Critical Introduction

Most likely writing sometime in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod is known not so much for elegant poetry but for the earliest extant version of the Greek creation myth. Drawing on Near Eastern creation myths, his Theogony, or “Origin of the Gods,” covers the origins of the cosmos, of the earth and everything on it, and of the gods themselves. Ancient Greece was a polytheistic society, and Hesiod's account of three generations of gods shows them “evolving” from abstractions to monstrous hybrid beings to the anthropomorphic deities known as the Olympians. In mythological terms, the Theogony includes a number of elements very common in creation stories around the world, including:

• a cosmogony, or account of the origin of the cosmos;

• a world parentaspect, in which two entities produce much of the known world, but are then separated from each other so that the world can exist and thrive on its own (the separation of Earth and Skyis the most typical version of this motif);

• a theogony, or story of the origins of the gods;

• a genealogy, listing the various offspring produced by the mating of various entities;

• a succession myth, in which younger generations of gods overthrown their elders; and

• a chaos monster, a creature representing uncontrollable nature, which must be tamed by a civilizing force.

Hesiod is notorious for his geographically vague descriptions; it is virtually impossible to draw a map of the cosmos based on his account. He focuses instead on how the world came to be in its present form, and especially on the gods themselves, most notably how Zeus brought order to the cosmos by defeating both earlier generations of deities and the monstrous Typhoeus.

Reading Questions

The first four entities that come into being are Chaos, Gaea, Tartarus, and Eros. Why do you suppose Greek tradition saw these particular beings as necessary for everything that came after them? In what specific ways are the female entities characterized as monstrous, as opposed to the male entities? Why do you think Gaea herself produces this last, greatest monster for Zeus to fight?