Hesiod's Theogony: From Near Eastern Creation Myths to Paradise Lost by Stephen Scully (review)

The heart of Stephen Scully's book is a masterful inquiry into the place of the Theogony in literary history, in the course of which he makes important observations about the evolution of ancient Greek ideas of the cosmos, divinity, sexuality and gender, justice, and the polis. He prefaces his historical investigations with a careful reading of the poem on its own terms, before looking backward toward its sources and then forward toward the influence it exerted on later texts. Literary analysis and literary history are carefully interwoven, as Scully's initial reading of the poem provides a road map for the historical sections of the book.

The introduction briefly addresses contemporary cosmogonic thinking, before going on to explore theogonic themes in the work of Sigmund Freud. Here, Scully highlights his interest in the conflict between anarchic sexuality and social order, which will later reappear in his detailed treatment of Hesiod's poem and in the historical sections. Chapter 1 compares first Homer to Hesiod and then the Theogony to Genesis. Chapter 2 offers a reading of the Theogony that highlights both its formal and thematic aspects. These features will turn out to have central importance for his situation of the Theogony in the earlier and later traditions. His focus on the political reverberates throughout his discussion of ancient Mesopotamian and Indo-European traditions and the later influence of the poem, while observations about Hesiod's poetics come back into play especially in his reading of Milton.

In Chapter 3, the author discusses the candidates for ancient sources—Mesopotamian, Phoenician, and Egyptian—for the myths of the Theogony. This part of the book draws heavily on the work of previous scholars (West, López-Ruiz, etc.) but is nonetheless useful for the clarity of its exposition of a complex topic in a relatively short space.

Chapters 4 through 6 detail the influence of the Theogony on later writers, first Greeks and Romans, followed by early Christians, and then (with increasingly sparse material) through later periods, before arriving at his end-point, Milton's Paradise Lost. The last section on Milton finally offers enough material to allow for an extended—and rewarding—parallel reading of the two poems.

Scully's insights about the poem, while based on previous scholarship, are well developed and relevant to his larger theme. Drawing on the work of Thalmann (1984), he shows how Hesiod's choice of words frequently activates the meanings inherent in the names and personified abstractions that people this heavily populated text. For example, lines 64–71 introduce the Muses, describing them in words that prefigure their names: thaliēs eratēn … melpontai … kleiousin … opi kalei, etc. When their actual names appear in the following lines (75–79), we have already heard them in the descriptions of their activities. Zeroing in on the ways that the poet sometimes anticipates and at other times follows the introduction of a mythic personage with related nouns and verbs that activate the meaning of the figure in question, he shows that the text is far more fully inhabited by these divine beings than a casual reading—or a reading in translation—can possibly reveal. Indeed, Scully has interesting things to say about the dilemmas posed for text editors (and even more for translators) in deciding which abstractions should be capitalized as personifications, and which are simply common nouns.

Scully's other, and ultimately more consequential, major interpretive move is to make the strong case for a political (in the root sense of the word) reading of the poem. According to this line of thought, the telos of the poem's violent generational battles of succession is the creation of a proto-polis on Olympus, a reserve of calm amidst the violence of the surrounding universe, which will serve as a model for mortals. The Zeus of Hesiod is not an orderer of the universe, but a provider...