Hesiod's Theogony is not overtly concerned with the world of mortals. The place of humans in the Theogony nevertheless holds a certain fascination, perhaps more for what is not revealed—our origins, for example—than for what is. Focusing on a relatively neglected passage of the poem (Theogony 521-32), I want to trace here the way Hesiod lays out the cosmic coordinates of kleos (‘fame’ or ‘glory’) with a view to better situating the condition of mortality within the poem as a whole. Kleos, as we will see, is part of the fallout for humans of the battle of wits between Zeus and Prometheus: it is the compensation for their new, temporally inflected existence.

At the mid-point of Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus arrives to find that his wife Phaedra has hanged herself, for a reason yet unknown. As he laments over his wife's corpse, the chorus of Troezenian women offers apparently standard consolation:

Early in the Pro Milone, Cicero's defence of Titus Annius Milo on trial for the murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the orator presents a list of exemplary figures from Roman history whose deeds offer parallels for Milo's alleged crime. Though these men murdered political enemies, they were nonetheless considered justified in their actions by their Roman peers. In emphatic and memorable last place in this list is an example drawn not from Roman history but from Greek tragedy:

Apuleius’ On the God of Socrates (De Deo Socratis), a lecture on Platonic demonology and Socrates’ daimonion that dates to the second half of the second century CE, is a critical work in the assessment of Apuleius’ Platonism, but it also should play a larger role in our reconstruction of his public image than it has. This popular philosophical lecture focuses on the same theme as two Greek works from roughly the same time period: Plutarch's dialogue On the Daimonion of Socrates (περὶ τοῦ Σωϰράτους δαιμονίου) and Maximus of Tyre's Orations 8-9 (Διαλέξεις). Discussion of On the God of Socrates has centered on its relationship with these other texts, with the aim of comparing Apuleius’ argument about daimones with Plutarch's and Maximus’. The consensus view is that Plutarch's treatment of demonology has little in common with Apuleius’ (I present further evidence supporting the consensus near the end of this essay). On the other hand, many scholars assert Apuleius’ closest Greek model is Maximus of Tyre, a sophist with a Platonic orientation who wrote forty-one brief lectures on ethics and other philosophical subjects in the second century CE.