Hesiod Quotes

Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one

But he who neither thinks for himself nor learns from others, is a failure as a man.

That man is best who sees the truth himself. Good too is he who listens to wise counsel. But who is neither wise himself nor willing to ponder wisdom is not worth a straw.

A man who works evil against another works it really against himself, and bad advice is worst for the one who devised it

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them).  Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

He's only harming himself who's bent upon harming another

For a man can win nothing better than a good wife, and nothing more painful than a bad one.

Do not let any sweet-talking woman beguile your good sense with the fascination of her shape. It's your barn she's after.

From their eyelids as they glanced dripped love.

No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: It too is a kind of divinity.

…Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no justice in them; but to mankind he gave justice which proves for the best.

Never wade through the pretty ripples of perpetually flowing rivers, until you have looked at their lovely waters, and prayed to them, and washed your hands in the pale enchanting water.

Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.

For here now is the age of iron. Never by daytime will there be an end to hard work and pain, nor in the night to weariness, when the gods will send anxieties to trouble us.

Often a whole community together suffers in consequence of a bad man who does wrong and contrives evil

Plan harm for another and harm yourself most, The evil we hatch always comes home to roost.

So you, the kings, you too must reflect upon this punishment, because the immortals are here in the midst of manking, observing those who do not hold the gods in awe...but grind each other down with crooked judgements

Never wade through the pretty ripples of perpetually flowing rivers, until you have looked at their lovely waters, and prayed to them, and washed your hands in the pale enchanting water

He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of the Muses to men.

If anything, which ought not to happen, happens in your neighborhood, neighbors come as they are to help; relatives dress first.

And I wish that I were not any part of the fifth generation of men, but had died before it came, or been born afterward. For here now is the age of iron.

Badness can be got easily and in shoals; the road to her is smooth, and she lives very near us. But between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows;

It is from work that men are rich in flocks and wealthy, and a working man is much dearer to the immortals

It is best to work, at whatever you have a talent for doing, without turning your greedy thought toward what some other man possesses, but take care of your own livelihood, as I advise you.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.” —HESIOD

Never procrastinate. Never say you’ll do it tomorrow or the next day. Slow workers never fill their barns. Neither do procrastinators. Diligence does the job.

they show the kalon kakon, ant’agathoio – beautiful evil, the price of good – to the other gods, who realize that mortal men will have no device or remedy against her. From this woman, Hesiod says, comes the whole deadly race of women. Always nice to be wanted.

If Hesiod did write it, then a humble peasant, living on a lonely farm far from cities, was the first man in Greece to wonder how everything had happened, the world, the sky, the gods, mankind, and to think out an explanation. Homer never wondered about anything.

I mean you well, Perses, you great idiot, and I will tell you. Look, badness is easy to have, you can take it by handfuls without effort. The road that way is smooth and starts here beside you. But between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat. The road to virtue is long and goes steep up hill, hard climbing at first, but the last of it, when you get to the summit (if you get there) is easy going after the hard part.

Once, in his first term, Cartwright had been bold enough to ask him why he was clever, what exercises he did to keep his brain fit. Healey had laughed. "It's memory, Cartwright, old dear. Memory, the mother of the Muses... at least that's what thingummy said." "Who?" "You know, what's his name, Greek poet chap. Wrote the Theogony... what was he called? Begins with an 'H'." "Homer?" "No, dear. Not Homer, the other one. No, it's gone. Anyway. Memory, that's the key.

Ο Έρως είναι ο αρχιτέκτονας του σύμπαντος.

The best treasure a man can have is a sparing tongue, and the greatest pleasure, one that moves orderly; for if you speak evil, you yourself will soon be worse spoken of.

But the woman unstopped the jar and let it all out, and brought grim cares upon mankind. Only Hope remained there..

In a wicked generation, might makes right, violence is praised, and virtue is slandered.” —Hesiod, Works and Days

So memory was a crucial skill for a poet like Hesiod or Homer, who would perform his work rather than publish it.

It is fine to draw on what is on hand, and painful to have need and not have anything there; I warn you to be carful in this. When the bottle has just been opened, and when it's giving out, drink deep; be sparing when it's half-full; but it's useless to spare the fag end.

