How Hesiod’s Theogony Shaped and Preserved The History of Greek Gods

Every name is a story and every story is a history. Through Theogony, we realize that beyond the totality of things, there are mechanisms that make a harmonious whole, and because of this, it would forever be relevant.

Greek mythology may have been around for ages but a huge part of legitimizing the story of Greek gods was Hesiod’s Theogony. This 8th-7th century poem details the genealogy of gods and is the first known mythological cosmogony in history. In a nutshell, Theogony narrates what was called the succession myth, or how Uranus was overthrown by Cronus, how Cronus was overthrown by Zeus, and how finally, Zeus became the god of gods. If not for Hesiod's Theogony, much of the knowledge that we know about Greek mythology may have been nonexistent. Hence, this poem is a living artifact that not only synthesizes the origins of Gods, but also strengthened cosmological speculation, shaped cultures, and wrote a history that would live for eternity.

Origin is very important to our existence. It is what validates us and makes us a person, and what makes something believable. To strengthen the reality of something is to establish its origin. I may so easily tell you, for example, that I am Taylor Swift's relative but how is that a reality? If I tell you on the other hand that my great grandmother resided in Pennsylvania and was from the lineage of Scott Swift (Taylor's father), then you may believe me better. This is the same as how Greek myths may not have been a very effective cosmological speculation if Hesiod had not established the order of being through the story of gods hailing from nothingness and succeeding each other. If for example today, given that Greek myths are hypothetically non-existent, and I told you the story of gods, you may so easily disregard my story. Whereas if I told you the long history of gods, then things make more sense. Every existence is backed by another existence, and everything that has happened is in relation to one another. There is a totality of being.

What Theogony tells us today is the importance of history. Even during Christmas, the first day of the nine-day novena tackles the Old Testament and the genealogy of Jesus. I remember my favorite part of these homilies was the common thing that it tells us, it is important to learn Jesus's genealogy because it is through it that we will realize how He was born from an ordinary man (from the lineage of Judah to Jacob to Joseph) for him to enter the history of man. Through it, He was one of us. Through this, He was able to sacrifice His life for our salvation. His story became the history of mankind. Similar to this, for myths to have such huge impact on religion and culture, it needed to be established well how the order of things came to be before it could tell humans their place in nature and the universe.

Another analogy for Theogony’s importance would be Chekov’s gun. It says that every part of a story, even the tiniest details shall contribute to its whole. Everything must be connected and be in placed because it has an effect to another element of the story. Theogony was important in its establishment of how gods came to be so that it could lay the foundation to many more stories that branched out of it. It is relevant today, so that in our study of mythology, we could understand the binaries, the archetypes, and the mechanisms that made mythology an important part of culture.

Every name is a story and every story is a history. Through Theogony, we realize that beyond the totality of things, there are mechanisms that make a harmonious whole, and because of this, it would forever be relevant.