Gods of the younger generation
You have ridden down the laws of the elder time
Torn them out of my hands. ---The Eumenides [808-10].

The king of the gods is consistently described as a serial rapist, violating women and goddesses alike. Zeus often used deceit, taking the form of a swan or bull, to get sex from them. He assumed the shape of Artemis to seduce the goddess Kallisto. He also raped the Trojan youth Ganymede. The Anatolian goddess Nemesis was named “Indignation,” for her outrage at a sexual attack by Zeus, which resulted in the birth of Helen. [Burkert, 18]

Even the marriage of Zeus began with a rape. He forced Hera to marry him by disguising himself as a wounded cuckoo, which she took to her breast, and then Zeus changed form and violated her. (The cuckoo was one of Hera's ancient symbols, and capped her queenly sceptre.) The shame thrown on Hera by this attack forced her to marry Zeus, according to the patriarchal playbook which declared such women damaged goods who could only be redeemed by the rapist. Hera became the goddess of marriage, which speaks volumes about the institution in ancient Greece-female consent not required. Her festivals became marriage festivals, but rather than being joyous occasions, they marked a crisis where Hera might disappear. [Burkert, 134] This goddess did not easily submit to subordinated wifehood.

In the Iliad, Zeus forces Hera into silence by threatening to scourge her with a whip, and reminding her how he had once bound her wrists and hung her high in the heavens with anvils bound to each foot, and how none of the gods were able to free her. [Iliad, 15.17] This story exactly mirrors the legal subjection of the Greek wife, whose kin had no power to restrain a husband's abuse. Hephaestos assures his mother that he and the other gods would have helped her, but they were powerless in that situation. During another dispute, Zeus told Hera to “sit down and hold your tongue as I bid you for if I once begin to lay my hands about you, though all heaven were on your side it would profit you nothing.” This forced the goddess into silence. [Iliad, 2.1.565 http://artflx.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusGreekTexts&getid=1&query=Hom.%20Il.%201.530 ]

The one outlet for Hera's frustration was to attack and torment the victims of Zeus (and this is a reworking of the original sovereign Goddess). So although Io resisted his importunings, her father sent her out to the fields to him, and she had to yield. Hera then afflicts Io with a gadfly that makes her wander the world seeking relief. Sometimes it is Athena or Artemis who becomes an avenger on behalf of masculine privilege. Apollo impregnates Coronis, but when she takes a mortal lover, Artemis punishes her with a deadly arrow. As Coronis is laid on a funeral pyre, Apollo rescues the unborn Asclepius and has him raised by Chiron. [Burkert, 214]

Other Olympian gods were rapists too. The most famous was Hades abduction of Persephone. Hephaistos went after the newborn Athena. Apollo tried to force any number of nymphs, and some mortals too. Poseidon raped his sister Demeter, taking the form of a stallion. The result was her wrathful aspect, Demeter Erinyes. [More on this soon]

We've already seen how the creator goddess Thetis was disposed of through rape by a mortal who was instigated by Zeus. That makes two stories about prophecies that a goddess would bear a son who would overthrow Zeus, who acts to destroy her (Metis) or neutralize her (Thetis). A third story appears in the play Prometheus Bound (once attributed to Aeschylus but because its challenge to Olympian orthodoxy doesn't fit this author, no longer.)

The immortal Titan nobly resists torture and threats of more torture by the Olympians. A loyal son of the Mother, he refuses to be intimidated into betraying the one who will redeem the world from the tyranny of Zeus. Hermes keeps urging him to give up: “The Father bids you tell him what is this marriage you keep talking about, that will hurl him from his throne and his power.” Prometheus scornfully refuses, saying that in the long run Zeus will fall.

The oracle Themis, the “aged Titan mother” of Promotheus, had prophesied that from the line of the fiftieth Danaid would come a warrior who will overthrow Zeus and free Promotheus. In the meantime, the Titan who brought fire to humans is prepared to endure all the torments that Zeus throws at him. “Nothing will force me to reveal whose hand Fate will use to hurl Zeus from his throne.” He gets in some shots at Hermes too, as a flunkey and addict to hierarchy: “Worship, adore and fawn upon whoever is your ruler.” The play ends with Promotheus calling, “O holy Mother! O holy Ether who sends light to the world! See how I am wronged!” [http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Prometheus.htm, accessed August 10, 2009]

