Glossary

The Protogenoi are the earliest generation of Greek divinity: Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, Eros, Erebus, Nyx, Aether and Hemera in Hesiod’s ordering, with Orphic and other traditions adding or reshuffling as they please.

They differ from later gods in a way that is easy to miss. They do not have personalities, and mostly they do not have stories. Zeus argues, seduces and schemes; Chaos does not do anything at all. The Protogenoi are the conditions under which a cosmos can exist, given names and genealogies so they can be talked about.

Gaia is the exception, and that is precisely why she drives the plot of the early Theogony while her contemporaries stand still.

A poem of roughly 1,000 lines, composed around 700 BCE, describing the origin of the cosmos and the genealogy of the gods from Chaos through to the establishment of Zeus’ rule.

It is not scripture and was never treated as such — competing cosmogonies circulated freely, and Hesiod’s account differs from the Orphic and Homeric material in significant ways. But it is the earliest systematic one to survive, and consequently it shapes almost everything written since.

The poem opens with Hesiod’s own account of receiving his commission from the Muses on Mount Helicon.

The war for control of the cosmos, fought between Kronos’ Titans, based on Mount Othrys, and Zeus’ Olympians. Hesiod gives it ten years and a decisive turn: on Gaia’s advice, Zeus frees the Cyclopes and Hekatoncheires from their imprisonment, and they join him — the Cyclopes forging his thunderbolt, the hundred-handed giants hurling three hundred rocks at once.

The defeated Titans were confined in Tartarus under guard. It is the second of the three succession conflicts in the Theogony, and the only one Gaia does not ultimately regret.