“Come now, from the Muses let us begin, who with their singing delight the great mind of Zeus the father in Olympus, as they tell of what is and what shall be and what was aforetime.” So writes Hesiod in the Theogony, the earliest known epic poem on the origins of the Greek gods. Writing in the eighth century BC, through his genealogy of the gods, Hesiod provides a foundational pillar for the Greek poets who come after him, recounting which gods came first, their many consorts and liaisons, and the eventual kingship of Zeus. But his poem is more than a mere list. Through myth, he co-opts the vernacular language of the celestial and terrestrial worlds, offering a cosmological framing for understanding humanity’s place in the world along with the nature of the world itself. Winds, rivers, oceans, night, sun, moon, and more abstract concepts, such as memory, fate, and death, are divinized and reified in the persons of the gods. The world, for all its soil and substance, is charged with the grandeur and greed of the gods.
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