But [Death] has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods. —Hesiod, Theogony

Better marry a maiden, so you can teach her good manners, and in particular marry one who lives close by you. Look her well over first. Don't marry what will make your neighbors laugh at you, for while there's nothing better a man can win him than a good wife, there's nothing more dismal than a bad one.

The care of God for us is a great thing, if a man believe it at heart: it plucks the burden of sorrow from him. So I have a secret hope of someone, a God, who is wise and plans; but my hopes grow dim when I see the deeds of men and their destinies. For Fortune is ever veering, and the currents of life are shifting, shifting, wandering for ever.

The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: “A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes.” No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

We know Pandora is beautiful. But what is she actually like? We get only one phrase which might tell us, before Hesiod gets side-tracked explaining how women will only want you if you aren’t poor, and comparing them unfavourably to bees.

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.

So memory was a crucial skill for a poet like Hesiod or Homer, who would perform his work rather than publish it. The ability to remember was recognized as crucial in the fourth century BCE by no less a writer than Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus. 7 Socrates attributes the invention of writing to an Egyptian god, named Theuth

So memory was a crucial skill for a poet like Hesiod or Homer, who would perform his work rather than publish it. The ability to remember was recognized as crucial in the fourth century BCE by no less a writer than Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus. 7 Socrates attributes the invention of writing to an Egyptian god, named Theuth (his

He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.

For Justice beats Outrage when she comes at length to the end of the race.

He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most.

(...) ὧδ᾽ ἔρδειν, καὶ ἔργον ἐπ᾽ ἔργῳ ἐργάζεσθαι.

Observe due measure, for timing is in all things the most important factor.

Amad a quienes aman, con el fin de ser amados por ellos.

One who delays his work is always wrestling with ruin.

Fallow land is kind to children, and keeps off the hexes.

The men and women of the Golden Age, Hesiod wrote, lived in an eternal spring, for hundreds of years, always youthful, fed on acorns from a great oak, on wild fruits, on honey. In the Silver Age, which is less written about, the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, and then quite suddenly aged and died. The Fabians and the social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild. But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood, a Silver Age.

And the Fates [Night] bore, and merciless punishing Furies who prosecute the transgressions of men and gods—never do the goddesses cease from their terrible wrath until they have paid the sinner his due.

For no obvious reason, I began to look closely at the women on the stradone. Suddenly it seemed to me that I had lived with a sort of limited gaze: as if my focus had been only on us girls, Ada, Gigliola, Carmela, Marisa, Pinuccia, Lila, me, my schoolmates, and I had never really paid attention to Melina’s body, Giuseppina Pelusi’s, Nunzia Cerullo’s, Maria Carracci’s. The only woman’s body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impose itself on mine. That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts and wanted to be picked up. And, good God, they were ten, at most twenty years older than me. Yet they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls and that we accentuated with clothes, with makeup. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings? Would Lila be misshapen like Nunzia? Would Fernando leap from her delicate face, would her elegant walk become Rino’s, legs wide, arms pushed out by his chest? And would my body, too, one day be ruined by the emergence of not only my mother’s body but my father’s? And would all that I was learning at school dissolve, would the neighborhood prevail again, the cadences, the manners, everything be confounded in a black mire, Anaximander and my father, Folgóre and Don Achille, valences and the ponds, aorists, Hesiod, and the insolent vulgar language of the Solaras, as, over the millenniums, had happened to the chaotic, debased city itself? I

Another time for men to go sailing is in spring when a man first sees leaves on the topmost shoot of a fig-tree as large as the foot-print that a crow makes; then the sea is passable, and this is the spring sailing time.

Do not piss as you stand and face the sun, but do it after the sun sets and before it rises, and even then do not be naked, for nights belong to the gods. ... Sire your children when you return from a feast of the gods, not when you return from an ill-omened burial. ... The sixth day of the month does not favor plants but is good for the birth of boys; it does not favor either the birth or the marriage of girls. But gelding of kids and lambs hurts less then.

