{"it":{"id":"TX033","kind":"text","sub":"Greek","name":"Hesiod, Theogony (and Works and Days)","place":"Florence","date":"c.700 BCE","oldest":"oldest papyrus fragments 1st c. CE+; medieval codices","inst":"e.g. Codex Mediceus Laur. 32.16 (Florence)","lang":"Greek","src":[231],"lat":43.775,"lon":11.255,"tags":["Europe"],"sum":"Hesiod's Theogony begins with Chaos, then Earth and Sky, and a son cutting down his father with a sickle.","why":"It is a key source for early Greek beliefs about the gods. Scholars have found a close parallel in the Hittite Kumarbi myth (TX041), though they disagree on how it travelled.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":1,"yt":"Compare with TX041.","rel":["TX041"],"hook":"In Hesiod's Theogony a son takes power with a jagged sickle. A Hittite myth tells the same story."},"S":{"231":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony"]},"rec":{"id":"TX033","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA134","a":"Titans/Olympians as visiting race.","who":"AA writers","main":"Near Eastern succession-myth parallels (Kumarbi/Hurrian).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[{"by":"H.G. Evelyn-White","yr":"1914","t":"Hesiod (Loeb)","lic":"public domain","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony"}],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Near Eastern succession-myth parallels (Kumarbi/Hurrian).","alternative_reading":"Titans/Olympians as visiting race.","alt_proponent":"AA writers","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Evelyn-White 1914 Loeb translation PD.","key_theme":"succession of gods; Prometheus steals fire; Pandora; 5 ages of man incl. 'heroes' demigods (W&D 156-173)","language":"Greek","physical_object_institution":"e.g. Codex Mediceus Laur. 32.16 (Florence)","composition_date":"c.700 BCE","oldest_ms_date":"oldest papyrus fragments 1st c. CE+; medieval codices","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0616","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony"},{"id":"VTX033-2","t":"Hesiod, Theogony, Theoi Classical Texts Library","u":"https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodTheogony.html"},{"id":null,"t":"Britannica: Hesiod","u":"https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hesiod"}],"sum":"# Hesiod's Theogony: The Greek Story of the First Gods, and Its Hittite Twin\n\nA shepherd is minding his flock on the slopes of Mount Helicon in central Greece when the goddesses appear. They are the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus, and their first words to him are an insult and a warning. \"Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies,\" they say, \"we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.\" Then they hand him a staff cut from laurel and breathe into him a divine voice, so that he can sing of \"things that shall be and things there were aforetime.\"\n\nThe shepherd is Hesiod, and the song is the Theogony, \"the birth of the gods.\" Composed around 730 to 700 BC, in 1,022 lines of epic Greek, it is one of the most important sources for how the early Greeks imagined the beginning of the world. It starts, as he tells it, at the very beginning: \"Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth.\" The English quotations here are from the translation by Hugh Evelyn-White, published in 1914.\n\n## Earth, Sky and a sickle\n\nAfter Chaos come Earth, Tartarus in the depths, and Eros, Love, \"who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind.\" Earth bears starry Heaven, Ouranos, \"equal to herself, to cover her on every side.\" With Heaven she bears the Titans, and last of them \"Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children,\" who \"hated his lusty sire.\" She also bears the one-eyed Cyclopes, who will one day give Zeus his thunderbolt, and three sons more terrible still, Cottus, Briareos and Gyes, each with a hundred arms and fifty heads.\n\nHeaven hates these children. As each is born he hides them away in a secret place inside Earth and will not let them come up into the light. Earth groans under the weight. So she makes \"the element of grey flint,\" shapes \"a great sickle,\" and asks her sons for help. Fear seizes them all, except Cronos. Earth hides him in ambush with the jagged sickle. \"And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love.\" Cronos stretches out his left hand, takes \"the great long sickle with jagged teeth\" in his right, and cuts off his father's members.\n\nNothing in the poem is wasted. From the drops of blood that fall on Earth come the Furies and the Giants \"with gleaming armour, holding long spears in their hands.\" The severed flesh falls into the sea, and from the white foam around it rises Aphrodite.\n\n## A dynasty of fear\n\nCronos now rules, and he has learned something from his father's fall. Earth and Heaven tell him \"that he was destined to be overcome by his own son.\" So as each of his children with Rhea is born, he swallows it: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. When Zeus is about to be born, Rhea flees to Crete, where Earth hides the baby in a cave and gives Cronos \"a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes\" instead. He swallows the stone. When Zeus is grown, Cronos is tricked into bringing up his children again, the stone first, and Zeus sets that stone at Delphi \"to be a sign thenceforth and a marvel to mortal men.\"\n\nThen comes the war. Zeus frees the hundred-armed brothers and, with them on his side, fights the Titans for ten years. Hesiod's battle is one of the most violent passages in Greek poetry. Zeus hurls lightning until \"the life-giving earth crashed around in burning,\" the sea seethes, and \"astounding heat seized Chaos.