Chapter 5 - Playing with Traditions

Summary

This chapter revisits the arguments for and against a Near Eastern inspiration of Hesiod’s well-known Myth of the Ages (or Races), and takes this opportunity to reflect on the criteria that are available to us in assessing the plausibility of literary-historical influence. The degree of similarity between the literary comparanda will naturally remain the first and most obvious criterion, but the story or theme should not also be part of an Indo-European or other tradition, or attributable to common human experience, and further, the story or theme should be quite unique and therefore unlikely to have been fashioned independently in Greece and the Near East. Both considerations naturally oblige the scholar to cast the net more widely, beyond the two standard corpora of Greek and ancient Near Eastern literature, in order to gain an impression of how significant a given parallel is likely to be, in this case ranging from Mesoamerica to the Mahābhārata. While the strength of the Near Eastern parallels leads the author to conclude that the Myth of the Ages is indeed likely to have been inspired by Near Eastern sources, Lardinois is also careful to explain how it came to be anchored in existing and more familiar Greek tales of gods and heroes.