But what is certainly the case is that his version of the story14 is closer to Theognis than to Hesiod. Again, the jar is full of useful things. And again they fly away when the lid is taken off. But the guilty party is not Pandora. Rather it is a lichnos anthropos – a ‘curious or greedy man’. Is it Epimetheus who is responsible this time? The fable doesn’t give him a name. But it is certainly a man rather than a woman, and one who is curious rather than evil.

The same was true of two personified emotions esteemed highest of all feelings in Homer and Hesiod: NEMESIS, usually translated as Righteous Anger, and AIDOS, a difficult word to translate, but in common use among the Greeks. It means reverence and the shame that holds men back from wrongdoing, but it also means the feeling a prosperous man should have in the presence of the unfortunate—not compassion, but a sense that the difference between him and those poor wretches is not deserved.

In comparison with the justice exercised with sovereign power by traditional chiefs, the kings of justice, by the powerful of crooked judgments, Hesiodic justice, going from the decree of Zeus to the order of the world, and from this to peasant vigilance and exactness, to the interplay of good understanding and debts repaid, calls for a whole transfer of sovereignty. Calls for it, but does not record it, for at the time of Works and Days justice is institutionalized only in the hands of the kings of justice.

А коли пізній зробиш посів, то ліки й на те є: Лиш перший раз закує, у дувняку десь, зозуля, Втішивши серце смертних людей на землі неозорій, Зевс на третій день задощить і дощитиме, поки Врівень не стане з копитом вола, - ні більше, ні менше. Ось тоді пізній орач - із раннім зрівнятися може.

As mentioned above, they operate in at least two timelines: the one in which they are ostensibly set, and the one in which any particular version is written. The condescending, paternalistic tone in Hawthorne’s version of Pandora is far more overt than the irritable misogyny we find in Hesiod. Hesiod may present Pandora as a trick, a construct made by the gods to bring harm to men, but he wants us to know about the reasons Zeus orders her creation, the revenge on Prometheus and the rest. In simplifying the stories for children, Green and Hawthorne both oversimplify, so that Pandora becomes more villainous than even Hesiod intended.

Їх є три тисячі Океанід тих, дів струнконогих. По суходолу вони та в глибинах солоного моря, Світле потомство богинь, усюди порозселялись. Стілький й інших є Рік шумковлинних, синів Океана, Що привела їх на світ достойна пошани Тетіда. Смертній людині годі усі ті ймена хзні знати, Кожен знає своїх, при яких він живе, поіменно.

According to Hesiod's Theogony, Rhea gives birth to the following children in this order: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Kronos swallows each of the first five deities, and Rhea is understandably consumed with grief. She consults her parents - Gaia and Ouranos, Earth and Heaven. They tell her to go to Crete to give birth to Zeus, the youngest of her children. Rhea gives birth and then plays a trick on Kronos: instead of giving him their youngest child to consume, she give him a rock, disguised as a baby. The inability to even register the difference between a god and a rock suggests that Kronos was not just a terrible father, but also an inattentive eater.

Harvest Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. -Hesiod Shall we gather the sunset pluck what is ripe harness the cicada's song? Even if this isn't the season of new love let us remember the buds and reap what we can. No crop is too small. No harvest too lean. The grain will yield. So scatter and slash call in the cows and let us milk them all dry. Plow as you will. Bulldoze away. Why not make every season our season each day our day to till and tease to clear and seed to plant and replant as we please. Come my sweet smell of hay do not be deceived by Hesiod. He says that I am after your barn. I want the whole fucking farm!

From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos, and, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse's Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet. Thence they arise and go abroad by night, veiled in thick mist, and utter their song with lovely voice, praising Zeus the aegis-holder and queenly Hera of Argos who walks on golden sandals and the daughter of Zeus the aegis-holder bright-eyed Athene, and Phoebus Apollo, and Artemis who delights in arrows, and Poseidon the earth-holder who shakes the earth, and reverend Themis and quick-glancing Aphrodite, and Hebe with the crown of gold, and fair Dione, Leto, Iapetus, and Cronos the crafty counsellor, Eos and great Helius and bright Selene, Earth too, and great Oceanus, and dark Night, and the holy race of all the other deathless ones that are for ever. And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me—the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis: 'Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things'.

