Divine lineages · 01

Greek Mythology

Mythic realm: Aegean & Mediterranean
Age remembered: from c. 8th century BCE
Names preserved: 16

Greek mythology gathers the stories of gods and heroes told across the Aegean world, first set down around the 8th century BCE in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod's Theogony. Hesiod traces the divine genealogy from primal Chaos through Uranus and Gaia, Cronus and his swallowed children, to the kingship of Zeus; Homer sets the Olympian gods quarreling and intervening over the battlefield of Troy.

At the center stand the twelve gods of Mount Olympus, with the Titans and primordial powers behind them, nymphs, centaurs, and a menagerie of monsters below, and demigod heroes such as Heracles, Perseus, and Theseus binding the divine family to the royal houses of Greece. The gods have vivid tempers and appetites — they envy, quarrel, and take revenge — yet even they bow to fate. Myth was woven into civic life: the oracle at Delphi, the games at Olympia, and the temples of the Athenian acropolis all fixed the stories to particular ground.

Athenian tragedy of the 5th century BCE reworked the myths into moral drama on stage, and Ovid's Metamorphoses carried them into Rome and medieval Europe. Since the Renaissance they have remained the most heavily drawn-upon store of subjects in Western painting, sculpture, and literature, and the names of the gods and heroes persist in the constellations and in scientific vocabulary, while the planets carry the same gods' names, mostly in their Roman forms.

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CHRONICLE OF ORIGINS · A LIVING SCROLL

Greek Mythology

Aegean & Mediterranean07 STAGESENTER THE MYTHIC LINEAGE ↗

The Formless Deep1 / 7

In the beginning

Chaos takes shape before all things

Hesiod opens with Chaos coming to be. The verb gives it a beginning, and the poem says nothing at all about what stood before it. The word means a gap, a chasm that opens. Out of it emerge broad-breasted Gaia, the everlasting seat of the gods, and misty Tartarus in the depths of the wide earth, and Eros, handsomest of the immortals, the limb-loosener who wrecks the judgement of gods and men alike. Chaos then bears Erebos and black Night, and the two of them produce Aether, the bright upper air, and Day.

VARIANTS, FRAGMENTS & ANCIENT SOURCES

Greek has no canonical creation story. Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BCE) is simply the earliest continuous account that survives; no institution ever certified it, and rival versions were in circulation from the start. In Iliad 14 Homer calls Ocean the origin of the gods and Tethys their mother, with no room for Chaos at all. Pherecydes of Syros (6th century BCE) opened his book with Zas, Chronos and Chthonie always existing, again with no primordial gap; his Chronos is Time, a different god from Kronos the child-swallowing Titan. The Orphics had several theogonies of their own; the cosmic egg stage below is drawn from them and is listed separately because it is the one Greek account in which the world is actually manufactured rather than merely born, but it does not continue Hesiod's line and should not be read as the next chapter of it. Note also that Hesiod's Chaos means a yawning chasm, a gap; the sense of "disordered mass" belongs to Ovid's rudis indigestaque moles and is a later development read backwards into the word.

The conspicuous absence is human origins. Hesiod never says where mortals come from: by the time Prometheus steals fire, people are simply there. The only human being Hesiod shows being manufactured is the first woman: in the Theogony Hephaestus moulds her out of earth and she is never named, and it is Works and Days that mixes the earth with water and calls her Pandora. The five races of Works and Days (gold, silver, bronze, heroes, iron) are a separate scheme about succession, not about material, and the golden race is made by the Olympians, not by Prometheus. Prometheus as the potter of mankind is late: in Plato's Protagoras the gods mould living things underground out of earth and fire and Prometheus only hands out fire and craft; the clay-modelling story appears in Pseudo-Apollodorus and in Ovid, and Pausanias in the 2nd century CE reports lumps of clay at Panopeus said to be left over from the job. This timeline therefore has no "humans" stage. The gap is real. The stones Deucalion and Pyrrha throw after the flood repopulate the earth rather than found it, so they sit under the flood stage.

A lost epic Titanomachy (ascribed in antiquity to Eumelus) also treated the war of the gods, but only scraps of it survive; the ten-year battle and the three hundred boulders below follow Hesiod.

Drawn fromHesiod, Theogony and Works and Days; Homer, Iliad; Pindar, Olympian 9; Aristophanes, Birds; Plato, Protagoras; the Orphic fragments, the Derveni papyrus, and the Rhapsodic Theogony as summarized by Damascius, De principiis; Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Pausanias, Description of Greece