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Creation of Mortals (Lecture 5 Slides) - Hesiod's Versions

This document summarizes Hesiod and Ovid's creation myths. Hesiod describes five ages of man - the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Heroic Age, and Iron Age - each progressively worse. He uses this to encourage righteousness and honoring the gods. Pandora was created as woman and the first evil, opening a box containing all ills. Ovid also describes declining ages but borrows less from Hesiod. In his version, giants represent chaos and humanity is reformed from their blood after being wiped out by Zeus. Both warn of humanity's decline unless turning back to justice.

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Jeonghun Lee
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74 views5 pages

Creation of Mortals (Lecture 5 Slides) - Hesiod's Versions

This document summarizes Hesiod and Ovid's creation myths. Hesiod describes five ages of man - the Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Heroic Age, and Iron Age - each progressively worse. He uses this to encourage righteousness and honoring the gods. Pandora was created as woman and the first evil, opening a box containing all ills. Ovid also describes declining ages but borrows less from Hesiod. In his version, giants represent chaos and humanity is reformed from their blood after being wiped out by Zeus. Both warn of humanity's decline unless turning back to justice.

Uploaded by

Jeonghun Lee
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Online quiz opening on Thursday! Up to end of lecture today.

Creation of Mortals (Lecture 5 Slides)


- Hesiods Versions:
- Five Ages:
-

Golden Age:
- peopled lived at leisure and with
carefree hearts since the grounds were so fertile
- Cronos is ruling (though he wasnt a
positive figure - cut off his fathers penis + swallowed his children),
but he ruled the Golden Age
- Silver Age:
- far worse than Gold, both physically
and mentally
- mortals were not
respectful of the gods
- this race was destroyed (since gods
thought that if they were disrespectful, what was the point of
having them around?)
- Bronze Age:
- mortals were violent!
- Zeus was the one who created these
mortals
- not at all like the Silver
- Hesiod emphasized that each race
was completely different from the one before
- from the Greeks perspective,
Bronze Age is neutral since being violent is not as bad as being
disrespectful to gods and others
- first generation where mortals die
and their souls go to Hades
- Heroes:
- Greek aristocrats claimed that they
were descendants of the heroes (direct connection of heroes to
present day)
- heroes were valiant in war and
more just, a godlike race
- Hesiods spoke of two groups of
heroes:
- first died in battle
- second lived eternally
under Cronos rule in the Islands of the Blessed (kind of
like the Golden Age)
- Iron Age:
- the longest generation
- this is the worst generation
- people were evil to
each other

disrespectful of the

gods
-

- injustice
this is the only age where people

had to work hard


- almost apocalyptic since he says
that eventually, all shame will leave all souls and Zeus will destroy
this age
- some Greeks portrayed this as a degeneration, but Hesiod did not
do this (since there are some good in the Heroic Age)
- whats the point?
- he emphasized people working hard (or rather, not
working hard) for their livelihood
- cautionary tale + aspiring tale want to
inspire people to live righteous lives and honour the gods (if
you are just to other people and honour your gods, you will live
well and not have to work hard)
- Pandora:
- important to Hesiod because he spoke about this in
the Theogony as well
- Pandora is the first woman created (story is very
misogynistic!)
- Background (Prometheus):
- story goes that mankind and gods
were eating together in Greece. At one of the banquets,
Prometheus laid out a banquet but gave mortals and gods
different things (gave humans good meat with bones under, gave
gods bones with good meat under), Zeus chided him and
Prometheus told him he could pick which one he wanted to eat;
Zeus, being greedy, chose the one with the meat and bones
under. Zeus was pissed off when he found out that he was tricked,
so he withheld fire from humans (Prometheus is the god of
mankind). So, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and brought it
back down to humans and faced the wrath of Zeus (Prometheus
was trapped on the side of the mountain, and Zeus bird came
every day and ripped out his liver (which generated every day)).
- To punish humans, gods created Pandora (name
means every gift or all gifts since all the gods helped in her creation
and gave her a wonderful gift (eg. Athena gave her skills of weaving and
beautiful clothes, Hephaestus gave her a crown, Aphrodite gave her
grace, charm, and desire, Hermes gave her the mind of a bitch and a
moral of a thief)). Essentially, she has all these gifts (shes beautiful, etc.)
but is awful inside.
- Prometheus (means foresight) told his brother
Epimetheus (means afterthought): Zeus is going to do something to us,
so we need to be careful. Do not accept anything from Zeus since itll be

