ClSt/Coml 200:

"Greek Myths: An Overview"

Background Information on:

Greek Mythology and Greek Religion

Greek mythology and religion are intimately connected, but they are not precisely the same thing. Many of the gods who figure in myth were worshipped in cult as well, but many were not. The principal deities in Greek religious observance are the Olympians, who represent the last generations of the immortals. In some cases the stories with which we are familiar were closely involved in the worship of particular gods; but this was not always the case, since the worship of any given divinity took different forms at different places and times throughout the Greek world.

Greek Mythology and Greek Literature

Greek literature, like Greek religion, is closely wrapped up with mythology; but neither is it the same thing. All the major genres of Greek literature make use of myth to some extent, and for most kinds of poetry in particular the myths are the principal source of subject matter. But a work of literature is not the same thing as a myth: it is an instantiation of a myth that exists in many other forms. Hesiod's Theogony, for instance, tells the story of how Zeus became king of the gods. But the poem is not the myth itself, nor is it necessarily the definitive telling of that myth. Rather, it is one of many instantiations of the myth, which took many other forms as well. These forms were not only literary, of course. A myth might be represented graphically, as on a vase painting or sculptural relief; architecturally or spatially, as in a temple or sacred precinct; or in cultic practice, i.e. the actual ritual observances through which worship took place. But all these partial representations of a myth do not "add up" to the entire myth itself. Even so widespread and so consistently represented a myth as the accession of Zeus to the throne of Olympus could not be expressed entirely and in ideal form: every version is limited in the first place by its medium (textual, material, or practical as the case may be) and, in the second place, exists in order to serve some purpose more limited and specific than any ideal version could accommodate. This is true even of versions that were widely accepted throughout Greek culture and that address myths of fundamental importance from an extremely broad perspective, as is true, for instance, of Hesiod's Theogony.

The Generations of the Gods

Is Hesiod's Theogony a "Standard" Account?

Hesiod's Theogony tells how the Olympian gods worshipped in his day came to be born. This poem acquired great authority in later Greek culture. Writing perhaps eight hundred years after we believe Hesiod's poem was composed, Apollodorus based his own account of divine genealogy (which is contained in a mythological handbook known as the Library) largely on Hesiod's Theogony. But Apollodorus differs from Hesiod in certain respects:

In Hesiod, while in Apollodorus The Titans release the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers before Cronus can imprison them again;
Apollodorus makes Gaia and Ouranos predict to Kronos that he will be overthrown by his son, Zeus; the infant Zeus is guarded on Mt. Ida by a band of youths known as the Kouretes; Zeus defeats Kronos with the help of Metis.

These differences are small, but there are more pronounced differences between some of the details that Homer gives about the ancestry of the principal Olympian gods:

In Hesiod, Aphrodite is born from the foam of the sea (Pontos) that floats around the testicles of the castrated Kronos; in Homer, she is the daughter of a normal sexual union between Zeus and Dione, whose parentage Homer does not mention (in Hesiod she is a daughter of Okeanos; in Apollodorus, she is a thirteenth Titan).
More generally, Homer on several occasions speaks of Okeanos as the genesis of the gods. The most obvious interpretation of this phrase would be that he regards the gods as the children and grandchildren of Okeanos (and his mate, Tethys). But this is very different from what Hesiod says about Okeanos, whom he makes a Titan (and so the brother of Kronos, father of the Olympians) and father to a line of nineteen river gods as sons and fifty nymphs (Okeanids) as daughters. It is possible that Homer thinks of Okeanos as occupying the place of Pontos in the generation before the Titans; but again in Hesiod, Pontos is not a direct ancestor of the Olympians.

So Homer, a poet comparable to Hesiod in antiquity and if anything even greater in his influence over later Greek culture, disagrees with Hesiod in certain ways, both large and small, concerning the generations of the gods. In fact, we know by report of earlier theogonies, some of them nearly contemporary with Hesiod, others much later but still considerably earlier than Apollodorus, that also differed from Hesiod, sometimes in important respects.

The point is that while Hesiod's Theogony was regarded as an authoritative text, we cannot assume that all accounts of Greek mythology agreed with his either as a whole or in particular details.

What Does Hesiod's Theogony Have in Common with Other Theogonies?

Despite these differences, there are certainly broad similarities among the various Greek theogonies:

The stories all assume that the Greek gods were born. This is a feature that Greek mythology shares with some other mythologies, but not with all.
There have been several generations of gods. Again, this is not an unparalleled element in other world mythologies. On the other hand, it is an extremely prominent feature of Greek mythology, and of course it is the single most important motif of Hesiod's Theogony.
There are several different classes of divinity. The Olympians, for instance, are entirely anthropomorphic (and incomparably handsome at that) and live in a human social system. The Titans on the other hand are rather monstrous, the Gigantes (Giants), Hundred-Handers, and Kyklopes frankly so. Earlier divinities have names that correspond directly to elements of the natural world (Gaia, Ouranos, Pontos, Nyx, Hemera), the human psyche (Eros), or to something even more formless and primeval (Chaos, Erebos, Aither).

While the details of different accounts vary from one another, they agree broadly on such features as these; and it is tempting to infer on this basis that the idea of generational succession corresponds to some sort of chronological development in Greek religion -- e.g. that worship of the elements in some deeply archaic period of Greek culture was replaced by worship of successively anthropomorphic deities culminating in the Olympians, or that worship of the feminine principle represented for instance by Gaia was eventually replaced by worship of the hyper-masculine Zeus. But this is probably not in fact the case. It is more likely that the successive generations should be interpreted without reference to time, but rather in terms of the relationships that exist within specific tellings of the myth. On this view, earlier generations exist only to serve as foils to the Olympians and, especially, to Zeus, who imposes order on a chaotic world and maintains it by virtue of his superior physical and mental power.

ClSt/Coml 200: "Greek Myths: An Overview"