Summary Of CLAS 104: Greek Mythology

Amelia-Rose Graham

CLAS 104: Greek Mythologies

March 16 2017

Hesiod on the Origins of Women

The poet Hesiod tell the story of Pandora, the first women in Greek Mythology, in both Theogony and Works and Days. In both these pieces his tone implies his dislike of women, calling them “beautiful evil” in Theogony and “a plague to men” in Works and Days. Overall, he comes across as misogynistic, blaming all the misery of men on Pandora, and the resultant female kind.

Women as the source of all evil and unhappiness is also seen in the Genesis book of the bible. The story of Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden because Eve ate the forbidden fruit, closely resembles the story of Pandora. When Pandora is gifted to men she unleased upon them “ills and hard toil and heavy sickness”, paralleling Eve being the reason they are forced to leave the Garden paradise.

The tale of the first women, is told about halfway through in a sort of side-tracked fashion. Theogony details the trick which Prometheus played on Zeus, showing Zeus’s motive to create Pandora as a punishment, in this version Prometheus was also punished by being chained to a rock and having his liver pecked out daily by an eagle. In Work and Days, the story of Pandora is near the beginning, it serves to set the context for the rest of the epic. It recounts the end of man’s golden age and the rest of the work goes on to talk about the subsequent ages and explains why men must work the land. In the Works and Days, the myth of Pandora is more significant than the story of Prometheus, which is mentioned only briefly. Theogony shows Pandora as a result of Prometheus’s activities, whereas Works and Days focuses more on woman’s influence on