[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 90–97]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Some Principles at Work in Hesiod’s Theogony 

 

DAVID R. SWEET  
University of Dallas 

 

This essay was originally given as a talk at the annual conference of the Association of Core 

Texts and Courses (ACTC) in April of 2010. Under those circumstances I made some prefatory 

remarks recommending the use of Hesiod’s Theogony as a possible core text to prepare the way 

for courses not only in Greek poetry, in epic poetry especially to be sure, but also in Greek 

philosophy, and for that matter also in the Bible. In the university where I teach, all our freshmen 

start the fall semester by reading the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. They also take a course 

either in the Republic and the Ethics, or in the Bible, or in both. For all of these courses one 

might ask, “Where better to begin than with creation, the coming into being of the cosmos?” 

Here is how I argued the case for beginning with Hesiod on the occasion of the ACTC 

conference. 

In attempting to understand the creation of the universe, as scientists we have the account that 

we call the Big Bang, but another recourse we have to the understanding of this event is the 

imagination, wherewith we can envision the coming into being and growth of the cosmos. The 

imagination might shrink before this task, but an exemplary man of imagination did some of our 

work for us 2,700 years ago: Hesiod. This is a talk about how Hesiod understood the coming into 

being of such entities as Earth, Sky, and Sea, and their role in a naturally generated, as opposed 

to an artistically constructed, cosmos. The difference is that between poiesis and genesis. Poiesis 

is of course exemplified for us by the Hebrew account – though paradoxically we know it by the 

name of the Book of Genesis, but Hesiod’s account more properly deserves the title, for it is 

governed by various principles that are deeply genetic. The focus of this talk will be a 

consideration of some of these principles. 

Let me begin by referring to the accompanying illustration (see Fig. 1), which diagrams the 

generations of the gods as described in the Theogony. Starting at the top of this chart with Chaos 

and Gaia, the first principle one might discern is that which leads from what could be called 

“nothing” to “something” to “everything.” But perhaps one shouldn’t call the origin “nothing.” 

Prior to the coming into being of Chaos and Gaia there “was” some original, apparently static 

condition. In later terms, instead of thinking of it as nothing, we might call it a condition of pure 

potentiality, even a state of pure being, a state however, whatever it was, that could not be known 

until its constituent elements emerged into a state of becoming,
1
 until they became actualized. 

There is then some initial coincidence between the knowable and the actual, while the potential 

remains wholly conjectural. But once actualized, Chaos and Gaia have an enormous amount of 

potentiality still in them – all things in fact are therein, and the subsequent process of generation 

is an actualization of the entities that are potential within each    



91  Sweet 

 

Figure 1 

“generation.” In modern terms the Big Bang is an event wherein the conjectural one becomes the 

evident many. That is to say, the present material cosmos with all its atomic and sub-atomic 

multiplicity has come from an original and undifferentiated something whose “being,” whose 

“nature,” we cannot know until it expresses itself as the constituent elements that resided within 



Some Principles at Work in Hesiod’s Theogony  92 

 

it in potentia, and this attempt to know we call natural science or physics, but whether the 

account we examine is that of science or of myth, in both cases, cosmogony and theogony are 

equally an emergence into a condition of perishability, which is knowable, of a presumed 

original condition of imperishability, which is unknowable. So, this is a paradox – that the 

whole, the one, must give up its virtue, its simplicity, its unchangeability, in order to be known. 

In order to be known it must have parts; it must become complex and variable. So, tangentially, 

the question might be, Why would the One wish to be known, especially if its being known has 

to be at the expense of the perfection of its unity. Why would the permanent, the divine, wish to 

reveal itself in the impermanent, the mortal? So there we have what we might call the cosmo-

theological problem. Why would the unknown wish to make itself known, at the cost, as it were, 

of its own eventual death? In Christian terms the question might be phrased as, “why did God 

become Christ?” In Hesiod’s terms, the answer seems to be that being has a yearning for 

becoming. Eros [Ἔis the cause of this yearning.
2
 The yearning is that of pure potency for 

complete actualization, such that the end of the process is the fully articulated cosmos down to 

all the ultimate particulars, which, as Hesiod describes them, are in a way us. The poem ends 

apparently with a catalogue of children born of mortal men and immortal goddesses, but scholars 

debate just where that end occurs, because in the manuscripts there is an immediate continuation 

with a catalogue of the tribe born of mortal women (at line 1021). There is no end in other 

words. The poem is still being written as, generation after generation, we replace ourselves with 

our own progeny. So that is one principle, from the One to the infinitude of ultimate particulars. 

