I'd love if you would in fact elaborate more on your Zeus essay! :D if you feel like it ofc
oh okay so this was for a class where we had to read some of hesiod’s theogony and then some of apollodorus’s library and in theogony like. there’s this huge description of zeus like. with his lightning bolts getting ready to fight the giants and then in library like. he was literally fighting earth? which gave me a lot of thoughts about like. western culture’s relationship with earth and global warming etc etc but like. there are so many demigods/gods who exist because zeus raped their mothers, like if you’re a woman you’re probably terrified of zeus to be honest especially because then hera gets jealous and angry too... this isn’t super coherent, so here are a couple of bits from the essay also:
Zeus grows into a god who can overpower his father. One thing interests me here is that the narrative then focuses almost entirely on Zeus’s strength and power and barely touches on Rhea’s cunning and the strength it must have taken to defy Cronus. There’s a whole paragraph describing Zeus’s powerful actions, describing how he “no longer held back his strength, but… he manifested his full force.” (Hesiod 687) Rhea, on the other hand, is not mentioned once after she steals Zeus from Cronus. After a full page describing Zeus, here a god of destruction, hurling his lightning and setting fire to Chaos itself, this same passage ends with, “An immense din of terrifying strife rose up, and the deed of supremacy was made manifest.” (Hesiod 687) An interesting note here that “supremacy” is also an extreme translation of the word κάρτευς, which is from κάρτος and means “strength” or “vigor.” Not only does Hesiod glorify Zeus’s masculine power, but the translator, who was presumably working thousands of years later, also glorifies it, which gives us a look into their values.
Finally, we come to what is to me the most interesting segment to examine in a modern context: Apollodorus writing about Zeus and the gods fighting against Earth and the titans. What interests me about this is not so much the details of the fight, but the fact that, at the very beginning of Western civilization, we have a narrative of the gods, who in this case are the heroes and the figures that readers are meant to empathize with, fighting against the Earth and other natural processes: “But Zeus forbade the Dawn and the Moon and the Sun to shine,” Apollodorus writes before going on to document Zeus’s battle against the Earth and her creations. This is innocuous enough in a vaccuum-- it’s only a mythical story, of course, and such an old one at that. But the gods are fighting their own grandmother. She is what sustains them, the reason they exist, and they want to destroy her. In the eyes of someone who has grown up in the shadow of this destruction, and taking into consideration the violence that humans have done and been doing to the Earth for years, this battle between the gods and Earth seems much more sinister. This feeling grows when you remember that many indigenous cultures in North America had a much more loving and nurturing relationship with the Earth before Western colonization and farming practices came here and destroyed their years of work.
the essay is pretty fast and loose and i have a lot more that i need to think about re: zeus and violence but that’s what i have right now
