Darkthorn’s Blog

Hesiod, Works and Days 42-105

- The creation of Pandora because of Prometheus’ trickery

- Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the bones and fat, so that humans got the better deal of the meat of sacrificial animals.

- She is a temptress of aesthetic beauty, external beauty, evil interior

- Zeus’ children will destroy the earth because of their mischief and wars

- A connection between Pandora and fire, women are both constructive and destructive

- Mix of earth and water, could be considered as have the other elements, air in her head and fire in her nature

- Man always has hope to withstand the sorrows of the world

Vergil, Aeneid 6

- tripartite structure, Aeneas’ decent into the underworld, his journey through the underworld, and Aeneas meeting his father and discussing the glory of Rome’s future

- catabasis, decent of a hero into the underworld, either to retrieve someone, or to obtain information about the future

- Rome is compared to the most important goddess of the eastern cults

- Augustus will bring glory back to Rome, because he is more refined than Mark Antony, and also because it has been foretold to Aeneas by his father

- Augustus compared to Hercules, indeed, he is better. This also promotes Augustus’ promotion to emperor of Rome. Creates a relationship between Greek and Roman myth

Ovid, Metamorphoses 15

- The deification of Julius Caesar, he must be deified so Augustus can become king

- Political propaganda to improve Augustus Caesar’s chances at becoming emperor

- Caesar is descended from Venus (roman goddesses of love), Caesar therefore should be loved and protected by Venus as well as Apollo

- Divine decent was important for hero status.

- The rest of book XV also speaks about how Augustus will bring dignity and culture back to the Romans

- Caesar called himself ‘pontifex maximus’ head priest, further relating himself to the divine

- Jupiter/Zeus speaks to Venus/Aphrodite that she cannot save Caesar from death, just as he himself was unable to save his own son. He can however, prevent the body from being defamed.

- A statue of Caesar was made with a star on his forehead because it was said that when Venus had removed his soul from his body after his death, it flew from her hands and became a star

Hymn to Demeter

- she is trying to find Persephone, who has been taken by Hades to the underworld.

- offers her services to the queen, and attempts to make the baby boy immortal to make up for her loss of Persephone

- creates a famine, and sits in her temple unhappily waiting for news of her daughter

- Queen worries about her son, and so stays up to watch Demeter, and is disturbed when Demeter puts him in the fire to burn away his mortality

- eventually Zeus intervenes and sends Hermes as a messenger to Hades to retrieve Persephone

- Persephone was tricked into eating pomegranate seeds, which also represent marriage, and that forces her into being trapped in the underworld for 6 months of the year

- The number of months varies from myth to myth depending on the calendar used. In antiquity, Persephone’s return to the underworld marked the beginning of winter.

All notes copyright Monash University.