“Muses from Pieria give glory through singing, come to me, tell me of Zeus your father in song. Because of him men are known and unknown, according to great Zeus’ will. For easily he makes strong and easily he oppresses the strong, lightly he diminishes the great man, uplifts the obscure one, he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud—Zeus of the towering thunders, [0] whose house is highest. O hear and see and judge righteous Lord; as I seek to sing to Perses of truth.”
Imagine, reader, lazy Perses, coming to beg and threatening to take Hesiod, his brother, to court to take again from him his livelihood so that he can squander it, being confronted by his brother with his lyre, who insists on singing to him for 49 minutes!? It was certainly a show for the neighbors, slaves and women.
Two types of strife are here declared, good strife in terms of competition between men engaged in parallel arts, and bad strife, meaning aggression, war and law suits. The “bribe-eating” judges, named as “fools” in public were certain to side with Perses again after this outrage.
The tale of Prometheus [Forethought] giving back the fire to man that Zeus had once taken from mankind as punishment, is told, and will be retold in Theogony. This, or the common source Hesiod was working from, certainly informed Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. This feud between the Almighty Zeus and Prometheus results in Zeus punishing the forward thinking Titan and his backward thinking brother, and the human race they were acting on behalf of.
The story of Pandora, “All-gift” or “All-endowed,” is related as the cause of the successive miserable ages of man. Like the second act of creation in Genesis, Pandora is made of water and clay, like a golem. Once this beautiful woman is created by a joint effort of the gods, even educated in lying by Hermes and seduction by Aphrodite, she bears a jar full of calamity, and also Hope, though Hope is the only force that remains trapped within the jar when she restores the lid.
The calamities of Pandora trigger the fall of the first race or age of man. This seems to be the basis for Ovid’s 4 ages, though Hesiod has 5 ages, the fifth combined with the 4th by Ovid about the time of Christ, some 700 years later.
Golden Race/Age
The mortals who lived even before the rise of Zeus, when Time ruled, were made of gold, need not work, did not suffer disease and when they died it was as if they went to sleep. This seems like a memory of a fallen technological civilization. This is the race wiped out when the brother of Prometheus, known as Afterthought, opened Pandora’s jar. Hesiod assures his brother that the souls of the Golden Ones have remained on earth as “watchers over mortal men,” for Zeus.
Silver Race/Age
This second race, made by the gods, were pampered, stupid and violent and soon killed each other in their agitation. This sounds much like a decline cycle from a high civil state. The silver men were hopelessly criminal. They were also not pious and were done away with by Zeus, either by flood or fire. They were left as a lesser blessed haunting on earth, undertaker spirits.
Bronze Race/Age
Zeus made this race of ash trees [spear wood] and bestowed them with bronze weapons, before the advent of “black iron.” These were brutal warlike men who did not eat bread and eventually fell to each other’s bloody hands. This cycle sounds like the Bronze Age Collapse in half-memory, as meat-eating warriors using brazen weapons and tools, “were laid low by their own hands,” and came to inhabit “chill Hades.”
Heroic Age/Race
The god/man hybrids of the race of demi-gods or heroes were then made by Zeus and other gods and goddesses breeding with humans, who seem to have never been entirely wiped from the earth. These men too, “our predecessors on the boundless earth,” suffered too, “ugly war and fearful fighting destroyed them.” Ovid was certainly right in compressing the heroes into the final age as the fathers of the present. These men who were not killed were granted a place apart in the Atlantic on some blessed isles by Zeus. This final portion indicates a part memory of the upper class migration away from a suffering land into the unknown, with the working classes largely left behind to fend for themselves. It is mentioned here that Time, Khronos, father of Zeus, was released from his prison by his son, to preside over some indistinct, peripheral realm. Zeus had a common cult title of Time-holder.
Iron Race/Age
Hesiod outlines the advent of the Iron Age, which would not change in character for another 2,000 years and the age of gunpowder and industry. “Would that I were not among the fifth men, but dead before or born after! For now it is a race of iron.”
Hesiod gives up the metaphor of the metal races as a half memory of technological incline alongside cultural decline, as he points out that life is now hard for all, that both kinds of strife, work and war, require iron, and as he told Perses earlier, that war is not a pursuit that favors the poor man and is apt to ruin even the rich man.
Hesiod sang of the world he lived in as having been five times the suffering subject of heavenly conspiracies, and that the men of the latter ages were all prone to conspire against one another unto a general decline. This, certainly was the frame of his own life, he and his father impoverished despite hard work informed by wisdom and buttressed by faith, and his wastrel brother a mere pawn of corrupt tax farmers.
“Then away from the wide-pathed earth, veiling their faces with white robes, [1] Decency and Moral Disapproval will go join the immortals, abandoning mankind; those grim woes will remain for mortal men, and their will be no help against evil.”
To close with Perses’s probable response to this sermon, “Brother, you say we are doomed to get screwed by the bosses, and you still want me to work, and hard?”
I am really beginning to like Hesiod, the original Calvinist, ranting at his libertine brother.
Notes
-0. See Exodus for parallel images of The Almighty.
-1. When Christianity became the Roman State Religion under the pagan patron of the church, Constantine, 1,000 years later in A.D. 325, a convert was granted 20 pieces of silver [looted from pagan temples] and issued a white robe. The failure to succor humanity at the core of classical paganism would trigger the Christian reaction, which returned “Decency and Moral Disapproval” to earth in the form of a civic collective. The Church Fathers had certainly studied Hesiod.
