Ovid, Etc. Compare the Kind

¶ … Ovid, etc.

Compare the kind of hardship Zeus' inflicts on humans in Hesiod, Plato, and Ovid. How does each kind of suffering represent a central problem of human life?

The Greek gods are cruel, especially Zeus, in the nature of the hardships the gods inflict upon human beings. In Hesiod, Zeus denies humans the gift of fire. Even though he is their creator, he leaves them shivering upon the earth, until his oversight is repaired, with terrible personal consequences by the kindly Titan Prometheus and with the affliction of Pandora upon mortals. In Plato's later rendering of Zeus, Zeus condemns human beings to a life of ignorance as well, although a philosophical rather than a physical state of privation. Plato depicts humans residing in a world forever removed from the Platonic ideals of the forms in the heaven. The forms contain the true nature of things, unlike the suffering and imperfect world humans dwell upon, on earth. In Ovid, Zeus or Jove is at turns playfully capricious and cruel in his dealings with humans as he allows folly to reign. Humans are playthings of the gods, toys rather than entities worthy of physical, philosophical, or intellectual and sexual respect in the Roman poet's constructed world.

Unlike Christian suffering, all of these various poetic and philosophically envisioned perils are not meted out by Zeus because humans have done something wrong in a transgression of mortal or moral laws. (Prometheus is punished, of course, for humans, but not the humans themselves.) Rather, the treatment of humans in all of these tales affirms the superiority of the gods in determining human's various fates. As the creator of humans, Zeus does not wish humans to become too powerful or knowledgeable and act as threats to the divine beings of Olympus, thus he tries to take advantage of their ability to physically suffer -- and when he can no longer do that he turns upon their helper, Prometheus and creates an enfeebling device in the form of Pandora's box to unleash further evils upon the world. In Plato's "Republic," the cave wall's shadows illustrate the limits, even with fire, of human's ability to free themselves from their cognitive and spiritual limits while on earth. The humans of Plato are not punished with ignorance because they have done something wrong, human mental and moral suffering is caused by the limited nature of the human condition, and its removal of humans from the more expansive understanding of the gods. But Ovid's "Metamorphosis" complete disconnects morality from human fate, even more radically than in either Hesiod or Plato. In Ovid, almost every person is transformed into one thing or another, regardless of how good or bad they might be in moral terms.

But the sorts of suffering in these tales still have shadings of moral difference, even if bad actions does not cause one's bad fate, as meted out by Zeus. For instance, the cold, shivering sufferings of humans and their inability to resist the evils of Pandora's box in Hesiod's re-telling of the Pandora myth are illustrative of the limits of the transient and inferior human physical condition. Even Prometheus cannot die, but those whom he helped can and will, as decreed through Zeus' creation of Pandora, even with fire -- that is the nature of human vulnerability, human's suffering physical fate. The limits of human philosophical understanding and the suffering this causes via ignorant and misguided governance of the body politic and the delights of the body are seen in Plato's "Republic," as even with fire, humans cannot truly perceive reality, only shadows of true reality on the cave wall that is superficially illuminated by fire. And in Ovid, the lack of control humans exert over fate is at the forefront of human existence.