![]() ![]() After they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse’s Spring or Olmeius, they dance fair and lovely on the highest peak of Helicon, moving with vigorous feet. Let us begin our song with the Heliconian Muses, who hold great and holy Mount Helicon, and dance on soft feet around the deep-blue spring and the altar of Zeus. The poem leaves off with a transition into another of Hesiod’s poems, called The Catalogue of Women, which exists today only in fragments. ![]() The poem falls into discrete parts:ġ05-122: Chaos and the primordial deitiesġ23-232: The second generation of gods (the children of the primordial deities)ĩ67-1020: Goddesses who bore children to mortal men The Theogony describes the ordering of the universe, including the ascendancy of Zeus and the other Olympians, and the births of the major divinities. It combines genealogies (catalogues of who is descended from whom) and etiological myths for how the various aspects of the universe and world came to be. Hesiod’s Theogony starts with the birth of the first primordial gods out of formless chaos and recounts how the major and minor gods, demigods, heroes, and humans came to be. The earliest cosmogony and theogony from ancient Greece that still survives today is an epic poem written by the poet Hesiod, who lived in Boeotia (an area in north eastern Greece) in the 8th/7th century BCE. These stories told about the creation of the gods and the struggles and hierarchies among them. They also had theogonies (from gonos and theoi, “gods”). The ancient Greeks told myths about how the universe came to be in cosmogonies, from the ancient Greek words cosmos, “order (of things) and gonos, “procreation.” So a cosmogony is a myth about the procreation of the order (of things). ![]() Creation and Destruction 1 Hesiod’s Theogony Athena fighting the giant Enceladus, red-figure tondo, ca. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |