How the World and Mankind Were Created
With the exception of the story of Prometheus' punishment, told by Aeschylus in the fifth century, I have taken the material of this chapter chiefly from Hesiod, who lived at least three hundred years earlier He is the principal authority for the myths about the beginning of everything. Both the crudity of the story of Cronus and the naiveté of the story of Pandora are characteristic of him
First there was Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss,
Outrageous as a sea dark, wasteful, wild.
These words are Milton's, but they express with precision what the Greeks thought lay back of the very first beginning of things. Long before the gods appeared, in the dim past, uncounted ages ago, there was only the formless confusion of Chaos brooded over by unbroken darkness. At last, but how no one ever tried to explain, two children were born to this shapeless nothingness. Night was the child of Chaos and so was Erebus, which is the unfathomable depth where death dwells. In the whole universe there was nothing else; all was black, empty, silent, endless. And then a marvel of marvels came to pass. In some mysterious way, from this horror of blank boundless vacancy the best of all things came into being. A great playwright, the comic poet Aristophanes, describes its coming in words often quoted:-
Black-winged Night
Into the bosom of egg, and as the seasons rolled
Laid a wind-born egg, and as the seasons rolled
Forth sprang Love, the longed-for, shining, with wings of gold.
From darkness and from death Love was born, and with its birth, order and beauty began to banish blind confusion. Love created Light with its companion, radiant Day.
What took place next was the creation of the earth, but this, too, no one ever tried to explain. It just happened. With the coming of love and light it seemed natural that the earth also should appear. The poet Hesiod, the first Greek who tried to explain how things began, wrote,
Earth, the beautiful, rose up,
Broad-bosomed, she that is the steadfast base
Of all things. And fair Earth first bore
The starry Heaven, equal to herself,
To cover her on all sides and to be
A home forever for the blessed gods.
In all this thought about the past no distinction had as yet been made between places and persons. Earth was the, solid ground, yet vaguely a personality, too. Heaven was the blue vault on high, but it acted in some ways as a human being would. To the people who told these stories all the universe was alive with the same kind of life they knew in themselves. They were individual persons, so they personified everything which had the obvious marks of life, everything which moved and changed: earth in winter and summer; the sky with its shifting stars; the restless sea, and so on. It was only a dim personification: something vague and immense which with its motion brought about change and therefore was alive.
But when they told of the coming of love and light the early storytellers were setting the scene for the appearance of mankind, and they began to personify more precisely. They gave natural forces distinct shapes. They thought of them as the precursors of men and they defined them far more clearly as individuals than they had earth and heaven. They showed them acting in every way as human beings did; walking, for instance, and eating, as Earth and Heaven obviously did not. These two were set apart. If they were alive, it was in a way peculiar to them alone.
The first creatures who had the appearance of life were the children of Mother Earth and Father Heaven (Gaea and Ouranos). They were monsters. Just as we believe that the earth was once inhabited by strange gigantic creatures, so did the Greeks. They did not, however, think of them as huge lizards and mammoths, but as somewhat like men and yet unhuman. They had the shattering, overwhelming strength of earthquake and hurricane and volcano. [n the tales about them they do not seem really alive, but rather to belong to a world where as yet there was no life, only tremendous movements of irresistible forces lifting up the mountains and scooping out the seas" The Greeks apparently had some such feeling because in their stories, although they represent these creatures as living beings, they make them unlike any form of life known to man.
Three of them, monstrously huge and strong, had each a hundred hands and fifty heads. To three others was given the name of Cyclops (the Wheel-eyed), because each had only one enormous eye, as round and as big as a wheel, in the middle of the forehead. The Cyclopes, too, were gigantic, towering up like mighty mountain crags and devastating in their power. Last came the Titans. There were a number of these and they were in no way inferior to the others in size and strength, but they were not purely destructive. Several of them were even beneficent. One, indeed, after men had been created, saved them from destruction.
