evergreen
laurel tree that they had picked out to be my staff, a magnificent one. And they breathed into me a
superhuman power of song, so that I might tell of what was to come and what happened in the past,
and they directed me to sing about the race of the blessed gods who live forever.” (Hesiod,
Theogony 24–33)Two poems survive that are unquestionably the work of Hesiod, the Theogony (about 1,000 lines long)
and the Works and Days (about 800 lines). In the Theogony, Hesiod tells us his name and in both poems
he speaks in the first person, giving us a number of biographical details. He lives, he tells us, in the
Boeotian town of Ascra, not far from Thebes. Once, when he was pasturing his flocks near Mount
Helicon, the Muses appeared to him and “breathed into” him the capacity for producing divine song. This
epiphany was to have long-lasting effects on the course of Western culture: For centuries, poets have
spoken of themselves as “inspired.” The song that the Muses have inspired in Hesiod is an account, from
the beginning, of the generation of the gods (which is essentially what the title Theogony means). The first
divinity to be generated is Chaos, “yawning void,” whose name is neither masculine nor feminine, but
grammatically neuter. Then female Gaia (“Earth”) comes into being and generates male Uranus
(“Heaven”). Between the two of them (more or less literally) a new generation of gods is created, the
youngest of whom is Cronus, who eventually overthrows his father Uranus after having castrated him with
a sickle. This is only one of a large number of elements in the Theogony that have close parallels in
earlier mythological accounts from the literature of western Asia. In the Hittite myth concerning the god
Kumarbi, Kumarbi overthrows his predecessor and bites off his predecessor’s genitals, whichhe
swallows; he then generates the Hittite weather god. In Hesiod, Cronus’ sickle is described as having
jagged “teeth” like a saw; after castrating Uranus, Cronus sires Zeus, whom the Greeks considered to be
responsible for the weather.
AEGIS A divine attribute, usually worn by Athena on her chest (figure 76), represented as a
Gorgon’s head surrounded by scales or a fringe, which confers special powers on the wearer.Zeus, in turn, overthrows his father Cronus, but this act is represented not as yet another act in an ongoing
series of crimes but as a restoration of justice. Cronus is punished not only for his violence against his
father but for his treatment of his children, whom he swallows as soon as they are born to prevent them
from usurping his rule. He is, however, deceived into swallowing a stone in place of his son Zeus, who is
thus spared and allowed to grow to full strength without Cronus knowing of his survival. Zeus later
rescues his brothers and sisters from the belly of Cronus and begins his enlightened rule over men and
gods. The whole of Hesiod’s story in the Theogony is of a steady progression in the divine realm from
(literal) chaos to order and justice, of which Zeus is the guarantor. In the human realm, according to
Hesiod, the guarantors of order and justice are the basileis, the plural form of basileus, which we saw in
chapter 1 was the title of the Mycenaean official just under the king. The basileis are thus the earthly
counterparts of Zeus: Just as the divine Muses sing the praises of Zeus and the other gods, so mortal poets
like Hesiod are expected to sing the praises of the earthly basileis (along, of course, with praising the
gods). But, unlike Zeus, the ruler of the gods, the human basileis are in need of instruction, which Hesiod