The Theogony

A family tree of the gods

The Theogony is a Greek poem credited to the early poet Hesiod. It traces the gods, generation by generation, from Chaos to the reign of Zeus. It survives complete at just over a thousand lines, in hexameter, the six-beat verse of early Greek poetry.

A theogony puts things in order. It is more than one separate story. It takes local claims about where gods or people came from and arranges them into a genealogy, a family tree, from Chaos to the poet’s own day. The order the poem sets out is meant for all Greeks, not one place.

The Muses hand a shepherd a laurel staff

The poet comes first. Hesiod says the Muses of Helicon taught him song while he looked after lambs below the mountain. Their first words are an insult before they are a gift. Shepherds, they say, are shameful bellies, and the Muses know how to make false things sound true as well as how to speak the truth (Theogony 22-28). They pick a laurel shoot for him and breathe into him a divine voice that can celebrate past and future (29-32).

Then the poet breaks off: “But why all this about oak or stone?” (35). Some modern readers hear in the line a turn away from local stories that said humankind came from oak trees, ash trees or rocks. Others take it as a proverb for leaving a side topic. Either way, the poem then begins again with the Muses and their song of the gods.

From Ouranos to Zeus

The poem’s main story is a line of sky-rulers. Ouranos is overthrown by Kronos, and Kronos by Zeus. Kronos once swallowed a stone, and the poem tells where Zeus later set it: “fast in the wide-pathed earth at goodly Pytho under the glens of Parnassus, to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men” (Theogony 497-500). Pytho is the sanctuary, or holy site, that Pausanias and other ancient writers call Delphi. The Theogony is the earliest surviving text to fix the stone to that ground.

Greek poetry was not alone in ordering the gods this way. Modern scholars have set the same line of sky-rulers beside older texts from the east: the Babylonian Enuma Elish, other Babylonian material, Hittite texts and fragments said to be by Philo of Byblos. They find the parallels close, but no one has shown how the older material reached Helicon.

Zeus against Typhoeus

After the Titans are driven out, Earth gives birth to one more challenger: “huge Earth bore her youngest child Typhoeus… by the aid of golden Aphrodite” (Theogony 820-835). He is a hundred-headed, fire-breathing creature. His voices sound in turn like a bull, a lion, a puppy, and a hiss no mortal ear could place. Zeus meets him face to face. Earth and sky and sea shake with the fight, and then Zeus hurls him into wide Tartarus.

The fight has a particular place in the poem. The Titanomachy, the war against the Titans, has already settled who rules. Some modern readers take the Typhoeus battle as confirming a reign already won, not deciding who comes next.

Where the poem stops

The poem as it has come down does not end with Zeus secure among the Olympian gods. Its final lines turn away from him entirely: “But now, sweet-voiced Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis, sing of the company of women” (Theogony 1021-1022).

Many editors read this turn as a seam that joins the Theogony to a separate poem, the Catalogue of Women. That later poem does not survive complete. Whether Hesiod wrote the lines that reach towards it is still an open question. Some editors remove the ending as later work. Others keep it, because arguments from its language favour Hesiod as its author. The Catalogue itself is argued over in the same way: some editors treat it as not by Hesiod and date it to the sixth century BC, and others find that view weak.

The date the poem does not give

The poem carries no date. Nothing in it names an event of its own time that could tie it to a year. So its date can only be worked out by comparison with other poems, above all with the epics of Homer.

Even the order of the two poets is disputed. Some modern scholars judge that it cannot be decided. Others argue from statistical study of the poets’ word choice that Homer came first. That would set the Theogony early in the Archaic period, but it still gives an order and not a year.