Theogony

What It Is

About a thousand lines of Greek hexameter, roughly contemporary with Homer, setting out how the cosmos and its gods came to be as they are. Theogony means the birth of the gods.

It is a genealogy, a cosmology and an argument at once. Hesiod takes a mass of inherited, contradictory local myth and imposes a single system on it, generation by generation. That act of organisation is the achievement. Nobody had done it before.

He is also the first poet in Europe to tell us who he is. He names himself, says where he was standing and what happened to him there, and so invents the poet as a person with a life rather than an anonymous voice. By his own account he was a working farmer on the slopes of Mount Helicon, which makes the ambition of the poem stranger and better.

It is short. An hour, perhaps ninety minutes.

Why It Matters

Almost everything later Greek and Roman literature assumes about the gods starts here. Without the Theogony there is no ordered Olympus, no Titans, no Muses to invoke at the opening of a poem. Ovid's Metamorphoses, Milton's heaven, every neoclassical painting of a god you have walked past in a gallery: all of it rests on a settlement this poem made.

It matters for a second reason that is easy to miss. This is the first serious European attempt to explain the whole world systematically, from a beginning, by causes, in order. That impulse, rather than any particular myth, is what the pre-Socratic philosophers inherited and turned into physics. The Theogony is myth on the road to becoming science.

It is also a poem about power: how authority is won, how it is held, how it passes on. And its opening lines make a claim so strange that critics have been arguing about what to do with it for two and a half thousand years.

Before You Read

Short but dense. The names arrive in floods, and the urge to hold them all is the urge to fight the poem.

Do not try to memorise the genealogy. Let it move over you like music, and use the family tree printed in your edition when you want your bearings. One sitting works better than parcelling it out over a week.

Read it alongside Works and Days. The standard editions print them together, and Hesiod only makes full sense as the sum of both: the cosmic order in one, the human order in the other. A little Homer first helps, but is not required.

Which Translation to Read

• M. L. West (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. West was the greatest Hesiod scholar of the twentieth century and his commentaries remain the standard. This volume gives you the Theogony and Works and Days together, accurately translated, with an introduction, notes and genealogical tables that actually make the poem navigable. Nothing else combines authority and usability this well at this price. The cost: West's English is exact rather than beautiful. He is not trying to write poetry, and the notes can feel like a seminar you did not sign up for. View on Amazon →
• Glenn Most (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press). Facing Greek and English, complete with the fragments and the ancient testimonia. The right choice if you have some Greek or want everything Hesiodic under one roof. The cost: Loeb prose is functional, and it runs to two volumes.
• Stanley Lombardo (Hackett, 1993). Muscular verse that sounds superb read aloud, with a fine introduction by Robert Lamberton. The cost: Lombardo takes liberties in the service of punch. Where West is exact, he is energetic.

Take West to understand Hesiod, Lombardo to hear him, Most if you want the Greek in front of you. Apostolos Athanassakis (Johns Hopkins) is a solid fourth: literal, careful, long used in the classroom.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first, for once. West's is historical and textual rather than a walk-through, so it will orient you without pre-empting you.

Read the genealogies as poetry rather than data. The lists are doing something. Watch what Hesiod chooses to put in order and what he leaves monstrous, and ask what he thinks order is worth.

Read it in one sitting, aloud if you can bear it, then read Works and Days.

The commonest mistake is to treat this as a reference work, a mythological dictionary to be consulted rather than a poem to be read. It is a poem, it is a slightly frightening one, and it takes an hour.