Hesiod's Theogony

Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by M .L. West. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. World's Classics. Oxford Paperbacks. xxv + 79 pages. Explanatory Notes. ISBN 0-19-281788-4. $4.00.

A great many people are familiar with The Iliad and The Odyssey, and some of them think that those two books are the sources of all the stories of Greek mythology. Hesiod was inspired by the Muses to write Theogony (the origin of the gods). The presentation is more systematic than anything in Homer, providing relationships among the gods and demigods in considerable detail. According to the Introduction, there are some three hundred names listed in the Theogony.

The Theogony is consistent with, and may be said to have founded, the literary tradition of revealed religion. God did not speak to Hesiod, any more than He spoke to St. Paul, Mohammed, or Joseph Smith. He was inspired by the Muses, by his own account, as he tended his sheep. So Iris speaks to Agamemnon, the angel speaks to Israel, and the archangel Gabriel speaks to Mohammed.

The unreliability of revelation comes through in this passage:

And once [the Muses] taught Hesiod fine singing, as he tended his lambs below holy Helicon. this is what the goddesses said to me first, the Olympian Muses, daughters of Zeus the aegis-bearer:

"Shepherds that camp in the wild, disgraces, merest bellies:
we know to tell many lies that sound like truth,
but we know to sing reality, when we will."

If you have not yet read Hesiod, you might well find him of interest. Theogony is interesting in one way, and Works and Days has an entirely different appeal.