And here I would note the great benefit of party distinctions in saving the people at large the trouble of thinking. Hesiod divides mankind into three classes—those who think for themselves, those who think as others think, and those who do not think at all. The second class comprises the great mass of society; for most people require a set creed and a file-leader. Hence the origin of party, which means a large body of people, some few of whom think, and all the rest talk. The former take the lead and discipline the latter, prescribing what they must say, what they must approve, what they must hoot at, whom they must support, but, above all, whom they must hate; for no one can be a right good partisan who is not a thoroughgoing hater.

Everything that happens, happens in accordance with this strife, and it is just in the strife that eternal justice is revealed. It is a wonderful idea, welling up from the purest strings of Hellenism, the idea that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws. Only a Greek was capable of finding such an idea to be the fundament of a cosmology; it is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of the Greek individual and the Greek state, taken from the gymnasium and the palaestra, from the artist’s agon, from the contest between political parties and between cities — all transformed into universal application so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn on it.

And barbarians were inventors not only of philosophy, but almost of every art. The Egyptians were the first to introduce astrology among men. Similarly also the Chaldeans. The Egyptians first showed how to burn lamps, and divided the year into twelve months, prohibited intercourse with women in the temples, and enacted that no one should enter the temples from a woman without bathing. Again, they were the inventors of geometry. There are some who say that the Carians invented prognostication by the stars. The Phrygians were the first who attended to the flight of birds. And the Tuscans, neighbours of Italy, were adepts at the art of the Haruspex. The Isaurians and the Arabians invented augury, as the Telmesians divination by dreams. The Etruscans invented the trumpet, and the Phrygians the flute. For Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygians. And Cadmus, the inventor of letters among the Greeks, as Euphorus says, was a Phoenician; whence also Herodotus writes that they were called Phoenician letters. And they say that the Phoenicians and the Syrians first invented letters; and that Apis, an aboriginal inhabitant of Egypt, invented the healing art before Io came into Egypt. But afterwards they say that Asclepius improved the art. Atlas the Libyan was the first who built a ship and navigated the sea. Kelmis and Damnaneus, Idaean Dactyli, first discovered iron in Cyprus. Another Idaean discovered the tempering of brass; according to Hesiod, a Scythian. The Thracians first invented what is called a scimitar (arph), -- it is a curved sword, -- and were the first to use shields on horseback. Similarly also the Illyrians invented the shield (pelth). Besides, they say that the Tuscans invented the art of moulding clay; and that Itanus (he was a Samnite) first fashioned the oblong shield (qureos). Cadmus the Phoenician invented stonecutting, and discovered the gold mines on the Pangaean mountain. Further, another nation, the Cappadocians, first invented the instrument called the nabla, and the Assyrians in the same way the dichord. The Carthaginians were the first that constructed a triterme; and it was built by Bosporus, an aboriginal. Medea, the daughter of Æetas, a Colchian, first invented the dyeing of hair. Besides, the Noropes (they are a Paeonian race, and are now called the Norici) worked copper, and were the first that purified iron. Amycus the king of the Bebryci was the first inventor of boxing-gloves. In music, Olympus the Mysian practised the Lydian harmony; and the people called Troglodytes invented the sambuca, a musical instrument. It is said that the crooked pipe was invented by Satyrus the Phrygian; likewise also diatonic harmony by Hyagnis, a Phrygian too; and notes by Olympus, a Phrygian; as also the Phrygian harmony, and the half-Phrygian and the half-Lydian, by Marsyas, who belonged to the same region as those mentioned above. And the Doric was invented by Thamyris the Thracian. We have heard that the Persians were the first who fashioned the chariot, and bed, and footstool; and the Sidonians the first to construct a trireme. The Sicilians, close to Italy, were the first inventors of the phorminx, which is not much inferior to the lyre. And they invented castanets. In the time of Semiramis queen of the Assyrians, they relate that linen garments were invented. And Hellanicus says that Atossa queen of the Persians was the first who composed a letter. These things are reported by Seame of Mitylene, Theophrastus of Ephesus, Cydippus of Mantinea also Antiphanes, Aristodemus, and Aristotle and besides these, Philostephanus, and also Strato the Peripatetic, in his books Concerning Inventions. I have added a few details from them, in order to confirm the inventive and practically useful genius of the barbarians, by whom the Greeks profited in their studies. And if any one objects to the barbarous language, Anacharsis says, "All the Greeks speak Scythian to me." [...]

