earlier eastern Mediterranean cultures (Burkert 2005b; Duchemin 1980). Sumerian,
Akkadian, and Hittite texts inform us of personifications of Order and Right, com-
panions of the great sun-god Shamash; in Egypt, Order is daughter of the sun-god
Ra; the major Indo-Iranian god Mithras is Treaty or Contract personified; Zarathustra,
the high god of Zoroastrianism, is supported by six powers who personify Good
Sense, Truth, Sovereignty, Order, Health, and Immortality. The many personifica-
tions which appear in Hesiod’sTheogonyare, therefore, further witness to the eastern
influences on the poem discussed earlier in this volume (cf. Chapter 1). Hesiod’s
cosmogony gives a fundamental role to Eros, personification of the generative prin-
ciple which drives the entire poem (cf. Chapter 20), and to Earth, who bears first
Heaven and then, with him as consort, the first generation of gods. A whole host of
elements of the natural world appear mixed in with the divine family, personified by
their place in the genealogy: Hills, Ocean, two dozen named rivers, the Sun, the
Figure 4.1 Maenad labelled EIRENE, between two satyrs, in the retinue of Dionysus (almost
out of shot to the right). Attic red-figure kalyx-krater, 410–400 BC. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches
Museum 1024. Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
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