When I took a Japanese religion course, our professor gave us a handout about the folktale of Kaguya. Or rather, folktales. It was a conglomeration of variations of the myth from different parts of Japan. The point was Japanese religion was never centralized and each locality had their own version and interpretation. Ancient Greece is similar in that aspect. Every tale was changed depending on the region and over the ages. Here's an example: The story I grew up with is a hero named Jason had a wife named Medea, and he could not have succeeded in many of his adventures without her. However he left her when the king of their city offered his daughter in marriage. Medea killed Jason's new wife, the king, and the children she had with Jason in revenge. It wasn't until later in life that I found out the filicide was actually just made up by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, who just wanted to give his drama a little extra kick like any Hollywood scriptwriter would today. Somehow this one man's opinion became the canon that led up to this day.

Now if you know anything about the Greeks, they fucking loved talking about the origins or most base notions of things. What is the theory of politics? What are aesthetics? What is the soul? For people of such mindset, these differences in the myth was driving them fucking crazy. They couldn't create any sort of chronology. This is where Hesiod came in. He was an ancient poet who basically just sat down and tried to hash all of this shit together to make on solid myth, figure out which god was related to which and how, and what happened when. The result was a work called Theogony ("Birth of the Gods"). After seeing scholars quote this dude for the fortieth time, I figured I should probably fucking read this shit.

First off, I discovered is it's short as fuck. So short in fact, the book I got combined it with his other opus, Work and Days. In it, he detailed the five ages from the beginning of the world to the present day. It started with there being an abundance of food and everyone was perfect. Finally it denigrated to his time period where children disrespect their parents, greed has no bounds, everyone is lazy, and there is no sense of modesty, only lasciviousness. As I read his numerous complaints, it seemed familiar: That's what people are saying about millennials. We're lazy, we don't work, we're slutty, we don't listen to our parents... The list goes on. And that's what people were saying about the baby boomers of the 1960s, the flappers in the 1920s, all the way back to Hesiod. I think you can chart a progression in cultural values — definitely the shit on TV wouldn't fly two generations ago — but then again, we've had ground-shattering moments in the past. People who entered the French Revolution or WWII left it to find a world completely different. The internet has completely changed the landscape and our mentality as a people — I know I personally would not be who I am today without it — but I think we've always been able to manage and there shouldn't be any reason we can't now.

Wow, I meant to write about one topic and completely changed it midway. Sorry about that; next time I'll stay on point.