Nobody knew how it all began, neither Homer nor Hesiod. Nor Ovid nor Vergil. But it was said that at the beginning, there was Chaos, which meant confusion & disorder, & there was Eros, which meant love. And confusion & disorder were what all those who were smitten by love [Eros] felt at the beginning & what all lovers felt when they fell out of love. Thus, it appeared that confusion & disorder [Chaos] was the flip-side of love & that Eros was the other face of chaos. And, thus, Eros & Chaos were in fact one. And the poets saw other aspects of Eros, such as Himeros[Passion or Desire], Anteros[Reciprocal or Mutual Love] & Pothos[Longing]. And they also saw other aspects of Chaos, such as Phobos[Fear] & Deimos[Terror]. And that since Eros & Chaos were one,all these aspects of the two were the aspects of love.

From the Heliconian Muses, let us now begin the song Of those who hold the great and sacred hill of Helicon, And dance on tender feet around the dark spring in a row, And round about the altar of the son of Kronos go; And when in the Permessos they have bathed their soft, young skin, Or sacred stream Olmeios or the fountain Hippocrene, They make their dancing chorus on the heights of Helicon­ -- So beautiful, beguiling, as their feet glide swiftly on.

When quarrel and strife arose among the immortals, if one of them that dwells on Olympus speaks false, Zeus sends Iris to bring the gods' great oath from far off in a golden jug, the celebrated golden water that drops from a high, sheer cliff and, far below the wide-pathed earth, flows from the holy river through dark night, a branch of Oceanus. A tenth part is her share: nine parts Oceanus winds round the earth and the broad back of the sea with his silver eddies, and falls into the brine, while that one part issues forth from the cliff, a great bane to the gods.

The Greeks were likewise different from us in the value they set upon hope: they conceived it as blind and deceitful. Hesiod in one of his poems has made a strong reference to it — a reference so strong, indeed, that no modern commentator has quite understood it; for it runs contrary to the modern mind, which has learnt from Christianity to look upon hope as a virtue. Among the Greeks, on the other hand, the portal leading to a knowledge of the future seemed only partly closed, and, in innumerable instances, it was impressed upon them as a religious obligation to inquire into the future, in those cases where we remain satisfied with hope. It thus came about that the Greeks, thanks to their oracles and seers, held hope in small esteem, and even lowered it to the level of an evil and a danger. The Jews, again, took a different view of anger from that held by us, and sanctified it: hence they have placed the sombre majesty of the wrathful man at an elevation so high that a European cannot conceive it. They moulded their wrathful and holy Jehovah after the images of their wrathful and holy prophets. Compared with them, all the Europeans who have exhibited the greatest wrath are, so to speak, only second-hand creatures.

Hekate in Byzantium (also Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey) It is probable that Hekate had an established presence in Byzantium from a time before the city was founded. Here Hekate was invoked by her title of Phosphoros by the local population for her help when Philip of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) attacked the city in 340 BCE. Petridou summarises the account given by Hsych of Miletus: "Hecate, or so we are told, assisted them by sending clouds of fire in a moonless rainy night; thus, she made it possible for them to see clearly and fight back against their enemies. By some sort of divine instigation the dogs began barking[164], thus awakening the Byzantians and putting them on a war footing."[165] There is a slightly alternative account of the attack, recorded by Eustathios. He wrote that Philip of Macedon's men had dug secret tunnels from where they were preparing a stealth attack. However, their plans were ruined when the goddess, as Phosphoros, created mysterious torchlight which illuminated the enemies. Philip and his men fled, and the locals subsequently called the place where this happened Phosphorion. Both versions attribute the successful defence of the city to the goddess as Phosphoros. In thanksgiving, a statue of Hekate, holding two torches, was erected in Byzantium soon after. The support given by the goddess in battle brings to mind a line from Hesiod’s Theogony: “And when men arm themselves for the battle that destroys men, then the goddess is at hand to give victory and grant glory readily to whom she will.” [166] A torch race was held on the Bosphorus each year, in honour of a goddess which, in light of the above story, is likely to have been Phosphoros. Unfortunately, we have no evidence to clarify who the goddess the race was dedicated to was. Other than Phosphoros, it is possible that the race was instead held in honour of the Thracian Bendis, Ephesian Artemis or Hekate. All of which were also of course conflated with one another at times. Artemis and Hekate both share the title of Phosphoros. Bendis is never explicitly named in texts, but a torch race in her honour was held in Athens after her cult was introduced there in the fifth-century BCE. Likewise, torch-races took place in honour of Artemis. There is also a theory that the name Phosphoros may have become linguistically jumbled due to a linguistic influence from Thrace becoming Bosphorus in the process[167]. The Bosphorus is the narrow, natural strait connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, separating the European side of Istanbul from the Asian side. The goddess with two torches shown on coins of the time is unnamed. She is usually identified as Artemis but could equally represent Hekate.

