Theogony

Hesiod, a farmer-poet from Ascra in Boeotia, lived about 700 BC, around the time of Homer; the Theogony ("birth of the gods") is the oldest Greek account of the origin of the world and the generations of the gods. It is a single poem of about a thousand lines, given here as one episode, with headings added to mark its parts. Much of it consists of long lists of names — the children of Night, the daughters of the sea — which are shortened here. The poem is told in the first person; the English is made from the Greek, in places following closely the public-domain prose translation by H. G. Evelyn-White (1914).

The Muses

From the Muses of Helicon let us begin our singing, who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon, and dance on their soft feet around the violet-dark spring and the altar of the mighty son of Kronos; and who, when they have washed their tender skin in the waters of Permessus or of the Horse's Spring, dance their fair and lovely dances on the summit of Helicon, and move with vigorous feet. From there they set out by night, veiled in thick mist, and walk with beautiful voices, singing of Zeus who holds the aegis, and lady Hera of Argos, and all the holy race of the immortals who live for ever.

And they once taught Hesiod beautiful song, as he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon. This is the word the goddesses first spoke to me, the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus who holds the aegis:

"Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies: we know how to speak many false things that seem like true ones; and we know, when we will, how to speak the truth."

So spoke the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus; and they plucked and gave me a staff, a branch of flourishing laurel, a marvellous thing; and they breathed into me a divine voice, so that I might celebrate the things that will be and the things that were before; and they told me to sing of the race of the blessed gods who are for ever, but always to sing of themselves first and last.

The Muses' warning that they can tell lies like the truth has been much discussed: it may be aimed at other poets — perhaps Homer.

The Muses were born in Pieria to Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory, who lay with him nine nights, as a forgetting of evils and a rest from cares: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Urania, and Calliope, who is the greatest of them all, for she attends on revered kings. Whomever the daughters of great Zeus honour and look upon at his birth, among the kings nourished by Zeus, on his tongue they pour sweet dew, and from his mouth flow gentle words; and all the people look to him as he decides disputes with straight judgements. And when a singer, the servant of the Muses, sings of the glorious deeds of men of old and of the blessed gods, a man who has sorrow fresh in his heart forgets his grief at once, and does not remember his cares; so quickly the gifts of the goddesses turn him aside.

Hail, children of Zeus, and give me lovely song; tell me how at first the gods and the earth came to be.

The First Things

First of all came Chaos — the Gap. Then broad-breasted Earth, Gaia, the ever-sure seat of all the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and murky Tartarus in the depths of the wide-wayed earth; and Eros, Love, who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods, who loosens the limbs, and overpowers the mind and the wise counsel of all gods and all men.

From Chaos came Erebus, Darkness, and black Night; and from Night came Aether, the bright upper air, and Day, whom she bore after lying in love with Darkness.

And Earth first bore, equal to herself, starry Sky, Ouranos, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure seat for the blessed gods. And she bore the long Mountains, the graceful haunts of the goddess-nymphs; and she bore also the barren Sea, Pontus, with its raging swell — all without the delight of love. But afterwards she lay with Sky, and bore deep-swirling Ocean; and Koios and Krios and Hyperion and Iapetos; Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne, gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born the youngest, Kronos of crooked counsel, the most terrible of her children; and he hated his lusty father.

These twelve children of Earth and Sky are the Titans.

She bore too the Cyclopes, overbearing in spirit — Brontes, Steropes and Arges, Thunder, Lightning and Flash — who gave Zeus the thunder and made him the thunderbolt; they were like the gods in all else, but one eye only was set in the middle of their foreheads. And three other sons were born of Earth and Sky, great and mighty, not to be named: Kottos, Briareos and Gyges, the Hundred-Handers, from whose shoulders sprang a hundred arms, not to be approached, and fifty heads on each.

The Overthrow of Sky

Of all the children born of Earth and Sky, these were the most terrible, and their father hated them from the first. As each one was born, he hid them all away in a secret place of Earth, and would not let them come up into the light; and Sky rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth groaned within, straitened; and she devised a crafty and evil plan. She made the element of grey adamant, and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons: "My children, born of a reckless father, if you will obey me, we shall punish your father's wicked outrage; for he was the first to devise shameful deeds."

All were seized with fear, and none of them spoke. But great Kronos of crooked counsel took courage, and answered: "Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I care nothing for our father of evil name; for he was the first to devise shameful deeds." Great Earth rejoiced; and she set him in an ambush, and put the jagged sickle in his hand.

And Sky came, bringing on night, and longing for love he lay over Earth, spread out on every side. Then the son from his ambush stretched out his left hand, and in his right he took the great sickle with its jagged teeth, and swiftly cut off his father's genitals, and threw them behind him.

Hesiod tells this act of violence briefly and plainly; it is the founding crime of the gods' history.

They did not fall from his hand in vain: for Earth received all the bloody drops that gushed forth, and in the course of the years she bore the strong Furies, the Erinyes, and the great Giants, and the Ash-tree Nymphs. And the genitals, when he had cut them off and cast them from the land into the surging sea, were carried over the waves a long time; and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh; and in it a maiden grew. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there she came to sea-girt Cyprus; and she came forth, an awesome and lovely goddess, and grass grew up under her slender feet. Gods and men call her Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, because she grew in the foam, aphros. Eros went with her, and fair Desire followed her, when she was born and went to join the gods. Her portion among men and gods is the whisperings of girls, and smiles, and deceits, and sweet delight, and love, and gentleness.