Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (31 page)

Poseidon
(
Neptune
) One of the three sons of Cronus, Poseidon becomes ruler of the sea and is, in Homer’s words, the “shaker of earth”—literally responsible for earthquakes, which were frequent and violent in Greece and the Aegean Sea region. Almost always depicted carrying his three-pronged spear, the trident, and driving a chariot, he is one of the most widely—and anciently—worshipped of the Greek gods.
Some scholars believe that Poseidon may have been an older god already worshipped in Greece when the Mycenaeans arrived, perhaps as a fertility god, associated with the water. But by the time of Homer and Hesiod, he is thought of as Lord of the Deep. A powerful figure who often resists his brother Zeus, he becomes one of the most significant figures in Homer’s
Odyssey
, as the god who is most hostile to the hero Odysseus.

Zeus
(
Jupiter
) King of the gods, god of thunder and weather, and originally bearing a name that meant “shining sky,” Zeus is the son of the Titan Cronus, who had toppled his own father, Uranus. Similarly, Zeus brings his father down and supplants him as the chief deity. The only major Greek god whose Indo-European origins are undisputed, Zeus is connected with older gods who probably arrived in Greece with the people later known as Mycenaeans. Some scholars see parallels between his story and the Mesopotamian god-feud in which Enki killed Apsu. (See chapter 3.) There are also similarities between Zeus and Marduk, hinting that the Greeks may have been influenced by the earlier Mesopotamian myths. In Greek myth, this old god of the bright sky is transformed into Zeus, the weather god. After the great war with the Titans, Zeus draws lots with his brothers, and divides the world. He is lord of the sky; one of his brothers, Hades, becomes lord of the underworld; and the other, Poseidon, gets dominion over the sea.
Zeus’s first wife is Metis, a sea nymph known for her wisdom, but Zeus is most famously married to Hera. Still, he is a notorious adulterer and has many lovers, both divine and human, and Hera deeply resents all of his many offspring. Some scholars believe that this was another vestige of the early rivalry between the male-dominated Zeus cult that arrived with the Mycenaeans and Hera’s goddess/earth mother-religion, which may have predated the Mycenaean era. Whatever the sexual politics may have been, Zeus became ruler of the world, presiding over law and justice—which essentially meant Greek customs. In that role, he often metes out justice to those attempting to defy the right order of the world through hubris. A word commonly misidentified today as “excessive pride”—as in, “The Yankees lost to the Red Sox because of their hubris”—this Greek concept actually meant a form of insolence, or intentionally dishonorable behavior, a powerful term of condemnation in ancient Greece.
Dispensing justice for dishonorable behavior seems a strange notion coming from a god best known for being a “serial adulterer.” His many notorious sexual escapades include both divine and mortal women. This makes him not only king of the gods, but father of quite a few of them as well. Among his lovers are the Titan Themis, with whom he has the three Horae (Seasons) and the Moirae (Fates); the goddess Mnemosyne (Memory), who produces the Nine Muses, who inspire poetry, dancing, music, and the other arts;
*
the grain goddess Demeter, who gives birth to Persephone; and the Titan Leto, mother of two of the greatest gods, Apollo and Artemis. Scholars believe that all of these affairs were allegorical tales meant to explain how the great “father” was responsible for creating the order of the world as it existed in the Greek mind.
But the tales that describe his exploits grew very colorful over the centuries. To seduce his many conquests, Zeus—a master of disguise—overcomes resistance by taking many different forms and shapes, perhaps most famously as a swan. That is how he appears to the queen of Sparta, Leda. Zeus mates with Leda in the form of a swan, and they conceive two children, one of them famed as Helen of Troy and the other Polydeuces (or Pollux). When Leda sleeps with her husband on the same night, she also conceives the mortals Castor (twin of Polydeuces) and Clytemnestra, who becomes the wife of King Agamemnon, commander in chief of the Greeks against Troy.
Among Zeus’s many mortal lovers are young boys—which strikes the modern mind as unnatural, but was not unusual among elite Greeks of the Classical Period. One of his most famous male lovers is Ganymede, a prince of the royal Trojan house and the most beautiful of mortals. In one legend, Zeus, in the form of an eagle, abducts Ganymede and carries him to Olympus, where he serves as a cup bearer to the gods. This was how handsome young boys functioned in the Greek drinking-and-sex parties called symposia, where older men initiated young boys into sexual knowledge, a practice known as pederasty, and the subject of Plato’s dialogue,
Symposium
.

How did man get fire?