It was natural to think of these fearful creations as the children of Mother Earth, brought forth from her dark depths when the world was young. But it is extremely odd that they were also the children of Heaven. However, that was what the Greeks said, and they made Heaven out to be a very poor father. He hated the things with a hundred hands and fifty heads, even though they were his sons, and as each was born he imprisoned it in a secret place within the earth. The Cyclopes and the Titans he left at large; and Earth, enraged at the maltreatment of her other children, appealed to them to help her. Only one was bold enough, the Titan Cronus. He lay in wait for his father and wounded him terribly. The Giants, the fourth race of monsters, sprang up from his blood. From this same blood, too, the Erinyes (the Furies) were born. Their office was to pursue and punish sinners. They were called "those who walk in the darkness," and they were terrible of aspect, with writhing snakes for hair and eyes that wept te.us of blood. The other monsters were finally driven from the earth, but not the Erinyes. As long as there was sin in the world they could not be banished.
From that time on for untold ages, Cronus, he whom as we have seen the Romans called Saturn, was lord of the universe, with his sister-queen, Rhea (Ops in Latin). Finally one of their sons, the future ruler of heaven and earth, whose name in Greek is Zeus and in Latin Jupiter, rebelled against him. He had good cause to do so, for Cronus had learned that one of his children was destined someday to dethrone him and he thought to go against fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born. But when Rhea bore Zeus, her sixth child, she succeeded in having him secretly carried off to Crete, while she gave her husband a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes which he supposed was the baby and swallowed down accordingly. Later, when Zeus was grown, he forced his father with the help of his grandmother, the Earth, to disgorge it along with the five earlier children, and it was set up at Delphi where eons later a great traveler, Pausanias by name, reports that he saw it about 180 A.D.: "A stone of no great size which the priests of Delphi anoint every day with oil." There followed a terrible war between Cronus, helped by his brother Titans, against Zeus with his five brothers and sisters-a war that almost wrecked the universe.
A dreadful sound troubled the boundless sea.
The whole earth uttered a great cry.
Wide heaven, shaken, groaned.
From its foundation far Olympus reeled
Beneath the onrush of the deathless gods,
And trembling seized upon black Tartarus
The Titans were conquered, partly because Zeus released from their prison the hundred-handed monsters who fought for him with their irresistible weapons-thunder, lightning, and earthquake-and also because one of the sons of the Titan Iapetus, whose name was Prometheus and who was very wise, took sides with Zeus. Zeus punished his conquered enemies terribly. They were
Bound in bitter chains beneath the wide-waved earth,
As far below the earth as over earth
Is heaven, for even so far down lies Tartarus.
Nine days and nights would a bronze anvil fall
And on the tenth reach earth from heaven.
And then again falling nine days and nights,
Would come to Tartarus, the brazen-fenced.
Prometheus' brother Atlas suffered a still worse fate. He was condemned
To bear on his back forever
The cruel strength of the crushing world
And the vault of the sky.
Upon his shoulders the great pillar
That holds apart the earth and heaven,
A load not easy to be borne.
Bearing this burden he stands forever before the place that is wrapped in clouds and darkness, where Night. and Day draw near and greet one another. The house within never holds both Night and Day, but always one, departing, visits the earth, and the other in the house awaits the hour journeying hence, one with far-seeing light for those on earth, the other holding in her hands Sleep, the brother of Death.
Even after the Titans were conquered and crushed, Zeus ware not completely victorious. Earth gave birth to her last and most frightful offspring, a creature more terrible than any that had gone before' His name was Typhon.
A flaming monster with a hundred heads'
Who rose up against all the gods.
Death whistled-from his fearful jaws,
His eyes flashed glaring fire.
But Zeus had now got the thunder and lightning -under his own control. They had become his weapons, used by no one else. He struck Typhon down with
The bolt that never sleeps,
Thunder with breath of flame.
Into his very heart the fire burned.
His strength was turned to ashes'
And now he lies a useless thing
By Aetna whence sometimes there burst
Rivers red-hot, consuming with fierce jaws
The level fields of Sicily,
Lovely with fruits.
And that is Typhon's anger boiling up'
His fire-breathing darts
Still tater, one more at0empt was made to unseat Zeus: the Giants rebelled. But by this time the gods were very strong and they were helped, too, by migh