scholia - University of Otago

28 Sclwlia ns Vol. 6 (1997) 19-33 ISSN 1018-9017
counteracts this measure by stealing fire in a fennel stalk. As a pay-back for this
theft (570) Zeus sends woman-as-wife to be an affliction to mortals. These
three stages of the contest (sacrifice, theft, wife) are actually three expressions
of a single fact, the human faculty of invention.Z 6 Sacrifice is a device which
al lows mortals to secure the attention and favour of the gods; the use of the
fennel stalk as a carrying vessel gives humans easy control of fire; and, even
though in Hesiod's story the wife is a creation of the gods which only a
shortsighted Epimethean infl uence would embrace, there is no escaping the fact
that she too is a Promethean product for all the poet's protestations, marriage is
unmistakably a human institution, a very productive invention which works by
a social division of labour by gender. In spite of the triplication of symbols,
then, what disrupts the aboriginal harmony between gods and mortals remains a
singular fact, the cunning of Prometheus, and this is the sole cause of Zeus's
anger. Promethean inventiveness causes the god to become angry, and this
anger brings the evils and sufferings which mortals have as the permanent
condition of their existence. 27
Both of these stories have as their common theme the human capacity for
inventiveness, and both also identify invention as the cause of the permanent
wretchedness of the human condition: the essential link between these two facts
is the anger of god. Simply put, both myths state that god punishes man for
being too clever.Z 8 Both seem to arise from a feeling that human cleverness is
the cause of god's antipathy toward and alienation from humanity. This
26 Though Prometheus is a Titan god and not himself human, he embodies an essential
fact of the human condition. Mortals must live with both the benefits and the consequences of
his achievements. Cf. Vemant [24] 44, 53-55.
27 The god's anger is an essential fact in the story. Hesiod is hard put to reconcile the
god's anger with the supremacy of his boule. West [22) 321 ad 55 1 pragmatically observes
that 'the statement that [Zeus) was not deceived (though he acted as if he was) is manifestly
inserted to save his omniscience and prestige'. This view is preferable to attributing a
logically consistent theology to Hesiod, as does Vernant [24) 240 n. 2: ' If we should accept
that Zeus has foreseen all , we must at once add that this foresight involved ... the king of the
gods being furious'. Vernant justifies this attribution on the grounds that a comparable
subtlety occurs in Christian theology (viz., that the omniscience and ornnjpotence of God
coexist with human freedom of choice): surely the existence of a sophisticated theology in
one context does not establish that it is possible in Hesiod! Here the structuralist bias in
favour of logic shows its true colours. In the more detailed account of Op. 90-99, the causal
link between the god's anger and human suffering is more explicit: the wife whom Zeus
sends as a pay-back for the deception lets disease and evil loose upon the world by removing
the lid of her dowry-jar.
28 For the place of cunning in Greek culture, see M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant (tr. J.
Lloyd), Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Sussex 1978).