The Greek heros like the gods were celebrated as rapists:

“As for Theseus, he carried off Helen, and soon thereafter carried off Ariadne also. Istrus, at any rate, when giving a list of the women associated with Theseus, in the fourteenth book of his History of Attica, says that some of them became his through love, others by rape, and still others through lawful wedlock; by rape, Helen, Ariadne, Hippolyte, and the daughters of Cercyon and Sinis; but he married lawfully Meliboea, the mother of Ajax. But Hesiod says that Theseus also married Hippe and Aegle, for whose sake he even violated his sworn promises to Ariadne, according to Cecrops. Pherecydes adds Phereboea as well. But before his adventure with Helen he had also carried off Anaxo from Troezen. After Hippolyte he married Phaedra.” [Athenaeus of Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, Book XIII] None of this stops him from being the great hero of Athens.

Male “Birth” and Male Privilege

Semele, the daughter of Kadmos, is burned up in sex with Zeus. Her child Dionysos gestated in his thigh, “a male womb,” and is born from there. Hermes takes Dionysos to the nymphs or maenads in Nysa, Anatolia, who raise him. [Burkert, 16]

Metis, Wisdom, was the mother of Athena according to Hesiod. Zeus pursued her, and she resisted, but eventually gave way to him. Gaia prophesied that the daughter of Metis would bear a son who would overthrow Zeus, and so determined to kill Metis. He convinced her to have sex once more and then when she was in the throes of orgasm, gulped her down. Because she was already pregnant with Athena, he developed a splitting headache, which became so unbearable that Hephaestos cut his skull open with an axe.

Athena leaped out fully armed. Hephaestos chased Athena, trying to rape her, and managed to spill semen on her thigh. She wiped it off and cast it on the Earth, who then gave birth to Erichthonios. Athena brought this “son” up in her temple, and he became a serpent god. [Burkert, 143]

Not having been born of woman was a key theme of Athena's career from then on, as Phyllis Chesler pointed out. (Her earlier form was quite different.) Athena declares herself as a daddy's girl in The Eumenides: "There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,/and, but for marriage, I am always for the male / with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side. / So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord / of the house, her death shall not mean most to me." [The Eumenides, 736-40]

The Eumenides

Aeschylus' play The Eumenides counterposes the Furies as avengers who punish those who shed their mother's blood. They say to Orestes, “How else did she nourish you, you filthy murderer, beneath her girdle? Do you disavow your mother's blood, the nearest and dearest to your own?” The Furies protest the new Olympian order as a bloody and unjust overthrow based on force:

"Such are the actions of the younger gods. These hold/by unconditional force, beyond all right, a throne/that runs reeking blood, / blood at the feet, blood at the head.../ [Apollo] has spoiled his secret shrine's/hearth with the stain, driven and hallowed the action on./ He made man's way cross the place of the ways of god /and blighted age-old distributions of power." [Eumenides, Lines 162-172]

It's amazing how much commentary exists in the (male) playwrights about the overthrow of an earlier feminine order. We saw it with the speech of Melanippe in Euripides, and here with Aeschylus. But ultimately the purpose is to justify the patriarchal coup and to shuttle the ancient chthonic (earthy) goddesses out of the way.

The play makes the Furies first disgusting, then comic, then cruel. Apollo orders them out of his temple and castigates them. He says that a wife murdering her husband (Clytemnestra) is worse than a son murdering his mother (Orestes). His blood guilt is undisputed, but Orestes claims to have washed it out at Apollo's shrine through a bath of pig-blood. The judges are evenly divided, and Athena breaks the tie: “There is no mother who gave birth to me, and I commend the male in all respects (except for joining in marriage) with all my heart: in the fullest sense, I am my Father's child. Therefore I shall not set a higher value on the death of a woman, when she had killed her husband, the guardian of her house.” 

The Furies lament repeatedly, “Hear me, O mother Night! The evil scheming and trickery of the gods has sundered me from my age-old privileges, and made me into nothing!” In the end, Athena forces them to accept a new dispensation that makes them protectors of her city and land, and dispensers of household welfare. They will continue to receive devotional rites on their thrones beneath the hearth, once they plunge beneath the Earth. Athena leads a torchlit procession to escort them to their underworld exile.

One version of The Eumenides:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/classics/undergraduate/coursematerials/modulebooklets0607/Eumenides%20trans.pdf