The Politics of Theogony

James Redfield

I begin with an often-quoted sentence from Herodotus (2.53):

Hesiod and Homer I think are 400 years older than I am, and not more—and they
were the first who made theogony for the Greeks and gave the gods their personal
names and distributed their honors and skills and indicated their forms.
This sentence echoes a sentence in the Theogony of Hesiod (73 f ), where he says
that Zeus
Set apart in good order each thing evenly for the immortals and devised their
honors.
The word these two sentences have in common is timÞ, which means “honor”,
“social status”, “value”, and in classical Greek often “public office.” Homer and
Hesiod, it seems, established the gods in a stable social order, and Hesiod, at
least, did it by singing about Zeus doing the same thing. Writing a theogony is a
Zeus-like act. It does not create a universe, but it does find, and it that sense
legislate, an order in it. Hesiod’s, like most theogonies, begins with chaos, which
is Greek means simply “gap”; it is on the same root as chask , the verb for
“yawn”. Within this vacancy Hesiod spins his web of classification, affiliation,
and personification, until he has filled the universe with immortal persons and
potencies. Only when Zeus has taken power, however, do the divine persons, or
some of them, come to constitute an stable society.
Herodotus places these poets 400 years back “at the latest”; his point is that
even at their earliest possible date they are in comparison with the gods of Egypt
parvenus. Most of us would cut this back a century and place Homer and
Hesiod somewhere in the Late Geometric, between 750 and 700 BCE. This
period is sometimes called the “Greek Renaissance”, marked by a rediscovery of
the preceding, and to them classic, civilization, the epic Mycenaeans: as an
objective correlative of the epics we find, for instance, Myceneran objects in
Late Geometric tombs and Late Geometric dedications in Mycenean ruins. It
was also a period of massive cultural reconstruction, with the development of
pan-Hellenic institutions at Olympia, Delphi, and Delos, the rapid beginnings
of western colonization, the arrival of literacy and the invention of the vowels,
the first post-Mycenean perfection of figurative art. Generally we speak of this
period as the period when the citystate was invented—if anything so complex

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32 James Redfield

and various can be said to be an invention. In any case, it seems like an

appropriate moment for someone to reinvent the universe.
Not that Hesiod’s Theogony stands in one-to-one relation to these political
developments. On the contrary, if there is any single event that marks the
emergence of the citystate it is the elimination of the kings; Hesiod’s Theogony,
however, in so far as it tells an over-all narrative is the story of how Zeus
obtained and then secured his monarchy. I would suppose that the transition to
a type of polity where authority is diffused within a political class—whose
members take turns holding offices with limited terms and with to-some-extent
defined powers and responsibilities—provoked anxious meditation on the
problem of legitimate authority, a problem to which Hesiod gives a theological
answer, grounded in the understanding that the gods are not like us
(Christopher Faraone in the present volume offers a subtler account of the
political message of the Theogony).
This, however, is not my topic in these brief remarks. Instead I fast forward
a couple of centuries to the early 6th c. By this time the city-state as originally
conceived seemed to be wearing out. The signs of wear were tyranny and
reform. Evidently new institutional forms were needed. Reformers—Solon at
Athens, Chilon at Sparta, to mention the most famous—often presented
themselves as alternative to tyranny, but the great tyrants were in their own ways
political reformers. In the major cities tyranny hardly lasted into a second
generation, and it did not recur. After it came a new kind of city-state.
Everywhere, in different ways, tyranny and reform broke the exclusive power of
the old families, those feared and trusted and invested with an authority almost
sacred. The succession belonged to a more explicit demystified order, with in
most cases written laws, prescribed modes of office, more utilitarian values. We
call this process rationalization; as we know, it goes with greater individualism
and an increasingly monetized economy.
In every civil society the old families are the vehicles of tradition; that is why
we call them “old” (since obviously every family is equally aged). Breaking with
tradition is a liberation but it leaves a gap, a new chaos, which is filled in various
ways—by imposing an intelligible pattern with an eye on utility, and sometimes
also by innovative mystification. The early 6th cent. is the period, for instance, in
which the great stephanitic games were organized into a regular calendar; it is
also the period in which the Eleusinian mysteries were established. Today I
would like to draw special attention to an aspect of the mystification, to the
proliferation in this period of alternative theogonies, specifically those of
Acousilaus, Epimenides, and Pherecydes of Syros.
Acusilaus is known for a theogony, and only for that; according to Phaedrus
in Plato’s Symposium it began with the original creation from Chaos of Earth