a trap! But Epimetheus sees Pandora and was enamored with her, so he
receives Pandora. Her, being evil, opened the box of all things bad.
- Significance:
- explains the origins of evil
evil was created from females
- from Pandora is
the race of the female sex, the ruinous tribes of
women, a great affliction, who live with mortal
men, helpmates not in ruinous poverty but in
excessive wealth women are gold diggers
- [men] who avoid
marriage arrives at grim old age lacking anyone
to look after him if you choose not to wed, youll
die alone
- [but if men] does
partake in marriage, and gets a good wife, spends his life
with bad competing constantly against good
- (lecture 5, slide
26): Eva Prima Pandora on the art ties with the
biblical creation story since this can be interpreted
as Eve as the first Pandora
- contra
st from the biblical creation story though since
females creation wasnt intended to be bad, but in
Hesiods creation story, the creation of Pandora
was a punishment to mankind
- suffering from cycle of procreation: if
we do not have women, we cannot have procreation, and so the
cycle of life will cease to exist
- hope:
- Pandora opened the
box and all evil escaped but hope remained trapped inside
- is hope good or evil?
- unsure
if Hesiod meant that hope is evil (one less evil to
worry about with it remaining in the box), or if hope
is good (its a hopeless world)
- Prometheus
- role: trickster (tricked
Zeus and the gods in the banquet) and cultural god/hero
- Prometheus is the
god of humanity: defending mankind against Zeus wrath
Ovids Creation:
- very eclectic, so he chooses and picks material from different
stories and combines them

- from the Metamorphoses: a holier creature, of a loftier


mind, fit master of the rest, was lacking still the world and animals
are already created, but something is lacking (humans)
- man is divine/earthly, and nobly upright (humans
can look up to the sky while all other animals look down)
- Ovid is different from Hesiod because he did not account that
males and females are created differently
- Stages of Humanity (borrows from Hesiod, but with less detail; this
is a systematic degeneration):
- Gold: no wars; no ships (distinctively Roman since
they thought it is disrespectful of the gods to cut down trees); always
spring in the Golden Age; just and respectful to gods
- Silver: winter came and people have to build
shelters and work the ground; but people were still just and respectful to
the gods
- Bronze: violent!
- Iron: all evils straight broke out; people
mined iron made weapons unjust violence; they mined gold
gave rise to greed and were even more unjust to each other
- Ovids creation story has giants (similar to Hesiods Typhosus
(sp?)):
- symbolized chaos since these giants would try to
take over the gods
- Zeus realized what was happening and so he
defeats the giants and buries them under the mountains causing the
giants to bleed
- from the blood of the giants mixing with the mud,
humans were formed!
- but werent humans already formed?
- can be interpreted
that when the giants rose, all humans were wiped out, and
now they are being reformed from giants blood
- giants embodied humanity in the Iron Age when
everything was chaotic and evil
- because humans were so bad, the gods decided to destroy
humans
- Zeus was going to use his lightning bolts, but the
other gods said this fire could reach Olympus
- so, they used a flood instead (again - biblical ties!)
- they had two survivors (Deucalion and
Pyrrha) who were just and good, and they survived in a boat;
after the flood, they go to the temple of Themus (the goddess of
justice and order): Cast behind you your great mothers bones;
they realized their great mother is the Earth, so they threw
stones behind them, and from Deucalions stone came forth men
(hence we are hard, we children of the earth and in our lives of

toil we prove our birth) aspiring: you can do it! since you
come from the very stones from the ground.
// Quiz one! Do by Saturday!

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