I’ve been reading Hesiod as part of background research for a new book project I’m working on, tentatively titled Talos. In Talos, vulcanologists enter a strange artifact that floats to the surface of a lava dyke during a catastrophic eruption of Santorini. Inside is some kind of antique computing machine that operates using a strange fluid. The device is capable of manipulating people and time, in fact, and is used by the protagonists to harass one another, to explore history, and to change the future of the planet itself. And then it is gone again.
Hesiod represents some of the earliest works of the archaic period of ancient Greece. His Theogony is the early catalog of the Greek myths of Olympians and Titans. His Works and Days is perhaps the earliest discussion of Pandora, and it is not what most people know from Laura Croft and common parlance. In the Pandora myth, she is created by the “lame god” and blacksmith Hephaestus as a mechanism for avenging the release of the knowledge of fire to humankind by Prometheus. Why was fire a bad idea? Well, if humankind learned the ways of the gods they would just hang out and play video games, it seems:
The gods had hidden away the true means of livelihood for humankind, and they still keep it that way. If it were otherwise, it would be easy for you to do in just one day all the work you need to do, and have enough to last you a year, idle though you would be.
Perhaps we would have done a lot of sailing on the wine-dark seas. So people need punishing for the sympathetic crimes of Prometheus. The blacksmith then manufactures a girl, Pandora, and she is imbued with a voice and various skills, clothing, and dysfunctional personality traits by the gods. Athena gives her beautiful clothes (later, in the Iliad, it is even odder: Athena takes the new animatron into a special room that is hidden from all the other gods with a lock that was built by, again, Hephaestus for her; locks in Greece were probably Egyptian-style pin lever mechanisms). Aphrodite made her charming but also gave her “anxieties that eat away at the limbs.” Poor thing, she was like a teen addicted to Instagram. Finally, Hermes made her into a cunning planner and deceptive orator.
Pandora was not the only animatronic construction of Hephaestus, however. He also created a giant defensive robot named Talos that threw rocks at ships approaching Crete until he was exsanguinated of his essential ichor by Medea who pulled a nail from his heel.
Pandora’s fate was rather interesting, however. She marries Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus, and they have a daughter named Pyrrha who marries the son of Prometheus, Deucalion. All in the animatronic/god crossover family, it seems. Now, Prometheus catches wind that Zeus is planning a great flood and warns Deucalion. The married couple builds an ark and survives the flood after landing on Mount Parnassus. They repopulate the Earth by throwing bones over their shoulders that grow into people. A Pyrrhaic victory at best.
I also revisited the Bart Ehrman blog recently. I have to admit my limited attention span for New Testament scholarship, but it is worth checking out now and again. In this case I ran smack into a guest post by a new PhD student of Bart’s who wrote his dissertation on the varying concepts of demons among Jews and early Christians. There are some wild concepts in there, and he starts with the belief that malevolent demons were the spirits of giants who had died during the Great Flood of Noah. Of course, the New Testament was written in Greek and the term demon as we use it now is derived from the Latin version of the Greek word daimon (δαίμων) that referred to a startling range of ideas across entire eras of Greek society. They were incorporated as various spirit references into the Greek and, we assume, as part of the general incorporation of Hellenistic concepts that changed the nature of the Jewish ideas concerning life, death, afterlife, and spirits.
The linguist John McWhorter has recently been interested in debating how linguistic subcultures use code-switching to move between dialects or vernaculars. His specific focus has been on African American dialects and how they should be treated in English education. He thinks that dialects should be celebrated alongside the common vernacular in American English, but need not be seen as part of a political program of oppression per se. In ancient societies, whether oppressed under the yoke of the Hellenists, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, or Babylonians…you get the picture, the borrowing of writing systems as part of the integration with the powers-at-hand meant reusing and incorporating concepts with spare text of explanation. So “daimon” came to represent pagan deities sometimes, weird antediluvian giant spirits sometimes, and even fallen angels and related minor spirits. The term was repurposed and the semantics smeared together later when the proselytizers preached to the gentiles of the pagan world.
So the semantic fabric of our linguistic minds gets this rich collection of various dialect- and vernacular-derived associations, but also gets these historical associations. Mine began with vague concepts of malevolent spirits built around Hollywood creativity derived from Biblical ideas and pure creativity, but morphed over time into deeper differences as Greek sources and concepts mixed in. It becomes a kind of semantic code-switching as to how to apply the semantics at different edges of writing and discussion problems.
Like McWhorter, I think we are all better for it.