The Theogony of Hesiod

The Theogony Of Hesiod is a poem describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, composed circa 700 BC. Although it is often used as a sourcebook for Greek mythology, the Theogony is both more and less than that. 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 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.