Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth

Homer, Hesiod, and Divine Justice in Greek Myth

The Greeks’ belief in divine justice inspired them to develop the cooperative values that remade their civilization. This idea came not from scripture—Greeks had none—but from poetry that told myths about the gods and goddesses and their relationships to humans. Different myths often provided different lessons, teaching that human beings could not expect to have a clear understanding of the gods and had to make choices by themselves about how to live.

Homer’s poems reveal that the gods had plans for human existence but did not guarantee justice. Bellerophon, for example, the hero whose brave efforts won him a princess bride and a kingdom, ended up losing everything. He became, in Homer’s words, “hated by the gods and wandering the land alone, eating his heart out, a refugee fleeing from the haunts of men.” The poem gives no explanation for this tragedy.

Hesiod’s poetry from the eighth century B.C.E., by contrast, reveals how other myths describing divine support for justice contributed to the Greek feeling of community. Hesiod’s vivid stories, which originated in Near Eastern creation myths, show that deities experienced struggle, sorrow, and violence but that the divine order of the universe included a concern for justice.

Hesiod’s epic poem Theogony (whose title means “genealogy of the gods”) recounted the birth of the race of gods—including Sky and numerous others—from the intercourse of primeval Chaos and Earth. Hesiod explained that when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth persuaded her fiercest son, Kronos, to overthrow him violently because “Sky first schemed to do shameful things.” When Kronos later began to swallow his own children to avoid sharing power with them, his wife, Rhea (who was also his sister), had their son Zeus violently force his father from power.

In Works and Days, Hesiod’s poem on conditions in his own time, he identified Zeus as the source of justice in human affairs: “Zeus commanded that fishes and wild beasts and birds should eat each other, for they have no justice; but to human beings he has given justice, which is far the best.” People were responsible for administering justice, and in the eighth century B.C.E. this meant the male social elite. They controlled their family members and household servants. Hesiod insisted that a leader should demonstrate aretê by employing persuasion instead of force: “When his people in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading them with soft words.”

REVIEW QUESTION What factors proved most important in the Greek recovery from the troubles of the Dark Age?

Hesiod complained that many elite leaders in his time failed to exercise their power in this way, instead creating conflict between themselves and the peasants—free proprietors of small farms owning a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and a limited amount of goods acquired by trading the surplus of their crops. Peasants’ outrage at unjust treatment helped push the gradual movement toward a new form of social and political organization in Greece.