\" The hundred-armed giants launch \"three hundred rocks, one upon another,\" bury the Titans and chain them in Tartarus, as far below the earth as the sky is above it: \"a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth.\"\n\nThree generations, three seizures of power. Each father fears his son, and each son is right to be feared. It is a story about how power is taken, and about the paranoia of those who hold it.\n\n## The tablets from Anatolia\n\nFor a long time this looked like a purely Greek invention. Then, in the twentieth century, scholars deciphered the clay tablets of the Hittites, the Bronze Age empire of central Anatolia, from their capital at Hattusa. Among them was a text first presented in 1946, often called the Kingship in Heaven, part of what is now known as the Kumarbi Cycle.\n\nIt tells of three kings in heaven. The first, Alalu, rules for nine years until his cupbearer Anu overthrows him and drives him down to the underworld. Anu rules until his own cupbearer, Kumarbi, rises against him. Kumarbi does not use a sickle. He bites off Anu's genitals, swallows them, and becomes pregnant with the storm god Teshub, who will one day overthrow him in turn. Kumarbi then spends the rest of the cycle raising monsters to destroy his son, among them Ullikummi, a giant of stone set on the shoulders of a being who holds up the world.\n\nThe Hittite tablets are centuries older than Hesiod, and the myths themselves are Hurrian, from a people spread from Anatolia to the Zagros Mountains. Kumarbi's worship is attested from about 1700 BCE.\n\n## How did the story travel?\n\nScholars now widely accept that the two traditions are related. The castration of a sky god, and possibly the swallowing of a stone in place of a god, are thought to have reached the Greeks from the Kumarbi myths. They disagree on how. Some see borrowing from the Near East close to Hesiod's own time. Others, as the standard summary puts it, think the shared ideas are more likely \"lingering traces from the Mycenaean tradition,\" the Greek world of the Bronze Age, which was in contact with the Hittites. Gary Beckman has suggested the elements may have belonged to a wider Mediterranean culture rather than passing directly from one text to the other. The record marks the modern claim, that the Titans and Olympians remember a visiting race, as unresolved interpretation with no measurable data.\n\nWhat is not in doubt is the shape of the thing. Two peoples, far apart in time and language, told almost the same story about the first rulers of the sky: a king who will not let his children into the light, a son who mutilates him, a successor who devours what he fears, a final storm god who wins by thunder and keeps order by locking his enemies under the earth. Hesiod adds a detail of his own at the start. The Muses who taught him say plainly that they know how to tell lies that look like truth, and that they tell the truth only when they choose.\n\nIf two civilisations remembered the beginning of the world as a violent succession of sky-kings, what were they both trying to explain, and which of the Muses' two kinds of story were they telling?","qs":["A Hittite god and a Greek god both seize power by mutilating their fathers. How did this story cross cultures, and why did it stick?","Why might a culture tell its origin through a son overthrowing his father?","The Hittite texts were only read in the 20th century. What else might lost tablets change about Greek myth?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Hesiod%2C_Theogony%2C_Venice%2C_Gr._464.jpg/1280px-Hesiod%2C_Theogony%2C_Venice%2C_Gr._464.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hesiod,_Theogony,_Venice,_Gr._464.jpg","title":"Hesiod, Theogony, Venice, Gr. 464.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Hesiod","cap":"Hesiod, Theogony (lines 566-586, detailing the creation of Pandora as punishment for Prometheus stealing fire for mankind), with scholia, in ms. 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Marble, first half of the 2nd century AD, found by the Via Ostie"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Ren%C3%A9-Antoine_Houasse_-_Minerva.jpg/1280px-Ren%C3%A9-Antoine_Houasse_-_Minerva.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ren%C3%A9-Antoine_Houasse_-_Minerva.jpg","title":"René-Antoine Houasse - Minerva.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"René-Antoine Houasse","cap":"","alt":"Hesiod, Theogony (and Works and Days): René-Antoine Houasse - Minerva"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Seneca.JPG/1280px-Seneca.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Seneca.JPG","title":"Seneca.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0 it","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/it/deed.en","by":"Massimo Finizio","cap":"So-called Pseudo-Seneca. Commonly believed to represent Hesiod. Ancient Roman bronze now at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Italy. Self-made by Ma"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"c.700 BCE","h":"Date","s":[308]},{"v":"Greek","h":"Language","s":[308]}],"hs":{"308":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/TX033.webp","w":1280,"h":1954,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Hesiod%2C_Theogony%2C_Venice%2C_Gr._464.jpg/1280px-Hesiod%2C_Theogony%2C_Venice%2C_Gr._464.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}