For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetus stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger: `Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire -- a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.

In Classical mythology, righteous wrath was the province of old women. Three very specific old women, in fact: the Furies (or the Erinyes, in Greek). Fragments of myth featuring the Furies are found in the earliest records of ancient Greek culture. These sisters were much more ancient than any of the Olympian deities, indicating the persistence of an older, female-dominated tradition which endured here and there even when later, more patriarchal, mythologies set in. The role of the Furies was to preside over complaints brought to them by humans about behavior that was thought to be intolerable: from lesser misdemeanors such as the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests — to crimes that were very much worse. It was their role to punish such crimes by relentlessly hounding their perpetrators. The Greek poet Hesiod names the three sisters as Alecto — “unceasing in anger,” the punisher of moral crimes; Megaera — “jealous one,” the punisher of infidelity, oath-breaking, and theft; and Tisiphone — “avenger of murder.” They were, he said, the daughters of Gaea (the goddess who personified the Earth), who conceived them from the blood of her spouse, Uranus, after he had been castrated by his son, Cronos. They lived in the Underworld, and like other chthonic deities, like seeds that lie buried beneath the Earth, they were also identified with its fertility. The wrath of the Furies manifested itself in a number of ways: a tormenting madness would be inflicted on the perpetrator of a patricide or matricide; murderers usually suffered a dire disease, and nations which harbored such criminals could be stricken with famine and plague. The Furies could only be placated with ritual purification, and the completion of a task specifically assigned by them for atonement. It’s important to understand that although the Furies were feared, they were also respected and perceived to be necessary: they represented justice, and were seen to be defenders of moral and legal order. The Furies were portrayed as the foul-smelling, decidedly haggish possessors of bat-like wings, with black snakes adorning their hair, arms, and waists, and blood dripping from their eyes. And they carried brass-studded scourges in their hands. In my menopausal years, I certainly had days when I could have gone with that look. I’m happy to admit that the existence of seriously not-to-be-messed-with elder women like the Furies in our oldest European mythology gives me great pleasure. And it’s difficult not to see them as the perfect menopausal role models, because sudden upwellings of (mostly righteous) anger are a feature of many women’s experience of menopause

When the victor, in a fight of the cities, according to the law of warfare, executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a law, that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded; in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous cruelty shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the "Iliad"? I am afraid, we do not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even shudder, if for once we did understand them thus. But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear better and more sympathetic — but where do we look, if, no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand, we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world? Only into night and horror, into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only by the children of the night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Hesiod's poem, still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications, which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans, then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief. Combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety; the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories. And just as in truth the idea of Greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder, so also nobler Civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder. Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of Musaeus, and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led — to the loathing of existence, to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the end, to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness. But these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic; through them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally. The Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question: what does a life of fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history.

The principle of competition is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built in the very roots of the world; there is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and real defeat. —IRVING BABBITT

Christ is, then, the perfect art work in the sense of that reality in whom is realised those goals that all artistic making has as its explicit or implicit ends. Because he is infinite meaning, life and being perfectly synthesised with finite form, the cave painters at Lascaux, or Hesiod penning his hymns, or Beethoven working on his last quartets, were all gesturing towards him though they realised it not.

