Zeus Blitzes A Monster. This vase, made in a Chalcidian colony in South Italy in about 550-525 B.C.,
shows Zeus attacking with thunderbolt a male monster with wings and snake-legs. Its identity is not
certain! but it may be Typhon. In Hesiod this monster has a hundred serpent heads but artists seldom
follow literary prescriptions for such creatures, and compound them from various sources, sometimes
Near Eastern. Giants are often given snake-legs in later art but seldom wings.
Oriental influence, then, is certain for an important myth in Hesiod. That raises the question of the
character of his poems as a whole; for both cosmogonical and what may be called 'wisdom' literature was
widespread in the Near East. Apart from Mesopotamia, we find it in Egypt, among the Phoenicians and
Canaanites, and of course among the Hebrews. Striking parallels to lines in the Works and Days can be
found in the Book of Proverbs; Genesis opens with the creation of the world before going on to human
genealogies and the origins of the different nations. The early Greeks found themselves in a world which
contained ancient and impressive civilizations, which they were not yet ready to dismiss as 'barbarians'.
Oriental influence, since the story of Zeus' succession is so firmly embedded in Homer and Hesiod, may
well go back to the Mycenaean period.
The Theogony does not give any account of the creation of man. It does, however, like Genesis and other
legends, imagine that there was a time when man existed, but woman did not. The creation of woman
came about in the following way, as a consequence of the peculiarities of Greek sacrificial ritual. Once