Hesiod: Theogony

Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet known principally for one of his two surviving epic poems: Theogony, written sometime around 700 BCE to relate the mythology of the gods. Reproduced here are excerpts from parts 1, 2, 6, and 9. The epic tradition in Greece constructed mythologies in a systematic attempt to understand the world, laying the groundwork for tragedy, philosophy, history, and science.

Theogony is no mere repository for a ready-made mythology; it is the thing itself. Nor is it a primitive invocation of personified natural forces but rather an account of how those forces are related to each other and to human beings. Although the translation is in prose, what it translates is a poem full of words that can be proper names but can also be the names of forces at work in the natural world. That it is a poem is important because poems take advantage of features of language that can be aids to memory, attend to rhythms with which human beings are familiar through dance and seasonal cycles, and aid perception and construction of patterns in a world that often appears chaotic. Mythology is particularly concerned with such patterns, so poetry serves it well.