In Hesiod’s Creation story, not all of the Titans fought against Zeus. Prometheus—a Titan who was a fire god, master craftsman, and trickster whose name connoted “forethought”—joined Zeus in the war against the other Titans. But as time went by, Prometheus rebelled. He was offended when Zeus took a dislike to the first humans, whom Prometheus had molded out of clay. In an argument over sacrifices to the gods, Prometheus balked when Zeus decided to deprive men of fire.

Taking the side of man, Prometheus tricked Zeus into receiving only the bones and fat of sacrificed animals instead of their meat. He had disguised the bones under a layer of glistening fat that Zeus chose instead of a plate of meat hidden under the animal’s stomach. (If that turns your stomach, don’t order haggis, a traditional Scottish delicacy featuring the stomach of a sheep.) Outraged at the deceit, Zeus decided that man can have meat but not the fire to cook it. When Prometheus hid fire in the hollow of a dried stalk of fennel and gave it to mankind, Zeus retaliated by chaining the Titan to a mountain peak in the Caucasus Mountains, where each day an eagle pecked at his liver—and each night the liver grew back.

Destined to suffer this torture for eternity, Prometheus was only freed when he used his gift of forethought to assure Zeus he had nothing to fear from a seemingly threatening prophecy. Zeus let Prometheus go. But he had one more “trick up his toga” to spring on mankind. The Lord of Olympus instructed Hephaestus to sculpt a lovely girl from earth and water. When the craft god was finished, all the gods then contributed other gifts to the first woman. As in a scene from a fairy-tale “finishing school,” Athena gave this creation beautiful clothes and taught her to weave on the loom. Aphrodite endowed her with beauty and charm, but the heartbreak and the sorrow of love as well. Finally Hermes—at Zeus’s urging—instilled in her the ability to lie persuasively. (Hermes was instructed to give to the woman “thievish morals and to add the soul of a bitch”—in Hesiod’s less than loving words.) So, Hermes “filled her with lies, with swindles, all sorts of thievish behavior,” and she was named Pandora, which in Greek means “all gifts.”

Though Prometheus warned his brother Epimetheus—a not-so-sharp tool whose name means “afterthought”—not to accept this gift from Zeus, Epimetheus was enchanted and married Pandora, who arrived bearing a package.

What was in Pandora’s “box”?

First of all, it wasn’t a “box,” but a covered jar. But that’s another story, and we’ll come to it in a bit.

The Greek equivalent of the biblical Eve, Pandora was the first woman, and according to the myth, created by Zeus as a punishment for men. Just as Zeus had been tricked by Prometheus with skin and bones that had been concealed under some enticingly glistening fat—an offering that looked good on the outside—Zeus returned the favor by sending Pandora, a “package” that seemed well wrapped but concealed trouble. Zeus also sent along a somewhat mysterious jar.

When Hermes delivered Pandora to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, he was smitten by her, even though she was a “curse to men who must live by bread,” in Hesiod’s woman-hating words. In spite of Prometheus’s warnings against accepting anything from Zeus, Epimetheus welcomed Pandora. Hesiod never says that Pandora was told not to open the jar. But plagued by insatiable curiosity, Pandora opened the jar given to Epimetheus by Zeus. Out flew all the ills that torment mankind—hard work, pain, and dreadful diseases that bring death. They all escaped from the jar to plague humanity.

The curious twist to Hesiod’s story is that only hope did not escape from the jar. Pandora put the lid back on the jar before hope could escape. But there is some ambiguity in that. Does it mean man has hope because it has not flown away? Or is it trapped within the jar? Hesiod does not explain. What is clear is that he takes a dim view of women, much like the authors of the biblical folktale in Genesis who blame the suffering of the world on Eve. Of Pandora, Hesiod says in
Theogony
, “From her descends the ruinous race and tribe of women.”

Commenting on Pandora and the Greek view of women, classicist Barry Powell wrote in
Classical Mythology
, “Among the Greeks, misogyny seems to be based not so much on primitive magical terror, or economic resentment as…on a male resentment of the institution of monogamy itself. Greek myth is obsessed with hostile relations between the sexes, especially between married couples…. We need to remember that…ancient literature, and myth, was composed by men for men in an environment ruled by men.”

As for the common expression “Pandora’s box,” it has a long history. In 1508, the Dutch author Desiderius Erasmus first used the phrase “Pandora’s box” instead of the original
pithos
in Greek, a traditional jar for storing grain. And since then, “Pandora’s box” has come to symbolize any object or situation that seems harmless on the outside but has a great potential for discord, evil, and unlimited harm.