Parmenides was then quite old, but his mind was still powerful and clear. The question was what is, what can be, how does anything come into being? And Parmenides gave a very strange answer: Nothing can come into being; only unchangeable being is. But all the accounts given by the poets, Homer and Hesiod and the others, tell how the gods were created; and we know from these and other writings that every city has its own gods. Parmenides says that the gods having come into being cannot be. He replaces the gods by the unchangeable being. There cannot be a beginning, a genesis, because coming into being means a movement from nothing to being and nothing is not. What is there if the gods do not exist? – Intelligible principles. One of them is Eros, which Parmenides called the first and oldest of all the gods.” I thought I understood, but I was not sure; and let me confess that I was so much in awe of him that my usual selfconfidence, what some no doubt thought my arrogance, had all but vanished and left me a stammering, tonguetied fool. And he knew it, knew it probably before I did; knew it as easily, as completely, as I knew how to breathe. “If the gods have not come into being,” he said, “how then can anything, even these intelligible principles, come into being? They must, like the world itself, be eternal. But then, you wonder, is it possible for Parmenides, for anyone, to say that one of these principles, Eros, is the first and oldest.

Hesiod,

For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them. But, notwithstanding, even these shall have some good mingled with their evils.

of the offspring of the serpentine Titans Phorkys and Keto. She and two other sisters were known as the Graiai, (literally, the Grays). Hesiod wrote: “they were born with fair faces and were gray from birth, and were gods who are immortal and men call Graiai, the gray sisters, Pemphredo robed in beauty and Enyo robed in saffron.”—Hesiod’s Theogony 270–273.

Moses and Hesiod, David and Sappho, Deborah and Tyrtaeus, Isaiah and Homer, Delphi and Jerusalem, Pythian tripod and Cherubin-sanctuary, prophets and oracles, psalms and elegy–for us, they all lie peacefully in one box, they all rest peacefully in one grave, they all have one and the same human origin, they all have one and the same significance–human, transitory and belonging to the past. All the clouds have dispersed. The tears and sighs of our fathers no longer fill our hearts but our libraries. The warmly pulsating hearts of our fathers have become our national literature, their fervent breath of life has become the dust of our bookshelves…. Do these departed spirits rejoice in the literary gratitude of our present generation? Whom do they recognize as their true heirs? Those who repeated their prayers but forgot their names, or those who forget their prayers but remember their names?

It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps. This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her , Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina , about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

Gossip is mischievous, light and easy to raise, but grievous to bear and hard to get rid of. No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.” Hesiod, Works and Days

The Titanomachy symbolizes the victory of Order over Chaos.” - Niall Livingstone[3] “the Greek word Mythos can indicate, amongst other things, a public utterance expressing the authority of its speaker.”[4] In fact, by the Classical Period, myths were principally instructive, hence Plato’s dim view of these stories being in the hands of anyone but philosophers. Myths helped crystallize beliefs and fashion a means of observing and categorizing patterns in daily life. According to Hesiod, the "Pre-World" was populated by personifications;[5] he painted the picture of the primordial geography of his worldview by dramatizing the personification of those elements he considered primal. This is a perfectly arbitrary folkloric trope, but in the case of the ancient Greeks, the antagonism was infused with strains of uncomfortable duality. Hesiod’s intention was to glorify Zeus, but in doing so, he created a melodrama that would last the ages.

The "Chasm" mentioned by Hesiod is a synonym for the ancient Greek word for Chaos, and "Earth" is the mighty mother-goddess Gaia, in whom was located the hellish Tartara (or Tartarus), where the Titans would ultimately meet their fate. Interestingly, Hesiod also places Eros, the embodiment of erotic love, at the conception of the cosmos too, thus providing the ancient Greek readers with a foundation for procreation and the lasciviousness of all deities. As a result, the act of creation begins with Chaos, Gaia (Mother Earth), and Eros (Erotic love), but these are no quaint grandparental figures or benign personifications. Chaos was capable of "giving birth" to the most macabre, inherently bleak, and "chaotic" elements of the world, without the need for a reproductive partner.

