The Mythical Origin of Justice
Hesiod1, an eighth-century B.C.
poet from the region of Boeotia in central Greece, employed myth to reveal the divine
origin of justice. His long poem
The Theogony (“The Genealogy
of the Gods”) details the birth of the race of gods from primordial Chaos
(“void” or “vacuum”) and Earth, the mother of
Sky and numerous other children. This myth about the succession of the gods owed its
inspiration to Near Eastern myths, another example of the importance of contact with
that region for the cultural as well as economic development of Greece as it emerged
from its Dark Age. Hesiod explained that, when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth
persuaded her fiercest male offspring, Kronos, to overthrow him by violence because
“Sky first contrived to do shameful things.”2 When Kronos later began to swallow up all his own children, Kronos's wife
had their son Zeus overthrow his father3 by force in retribution for his evil deeds. These vivid stories, which had their
origins in Near Eastern myths like those of the Mesopotamian
Epic of
Creation, carried the message that existence, even for gods, entailed
struggle, sorrow, and violence. Even more significantly, however, they showed that a
concern for justice had also been a component of the divine order of the universe from
the beginning. In his poem
Works and Days, Hesiod identified Zeus as the
fount of justice in human affairs, a marked contrast to the portrayal of
Zeus4 in
Homeric poetry as mainly concerned with the fates of his favorite aristocratic warriors.
Hesiod presents justice as a divine quality that will assert itself to punish
evil-doers:
“For Zeus ordained 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.”5
