Greek myth - marriage and authority

Some brief thoughts about patriarchy, authority and hierarchy, because, as much as we can focus on Zeus’ undebatable display of patriarchal attitudes when he gives Hades to Persephone without talking to either his daughter or Demeter (to get their agreement or just informing them that “this is happening”), he’s not the only one who is so cavalier about giving a daughter/someone under his authority away in marriage.

Hera does it too.

She literally uses Pasithea as bait for Hypnos to go along with her plan to put Zeus to sleep in the Iliad, and Hypnos doesn’t doubt that this is something she can/has the right to do. His issue is Zeus (again) getting pissed off at him and maybe not getting to Nyx’s protection in time. Hera isn’t even Pasithea’s mother, only her step-mother by virtue of being married to Zeus, but she is her queen (and the goddess of marriage).

On top of that, you have the whole thing with Hephaistos, the trap throne and Aphrodite - regardless of whether it’s Hera or Zeus (or both of them) who announce/come up with the idea that whoever helps free Hera gets to marry Aphrodite, there’s clear authority/hierarchy in play to let [them] do this. The Odyssey of course has the angle that Aphrodite is Zeus and Dione’s daughter, giving Zeus the right as her father to do something like this, but if you go with the common tradition and Aphrodite is the daughter of Ouranos, Zeus and/or Hera can only have authority to use her this way if you lean on the fact that they are her king and queen.

Like, it’s clearly not JUST about patriarchy, and it isn’t just Zeus who cavalierly gives women away in marriage as desired or convenient. Doesn’t make it any less potentially unfortunate for these women, obviously, I just had the thought it couldn’t be just about one thing only.

Greek myth - infidelity and the heroic age

Some thoughts about all the infidelity... Like, do you know how basically all the mortal women both Zeus and Poseidon (and Apollo and anyone else, honestly) sleep with are during a period of a handful of generations? They happen during the Heroic Age, since after the Trojan War the myths “stop” - the gods have stopped consorting so closely with mortals. Which isn’t to say both of them can’t still end up with a mortal woman here and there (you definitely have actual people having claimed to have children by gods, given Alexander the Great and I can swear I read something somewhere where a woman claimed to have a child by Apollo...), but the point is that by and large, such things stop by the end of the Heroic Age.

Not that Zeus or Poseidon would necessarily stop cheating on their wives, since there’s always nymphs and goddesses, but the implication, or even explicit idea that the gods/Zeus stopped having sex with mortal women after this time is there. Like Diodorus goes straight up and claims Alcmene was the last, which, of course she can’t have been, since at the very least both Semele and Leda come after her, but there’s the idea there.

When you stop going “hurr hurr so many women/children they could make up a small village each (reminder, Poseidon has more children by other people than his wife than Zeus does)” and think of the number that happened in such a short time [because you need it for all those culture heroes to establish cities or noble lineages of later Greeks], it becomes a little ridiculous. It’s also certainly a good lead-in to why now, why then, and only then? as a world-building idea. It starts with Niobe (daughter of Phoroneus, not the famous one), which would either be some time before Io, or shortly after, depending on how you play that, and then it stops a couple generations later.

It’s not that either of them don’t cheat before that - Zeus in particular starts when he’s still with Metis, at the tail end of or shortly after the Titan war, with Himalia - but the number of goddesses/nymphs before the Heroic age and all these mortal women is in the minority, so the outright frenzy of it is pretty stark!

If I was going to whip up some sort of meta reason for it, I'd probably make it a blend of regular, stupid lust tied up in the permissiveness of Ancient Greek culture that married men didn't need to be faithful to their wives as well as a level of fate - that there literally needs to be divine involvement in the bloodlines of humans around the Mediterranean, but especially Greece, for whatever reason. That both keeps personal responsibility on the gods (most particularly Zeus and Poseidon, since they're married) for what they're doing, but adds a supernatural imperative for some interesting flavour.