“Gods that faine to be”: Political Euhemerism in Spenser’sMutabilitie Cantos

Abstract

The myth of the wars waged against Zeus by the Titans and Giants has been described as 'the most quintessential epic of epics'. 1 It is treated directly in Hesiod's Theogony, and was the subject of the first poem in the Epic Cycle, of which only fragments survive. 2 Renaissance readers believed on the testimony of the so-called Orphic Argonautica that Orpheus himself-the legendary pre-Homeric singer reported to have invented epic hexameter-had composed a poem about 'the destructive acts of the Giants'. 3 As 'a myth that concerns the struggle between cosmos and chaos at the most universal level,' it forms a crucial subtext in Virgil's Aeneid, insistently parallelled with Augustus' suppression of political enemies and establishment of one-man rule. 4 So when Spenser chooses it as the theme of the Mutabilitie Cantos, however oddly disjoined this enigmatic fragment may seem from the body of his epic, there is also a sense that he is coming at last to the heart of the matter. But a curious anomaly in how he frames the conflict has received very little attention. The question is one of genealogy. In Hesiod's well-known account, Ouranos ('Heaven') is the first ruler of the cosmos, and his children with Ge ('Earth') are called the Titans. One of them, Kronos ('Saturn' to the Romans), deposes his father, and is deposed in turn by his son, Zeus (Roman 'Jupiter'). The deposed Kronos and his siblings, the other Titans, rebel against Zeus and are defeated, in the war known as the Titanomachy. Spenser presents a different family structure, as Mutabilitie complains to Jove: For, Titan (as ye all acknowledge must) Was Saturnes elder brother by birthright ; Both, sonnes of Uranus: but by vniust And guilefull meanes, through Corybantes slight, The younger thrust the elder from his right: Since which, thou Iove, iniuriously hast held The Heauens rule from Titans sonnes by might; (Mutabilitie Cantos vi.27) In referring to an older brother of Saturn named 'Titan', Spenser ascribes to a variant of the Titanomachy myth originating in Euhemerus' Sacred History, a controversial fantasy travel narrative composed around 300 BCE, which now survives only in fragments and summaries in other authors. At stake is not simply the gods' family-structure, but their presentation in the tradition stemming from Euhemerus' text as a dynasty of mortal kings, who lived and ruled in the historical past, and came to be worshipped by their subjects. Taken as a theory of the origin of Greek religion and a key to the historical basis of mythology, referred to today as 'Euhemerism', the account was influential throughout the middle ages and Renaissance, and all the texts which follow Euhemerus' genealogy 1 Alison Sharrock, Seduction and Repetition in Ovid's Ars Amatoria 2 (Oxford, 1994), 115. 2 The cyclic Titanomachy was ascribed to Eumelus of Corinth or Arctinus of Miletus, and probably composed in the late C7th or C6th; its version of the Titanomachy may be reflected in Apollodorus' account at the beginning of his Bibliotheca (I.i). See M.L. West, '"Eumelos"...