Democracy itself is characterized by freedom, which includes the right to say and do whatever one wishes: everyone can follow the way of life which pleases him most. Hence democracy is the regime which fosters the greatest variety: every way of life, every regime can be found in it. Hence, we must add, democracy is the only regime other than the best in which the philosopher can lead his peculiar way of life without being disturbed: it is for this reason that with some exaggeration one can compare democracy to Hesiod’s age of the divine race of heroes which comes closer to the golden age than any other.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon’s response speaks of Socrates’ standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

Thales signaled a major change in Greek thinking and world thinking. A new, rational way of understanding reality was born, as opposed to one tied to myth or religious ritual—as still prevailed in two much older civilizations, Egypt and Babylon. It was a major shift, and a radical one. Quite suddenly, Greeks of the sixth century BCE lost faith in the ancient legends about the origins of the world told by Homer, Hesiod, and other early poets; about how Uranus had fathered the Titans with Mother Earth and how the Titans fought and lost to Zeus and the other gods for dominance of the world. They no longer seemed believable; they even seemed deliberately misleading (one reason Plato bans poets from his Republic). Instead, the question that every Greek sage before Socrates wanted to answer was: “What is real about reality?” More specifically, what is the stuff from which everything else in the world is made?

Hekate, the third of this group, was always closest to us—although her name perhaps means “the Distant One”. It is not only her name that links her with Apollon and Artemis, who are also named Hekatos and Hekate, but also her family origin—if Hesiod is right in his account of it. She is elsewhere supposed to have been one of the Daughters of Night.{58} Hesiod, however, gives us the following genealogy:{59} the Titan couple Phoebe and Koios had two daughters: Leto, the mother of Apollon and Artemis, and Asteria, a star-goddess who bore Hekate to Persaios or Perses, the son of Eurybia. Hekate is therefore the cousin of Apollon and Artemis, and at the same time a reappearance of the great goddess Phoibe, whose name poets often give to the moon. Indeed, Hekate used to appear to us carrying her torch as the Moon-Goddess, whereas Artemis, although she, too, sometimes carries a torch, never did so. Hesiod seeks further to distinguish Hekate from Artemis by repeatedly emphasising that the former is monogenes, “an only child”. In this respect, too, Hekate resembled Persephone, the goddess of the Underworld. For the rest, she was an almighty, threefold goddess. Zeus revered her above all others,{60} and let her have her share of the earth, the sea and the starry sky; or rather, he did not deprive her of this threefold honour, which she had previously enjoyed under the earlier gods, the Titans, but let her retain what had been awarded to her at the first distribution of honours and dignities. She was therefore a true Titaness of the Titans, even though this is never expressly stated.

Other scholars would see links with Hesiod’s Theogony, the Sanskrit Rigveda, and even the Norse sagas, where the world is said to have sprung from the great abyss Ginungagap, which, like Te Pō, is without form and void.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone. And not just once, but over and over again.

Hesiod was virtually a contemporary of Ezekiel. Another of the major sources on the ancient history of the Middle East is, of course, Flavius Josephus,

So potter with potter contendeth: the hewer of wood with the hewer of wood: the beggar is jealous of the beggar, the ministrel is jealous of the ministrel.

Evil one may attain easily and in abundance: smooth is the way and it dewlleth very nigh. But in front of virtue have the dealthless gods set sweat: long is the way thereto and steep and rough at first. But when one hath reached the top, easy is it thereafter despite its hardness.

For if aught untoward happen in the township, the neighbours come ungirt, the kinsmen gird themselves.

But it forms the backdrop for Thales' idea that the world arose from the waters. This ur-ocean however to him is not one more God among others as is Hesiod's and Homer's "deeply vortexed Okeanos"; for Thales this ocean is the one and only source from which the world springs by condensation and evaporation. And all the while the total amount of this ur-matter remains the same; it cannot be created or annihilated. It carries the force that moves both the cosmos and all organisms-so pervasive and so multi-faceted that it makes up the stuff of the world and fills it to the brim. In this worldview, there is no room for nothingness