Hesiod: Theogony

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The poem begins with the Heliconian Muses, who “taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon.” The Muses say they know “how to speak many false things as though they were true” but that they also know how “to utter true things.” This connects Hesiod's art with what would become rhetoric and fiction (especially concerned with making things appear true) and with what would become philosophy and science (concerned not only with appearance and persuasion but also with truth as such).

The Muses give Hesiod a laurel rod (a symbol of authority) and inspire him. They tell him to sing of the gods. The Muses “celebrate in song first of all the reverend race of the gods from the beginning,” then “sing of Zeus” (who overthrew them), and then sing of men and giants. The sequence is important—from a pantheon of gods associated with the forces of nature to a second generation of gods that begins a long march from polytheism toward monotheism: Zeus is a variant of theos, the word for “god.” Mnemosyne (memory) is the mother of the Muses and Zeus the father. The Muses “sing the laws of all and the goodly ways of the immortals,” and the servant of the Muses (a singer or poet) has the power to make a person forget heaviness and sorrows. Without forgetting, there is no pattern; without pattern, the world is incomprehensible.

In Hesiod's account, the first beings emerge from an interaction of Earth, Heaven, and Night—and the Sea nurtures them. Chaos is first, followed by Earth, Tartarus (the lowest region of the world), and Eros. Chaos is derived from the word cha, which indicates separation (as in chasm). Until there is separation, there is no Earth—only Sky. Once the separation occurs, the lowest region of the world comes into being and, with it, Eros, or desire. Also from Chaos comes Erebus (darkness) and Night and from Night, united with darkness by desire, Aether (the upper air, which is the substance of light) and Day. Hesiod describes a process of differentiation beginning with an undifferentiated mass. From Earth and Heaven come the Titans and three sons with a hundred arms and fifty heads. From Night come the Cyclopes. Heaven hides all these children away “in a secret place of Earth.” As Hesiod describes this process of differentiation, he also describes a gathering of hidden potential: forces hidden within the Earth.

Earth promises her children that together they will punish Heaven if they will obey her. Cronos “the wily” promises to do the deed, announcing that he does not reverence his father. Earth hides Cronus, gives him “a jagged sickle,” and reveals the plot. Heaven “lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her.” At that moment, Cronus uses the jagged sickle to castrate him. Earth bears the Erinyes (akin to the Roman Furies—the personified anger of the dead), the Giants, and the Meliae (nymphs who were mothers of the third race of humankind) from the blood. Cronus throws Heaven's testicles into the sea, where foam gathers from which Aphrodite is born. Eros and Desire follow her from birth.

In Hesiod's hands, the story of the birth of the gods is not a simple genealogy. It is an account of three divine generations in which the third finally comes to power and one member of that third generation, Zeus, becomes the supreme ruler, an increasingly monotheistic vision. The monotheistic vision and its association with patriarchy is reflected in the story of Athena's birth from her father's head rather than her mother's womb, a pattern repeated more than once in the West to encapsulate historical developments in the process of transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.