Greek Mythology. Jessie M. Tatlock
Fig. 1. Omphalus, copy of a stone bound with fillets that was set up at Delphi to mark the center of the earth.
The account of the beginning of this world, as the Greek poets tell it, is in one respect quite unlike the account that is found in the first chapter of Genesis. For while the Hebrews were taught that God, who existed from the beginning, created our universe of heaven, earth, and sea, and all the forms of life, ending in man, the Greeks believed that the natural world came into being by birth or generation, and that even the gods whom they worshiped were the children and successors of an earlier and more elemental race of beings.
Thus, in the beginning was Chaos, a formless misty void; next came Gæa (Earth), and Eros (Love), most beautiful of immortals. From Chaos sprang Er’e bus (the darkness under the earth) and Night. From these two were born Æther (the light of heaven) and Day. But Gæa, touched by Eros, bore U'ranus (Heaven), the sea and all the hills. Then Uranus and Gæa were united by Eros and became the parents of the Titans, who represent the great ungoverned forces of nature, and the three Cy clo’pes, who are the rumbling thunder, the lightning, and the thunderbolt; lastly, they gave birth to the hundred-handed giants, who represent the violence of the sea. When Uranus, fearing his children, the Cyclopes and the hundred-handed giants, drove them back into the earth, Gæa in her distress called upon the Titans for deliverance. The greatest of them, Cronus, obedient to his mother's call, attacked his father, and having maimed him with a sickle, seized "his power.
After this, Cronus married his sister Rhea and became the father of six children; but since he had been told that a son should overthrow his rule, as he had overthrown that of his own father, he adopted the extraordinary precaution of swallowing his children as soon as they were born. Thus Hes’ti a (Vesta), De me’ter (Ceres), and Hera (Juno) Po sei’don (Neptune), and Hades (Pluto), came to the light only to be devoured. When Rhea bore her last son, Zeus (Jupiter), she saved him from the fate of his brothers and sisters by giving to Cronus a stone wrapped in baby's clothes in his place. The infant was kept for safety in a cave in Crete, where he was nourished on honey and the milk of the goat Am al the’a, while the Cu re’tes, mountain spirits of Crete or priests of Rhea, drowned his cries by clashing their spears on their shields.
Fig. 2. Rhea offering Cronus the stone in place of Zeus.
When Zeus was grown, by giving Cronus a strong potion he forced him to disgorge the five children he had swallowed. He then declared war upon him. The gods, as Zeus and his brothers and sisters should now be called, fortified themselves on Mt. Olympus, in Thessaly, and for ten years the war raged without ceasing. The rugged mountains and jumbled rocks of Thessaly bear witness to the fury of the battles. Finally Gæa advised Zeus to loose from their prison under the earth the Cyclopes and the hundred-handed giants. After this, armed with the thunderbolts given him by the Cyclopes, and assisted by the convulsions of sea and land caused by the hundred-handed giants, Zeus gained the victory. Those Titans who had taken Cronus' part were buried deep in Tartarus, as far below the earth as earth is below heaven.
The three brothers now divided the world between them. Zeus, chosen as king, was supreme over heaven and earth, as truly a sky-god as his grandfather Uranus had been. Poseidon was lord over all the waters, and to Hades was given the realm that bears his name below the earth, and dominion over the dead.
Although Gæa had aided and abetted the gods in their war against Cronus, she resented the complete subjugation of her sons. Therefore she brought forth Typhon, a fearful monster, from whose shoulders grew a hundred serpent heads, with darting tongues and fiery eyes, and from whose throats came fearful sounds, like the bellowing of bulls, the howling of dogs, the roaring of lions, and the hissing of serpents. Under him all the earth was shaken, the waters seethed; even Hades below trembled at the convulsion of the world. But Zeus seized the thunderbolts, his gift from the Cyclopes, and overthrew Typhon, scorching all his hundred heads. This monster, too, was buried beneath the earth, but still from his uneasy writhing at times the earth trembles, and the flames from his nostrils shoot up through the craters of volcanoes.
To Zeus were born many sons and daughters, and when other enemies threatened his power, he had their assistance in overcoming them. This new war was brought on by a race of giants who had sprung from the blood of Uranus, when he was wounded by his son Cronus. Not all are agreed as to just what the form of the giants was, but artists sometimes depicted them with the tails of serpents, and armed, as a tribe of savage men might be, with tree-trunks and rocks. These, too, Zeus with the help of his brothers and children overthrew and buried. After this his rule was undisputed.
Much of this story of the world is allegory. Day springs from night; heaven and earth are the parents of the powers of nature. It is all a development from the lower to the higher, from unordered forces of nature, to nature ordered by thought, justice, and beauty. And this development comes through love and birth, and through struggle, in which the higher gains the rule by crushing the lower. It is the story of science, history, and the spiritual life, told as an allegory.
Of the origin of man in the world the Greeks The had three explanations: he was born of the earth, as in the story of the earliest king of Athens, who rose from the ground, half man, half serpent; or he was descended from the gods, Zeus is called "Father of gods and men "; or — and this came to be the accepted account — he was molded out of clay by the Titan's son, Prome’theus, and given life by A the’na, the wise daughter of Zeus. A Greek gentleman of the second century A.D., traveling in his own country, was shown a small brick hut in which, he was told by the natives of the place, Prometheus had fashioned the first man. Large masses of clay-colored stone lay about, and the credulous tourist says that it had the odor of human flesh.
When he had created man, Prometheus gave him the gift of fire, which raised him above all other animals and enabled him to make use of the world about him by forging weapons and tools for agriculture. Fire was the means and the symbol of civilization. But Prometheus fell under the displeasure of Zeus for his favor toward man; for when a joint meeting was held to determine what part of beasts offered in sacrifice was due to the gods and what to men, he prepared a cunning device. He cut up an ox and divided it in two portions; in one was the flesh covered by the hide, and in the other the bones temptingly covered by fat. Then he told Zeus once for all to choose what should be his portion. And Zeus, although he saw the deceit, chose the bones and fat, because he wanted to bring trouble on Prometheus and his creation, man. So the gods deprived men of fire and denied them their means of livelihood, until Prometheus stole it once more from heaven, bringing it secretly in a hollow reed. For this defiance of his power the god punished Prometheus by having him bound to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains, where an eagle ever tore at his liver, which ever grew again. Although at any time he might have won his freedom by telling Zeus a secret which he alone knew, the much-enduring Titan bore this torture for ages. The two were at last reconciled and Prometheus set free, by Her’acles (Hercules), the son of Zeus, who, as part divine, part human, was suited to act as mediator between the gods and man's self-sacrificing friend and benefactor.
Because of the theft of fire, against men, too, Zeus devised evil.
For fire will I give them an evil thing wherein they shall rejoice, embracing their own doom. So spake the father of men and gods, and laughed aloud. And he bade glorious Hephæstus speedily to mingle earth with water, and put therein human speech and strength, and make, as the deathless goddesses to look upon, the fair form of a lovely maiden. And Athena he bade teach her handiwork, to weave the embroidered web. And he bade golden Aphrodite shed grace about her head and grievous desire and wasting passion. And Hermes, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, he bade give her a shameless soul. (Hesiod, Works and Days, 56 ff. Translation by A. W. Mair.)
Now when he had fashioned the beautiful bane in the place of a blessing, he led her forth where were the other gods and men. . . . And amazement held immortal gods and mortal men, when they beheld the sheer delusion unescapable for men. For from her cometh the race of woman-kind. Yea, of her is the deadly race and the tribes of women. A great bane are they to dwell among mortal men, no help-meet for ruinous poverty,