Mythology: Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Hamilton begins by explaining the sources she used for this chapter (as she will do from now on). She takes this chapter mostly from the Greek poet Hesiod, but some from Aeschylus. The Greek universe begins with nothing but Chaos. Somehow this amorphous nothingness has two children, Night and Erebus (the underworld where death lives). Then, miraculously, Love is born golden-winged from the darkness and death. Love then creates Light and Day.

Earth then appears, though it is never explained how, and Earth gives birth to Heaven. Both entities are simultaneously places and vague personalities – they are alive, but also make up everything at once. Mother Earth and Father Heaven first give birth to monsters. Hamilton compares them to our modern knowledge of dinosaurs and mammoths, though the Greek monsters were vaguely human.

Three of the monsters have a hundred hands and fifty heads each, and three are Cyclopes, giants with only one huge eye. Then come the Titans. These are just as strong as the monsters, but not quite so destructive.

Father Heaven hates his monstrous children, so he imprisons them within the earth, except for the Cyclopes and the Titans. Earth asks her children to help her against cruel Heaven, and the Titan Cronus wounds him badly. From his blood come the Giants and the Furies (terrible creatures who pursue and punish sinners). After that Cronus and the Titans rule the universe for long ages.

Then comes the gods’ rebellion. Cronus had learned that one of his children would overthrow him, so he tried to avoid his fate by swallowing them as soon as they were born. When Rhea (Cronus’ sister-queen) gives birth to Zeus, however, she is able to secret him away to Crete, and she gives Cronus a stone wrapped in baby clothes to swallow instead.

When Zeus is grown, he forces Cronus to disgorge the stone along with Cronus’s five earlier children, and the stone is later set up at Delphi as a holy place. After this the sibling gods rebel against Cronus and the Titans. The war almost destroys the universe, but Zeus and the gods eventually win with the help of the hundred-handed monsters and one sympathetic Titan: Prometheus.

Zeus punishes the Titans by chaining them in Tartarus, far beneath the earth. Prometheus’ brother Atlas is forced to constantly hold up heaven and earth on his shoulders. After that Earth gives birth to a terrible monster called Typhon, but Zeus was is able to defeat it with the help of his thunderbolts. Later there is a rebellion of the Giants, but again the gods are victorious. After that Zeus and the Olympians rule undisputed.

In Greek mythology the Earth was a round disk divided by the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea (which they first called the “Unfriendly Sea,” but later the “Friendly Sea”). Around the disk flowed the great river Ocean.

Outside of Ocean’s perimeter lived mysterious peoples like the Cimmerians, who lived in a land of endless night, or the Hyperboreans in the far north, a blissful land near the dwelling of the Muses. The Ethiopians were in the far south, where they were often visited by the gods. Also on Ocean’s bank was the happy land of the blessed dead.

At this point it was time for humans to be created. There are three stories about how it came about. In one Prometheus and his brother, scatterbrained Epimetheus (“afterthought”) are assigned with making mortals. Epimetheus foolishly gives all the best gifts to animals first, but Prometheus fashions humans in the shape of the gods, and then he steals fire from the sun for their gift.

A second creation story has the gods making humans using metals. They start with gold, and these humans are almost perfect. Then the gods experiment with metals of progressively lower quality; the silver race is foolish and keep injuring themselves, the bronze race loves war and eventually destroys itself, and then comes a race of heroes. The last is the iron race, the humans that now reside on earth. They are the worst humans yet, each generation more sinful than the last, and one day Zeus will destroy them too.

Hamilton returns to the first myth, and describes how Prometheus tricks Zeus on mankind’s behalf again – he arranges it so that humans get the best part of a sacrificed animal, and the gods are left with the bones and fat. Zeus is enraged, and he avenges himself first on humans and then on Prometheus.

In both of these myths only men are created. Zeus creates the first woman – Pandora – as a punishment for men, implying that all women have a nature to do evil and act as “beautiful disasters” to men. Another story involves Pandora, but blames her curiosity instead. The gods gave her a box into which each had put some misfortune or evil, and they told her never to open it. Pandora opened the box, releasing all the troubles of the world. The only good thing the box held was Hope, which now is humanity’s only comfort in their misfortunes.

Zeus then punishes Prometheus for helping humans (even though Prometheus had earlier helped Zeus conquer the Titans). Zeus has Prometheus chained to a rock for eternity. This is a punishment, but also because Zeus learned that he, like Cronus, is fated to one day give birth to a son who would dethrone him. Only Prometheus knows the name of the son’s mother, so Zeus tries to get Prometheus to reveal the name as he is chained in agony.

Prometheus never gives away his secret, so Zeus punishes him further by sending an eagle to tear out Prometheus’ liver every day. Because of this, Prometheus stands as a symbol of rebellion against unjust power. Prometheus is later freed, either by Chiron the Centaur dying for him or by Hercules slaying his tormenting eagle and breaking his chains.

Hamilton then tells the third creation story, where humans are created out of stone. They are so wicked that Zeus decides to destroy them, and he send a great flood that covers all but the tallest mountain. Only two mortals survive, Prometheus’ son Deucalion and Pandora’s daughter Pyrrha. Prometheus saves them by warning them to stay afloat in a wooden chest.

Zeus pities these two, especially because they are faithful worshippers, and he ends the flood. Deucalion and Pyrrha find an old temple and a voice commands them to throw stones behind them. They do so, and the stones become people, the ancestors of today’s humans.