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 The Politics of Theogony 33

and Eros.1 Other sources say he made Eros the son of Aether and Night;
generally however he seems to have followed Hesiod, but apparently in prose;
furthermore after telling of the origins of gods and men he carried the story
down through the Argonauts, the Trojan War and the Great Flood. He thus
united mythology and legend. Once he got into Homer’s territory the
alternative stories seem to have multiplied, for instance:
Aphrodite, when there was an oracle that with the destruction of Priam’s rule the
descendants of Anchises would reign, slept with Anchises, who was already past his
prime, and bore Aeneas; with the wish to contrive an occasion for the destruction of
Priam’s house she instilled in Alexander his passion for Helen. After the abduction
she seemed to fight as an ally with the Trojans, but in truth gave counsel tending
toward their defeat, but such that they would not completely give up hope and turn
over Helen. The story is in Acousilaus.2
Acusilaus is of uncertain date; he might be as early as the 6th cent. but is often
placed later.
Epimenides seems to be something of a composite figure. He is also credited
with a theogony in which Air and Night were the origin of all; he had some
original details, for instance that the Nemean Lion fell from the moon. He is
most famous, however, for improvising a ritual in order to purify Athens in a
time of plague:
He took black and white sheep and brought them to the Areopagus. Thence he let
them go where they would, having instructed those who followed them that
wherever the sheep lay down, there they should sacrifice to the appropriate god.
And so the disease ceased. From this there can still be found scattered through
Athenian neighborhood anonymous altars, memorials of this propitiation.3
He had acquired his gifts, we are told, when as a youth tending sheep he fell
asleep in a cave and slept fifty-seven years, without aging or being aware of the
passage of time.
He established the sanctuary of the Semnoi in Athens … He is said to be the first to
have purified houses and fields and to have established [related] sanctuaries. There
are those who say he did not sleep but spent this time in solitude, collecting
medicinal roots.4
Epimenides was much more than a religious poet; he was a magic person and an
innovative ritualist.
Pherecydes also wrote a theogony; his primeval couple were Zas and
Chthonie, who (with Time) pre-existed the material universe, preexisted
existence, as it were. The world came into existence as “a great beautiful robe

1 Plato, Symposium 178b.

2 Schol. Il. 19.207 = DK [Diels-Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed.] 73 B 31.
3 Diogenes Laertius 1.110.
4 Diogenes Laertius 1.112.

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34 James Redfield

with embroidered in it the earth and Ogenos and the house of Ogenos”. Zas
presented this to Chthonie as his wedding present, and she became the earth.
Time, for his part, produced from his own seed the other three elements: air,
fire, and water. “Theopompus [4th cent.] says [Pherecydes] was the first to write
of both nature and the gods” (Diogenes Laertius 1.116). We are also told that he
introduced into Greece the doctrine of metempsychosis. Pherecydes evidently
was the most radical of my trio.
Of course the early 6th cent. was not the only time for the writing of
alternative theogonies: Alcman of Sparta in the 7th cent. evidently wrote or
alluded to one centering on Thetis as cosmogonic deity, and Ion of Chios tells
us that Pythagoras of Samos wrote poems under the name of Orpheus,
evidently late-6th cent. theogonies. Then there is the “Orphic theogony” of
uncertain date, reconstructed by Martin West. Nevertheless I am struck by this
cluster of alternative theogonies in the early 6th cent. This leads me to a
meditation on the notion of the “alternative”.
Take alternative medicine. Up to the mid-19th cent. medicine was pretty
much what any practitioner thought to make of it. Then science came along,
and soon we had certified qualifications, peer review, and all the rest of it; then
alternative medicine came into existence. From this example (and I could give
many more) I extract three principles: first, the alternative is brought into being
by the codification and institutionalization of the mainstream, and second,
while the mainstream is single, the alternative takes an indefinite number of
forms, not necessarily consistent with each other, but all alike in being marginal.
Third, the alternative is both sought for and distrusted. Order, in other words, is
both sustaining and oppressive; the more orderly, the more it inspires reaction.
It took the Second Empire to produce the Parisian bohÞme. In other words: it
takes a coherent culture to inspire a counter-culture, which is invariably
somewhat incoherent. I forget who was the Frenchman who said: there are only
two great dangers: disorder, and order.
Alternative theogonies, then, are appropriate to the early 6th cent. precisely
because it was an age of rationalization—not only of law codes and electoral
procedures, not only through the monetization of the economy, but also in the
realms of ritual and text. By this time Homer and Hesiod were established
poets, or as we would say, classical, canonical, the kind of thing the children are
taught to study and memorize in school. In these circumstances, to write an
alternative theogony is a political act, not in the sense that it has a political
message but in the sense that by inventing alternative meanings for the universe
it creates a space of spiritual freedom with unpredictable results.
A parallel and often connected counter-cultural tendency is the quest for an
alternative politics in the real world. As we know, the theorist who went the
furthest in this direction was Pythagoras. When he left old-world Greece for
Italy he gave up writing “poems under the name of Orpheus”—of these no trace

