The Theogony

De: Hesiod

Narrado por: Peter Coates

The Theogony "the genealogy or birth of the gods" is a poem by Hesiod (8th – 7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, composed c. 730–700 BC. It is written in the Epic dialect of Ancient Greek and contains 1022 lines.

Hesiod's Theogony is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the cosmos. It is the first known Greek mythical cosmogony. The initial state of the universe is chaos, a dark indefinite void considered a divine primordial condition from which everything else appeared. Theogonies are a part of Greek mythology which embodies the desire to articulate reality as a whole; this universalizing impulse was fundamental for the first later projects of speculative theorizing.

Hesiod appropriates to himself the authority usually reserved to sacred kingship. The poet declares that it is he, where we might have expected some king instead, upon whom the Muses have bestowed the two gifts of a scepter and an authoritative voice (Hesiod, Theogony 30–3), which are the visible signs of kingship. It is not that this gesture is meant to make Hesiod a king. Rather, the point is that the authority of kingship now belongs to the poetic voice, the voice that is declaiming the Theogony.

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Genealogies and marriages of the gods with slight mentions of other narratives.

The beginning starts with spending thirty minutes doing a genealogy where the gods ancestry is laid out. During the genealogy there is a short story about Uranus and how his members were cut off by his son Chronos effectively deposing him. Then more genealogy and another story about how Chronos was tricked by Gaia and taken out by his son Zeus. Then it describes the gods and mentions their stories in passing, like Prometheus was punished by Zeus and his liver was eaten by an eagle every day. This narrative ends how it began but instead of a genealogy now it's about marriages of the gods. The story's contained within are in other narratives and many times this is just mentioning something that is far better told by other narratives. As far as genealogies of the gods or marriages of the gods go this book is gold but it has a tendency to be a bit dry and the actual stories are contained in other narratives.