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 The Politics of Theogony 35

remains except Ion’s testimony—and created a kind of secret society, like the
Freemasons. It had secrets, slogans, doctrines, and a spiritual discipline, what the
Greeks called an askesis. Furthermore the members cultivated mutual friendship;
their name for themselves was hoi philoi, the Friends. As a group of men, mostly
of elite status, who enjoyed among themselves a special understanding, the
Friends could hardly help becoming a political force. They seems to have
informally taken over more than one city in Italy; then there were riots and
most of them left for exile in old-world Greece—leaving only, as a kind of
Nachleben of this abortive political enterprise, Archytas of Taras, who became
the friend and political ally of Plato.
The Greeks of the 5th and 4th centuries were in no doubt as to the link
between alternative religiosity and alternative politics. This must explain the
hostile ridicule to which these doctrines—for which the Greek name was
“Orphic” —were subjected, in Athens at least and probably elsewhere. Religious
innovation felt dangerous. It is not that there was any link between, say, the
doctrine of metempsychosis (Pythagoras was the pupil of Pherecydes) and
radical politics; it is only that people who shared such outr beliefs were likely
also to share an oblique view of the political order. The logic of this link
between religiosity and politics is in my view a hidden theme in a number of
Athenian events, for instance in the prosecution of Socrates.
Socrates may or may not have introduced new gods, but he certainly shared
the view of Xenophanes, who in the previous century wrote:
Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods all things
Such as are among humans disgraceful and a reproach:
Theft, adultery, cheating each other.5
This is obviously not a neutral statement of fact—as such it would be
indisputable—but a demand for an alternative set of gods. This marked Socrates
as a member of the avant-garde, glamorous and untrustworthy. He was therefore
linked with the avant-garde poet Euripides—there were rumors that Socrates
wrote Euripides’ plays. Euripides was charged with Orphic tendencies, and was
vaguely disreputable. He had no trouble getting a hearing—in fact he was
exceptionally popular—but he won very few first prizes.
A theogony is a kind of manifesto; within the economy of ancient religion it
has something of the standing of an ideology. Aristophanes understood the
phenomenon well enough to parody it. When Aristophanes’ birds (guided by an
Athenian drop out) are in the process of taking over the universe they pause to
sing their own theogony. Naturally it’s aversion of the one with an egg in it:
Chaos was first and Night, and black Erebus and broad Tartarus
But no air or earth or heaven. In the infinite bosom of Erebus

5 DK 11 B 11.

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36 James Redfield

Black-winged Night first of all laid the unfertilized egg

From which as the seasons came round hatched Eros the desirable
His back shining with golden feathers, like to windswept whirlpools.
He coupling with benighted Chaos down in broad Tartarus
Hatched our race and brought it out to the light.
There was no race of immortals before, until Eros mixed up everything:
As different things mixed together with others the heavens and sea came to be
And the earth and the imperishable race of all the blessed gods. So we are
Much the eldest of all the blessed ones.6
Thus the birds legitimate their parodic counter-colonial enterprise.
Aristophanes was a close if satirical student of alternative tendencies, of
Socrates, Euripides, and also of women—who were in the polis a standing
reserve army of political alterity. In the ‘Birds’ the alternative becomes another
order of creatures literally inhabiting another element, so of course they produce
an alternative creation myth.
Aristophanes thus signals, in the modality of his art, his understanding of
the politics of theogony.

6 Aristophanes, Birds 693 – 703.

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