Another principle also emerges right at the start of the Theogony when the separation is made 

between Chaos and Earth. These two entities generate separate lines of progeny, the members of 

which never intermarry. Their separation from each other is represented on the diagram by the 

left-hand set of vertical dashes. The contrast between them has been called that between Unform 

and Form.
3
 On the one hand, Chaos, which is without substance and without form, produces 

entities that exist but are intangible and invisible: Ἐό[Darkness] and ύ [Night], and they 

in turn produce Brilliance [ἰή] and Day [Ἡέ], that is to say, something like spaces in 

which creatures with substance can be seen and grasped. And Night then without Eros produces 

states which can exist within substantial living beings but which have no separate identity or 

existence apart from what they can achieve by coming to be in other living things. Then follow 

the children of Eris [Ἔ], Conflict, conditions of pain that again exist only in other creatures, 

especially human beings, concluding with Horkos [Ὅ], Oath, the bulwark past which 

nothing can proceed and which represents the symbolic end of this line of progeny. There is an 

etymological connection between Ὅ = Oath, and Ἕ = Barrier; in this case Horkos is 

the barrier through which no further descendants of Chaos are allowed to pass.
4
  

Form, on the other hand, in its initial emergence out of pure potentiality, is present within 

Earth, but she herself is the principal of substance – the stuff out of which everything else that is 

substantial comes to be. She contains within herself, however, principles of form, Ouranos 

[ὐᾶό], Sky; Ourea [ὔ], Mountains; and Pontos [ό], Sea. Along with Earth, all 

these together may be considered the first order of deities, the order of elemental gods that 



93  Sweet 

 

become the elements of classical materialism, but here in Hesiod they are still animate. Among 

these three principles of form, which are derivative from Earth, the Mountains are non-

generative. They seem to be a manifestation of Earth herself as the horizon that separates Sky 

from Sea. Sky and Sea in turn, in union with Earth, generate beings that have both substance and 

form. From Earth and Sky are born the Titans (see Figure 2), the second order of deities, i.e., 

intelligible entities that have the power to generate but are more like attributes of fully developed 

creatures than creatures themselves. From their names, with the exception of Okeanos 

[Ὠᾶό], Ocean, we understand them to be abstract powers rather than creatures with 

identifiable shapes that can be represented in art as having “bodies.”
5
 And from these “powers” 

or “attributes” the third generation is born. But when the third generation is born, it becomes 

apparent that there are two kinds of form, represented by Ouranos and Pontos, and a third 

principle emerges, a paradoxical one, that there is a distinction 

 
Figure 2 

between well-articulated form and “amorphous” form, having to do symbolically perhaps with 

the difference between sky and sea and the quality of visibility within them – that is to say, how 

things appear in each medium, whether they are clear or confusing in outline, and finally whether 

they are shapely or monstrous, beautiful or ugly. 

The difference may be called that between the Ouranids and the Pontids. The separation 

between them is indicated by the right-hand set of vertical dashes on Figure 1. The culmination 



Some Principles at Work in Hesiod’s Theogony  94 

 

of Ouranian visibility is the Olympian pantheon, the gods whose beauty and clarity are perhaps 

the cause of their being worshipped, who embody the complete coincidence of form and 

substance in such distinctive ways that each is a peculiar entity, an individual divine power with 

special epithets, and these epithets enable us to know each of them as a person. Yet, strangely, 

the names of most of the Olympians themselves are not perspicuous, as opposed to the names of 

the two generations of gods that preceded them.
6
 In the Olympians a name is just that, a marker 

of their individualized being. Another principle of genealogy is therefore that of definition, 

according to which there is a progression from the initial order of substances, or elements, whose 

names are what they are, Earth, Sky, and Sea, to the Titanian order of divinities whose names are 

attributes that float free of the bodies within which by implication they lie, to the order of 

Olympians, who combine substance and attribute, whose names are pure names marking each as 

a distinctive divine entity, and whose epithets make it clear that they have beautiful bodies.  

On the other side of the dichotomy of form, the Pontid tendency towards multiformity is most 

clearly represented in the only marriage of two Pontids with each other, that of Phorkys and 

Keto. Their marriage produces the Graiai, the Gorgons, Echidna and Ophis, and their 

descendants such as Orthos, Cerberus, the Hydra, the Chimaera, the Sphinx, the Nemean Lion 

and other grotesque creatures who are eventually slain by various heroes, that is, by the mortal 

descendants of the Olympians, by Heracles and other heroes, who ultimately are all Ouranids, 

such as Oedipus, Perseus, and Bellerophon. The cosmos therefore is driven by principles of order 

and disorder, of the beautiful and the ugly, and there is strife between them. Heroic action is the 

conclusion of the process. The two tendencies of theogony are in conflict with each other, both 

are in Earth, and the tendency in her towards articulate form, beauty and intelligibility prevails. 

Theogony is the struggle of what “is” or pure potency – not only to become, but also to become 

known. It culminates in knowing beings who can satisfy the need of being to be intelligible. We 

might say it culminates in Hesiod, the heroic poet. 

But the heroes and the poets are not gods. Somehow the divine apparently declines into the 

heroic and then into the mortal. So a fourth principle emerges, one that is visible very early – the 

principle that generation implies degeneration, that is, it implies the process of growing old and 

being replaced by succeeding generations, one’s own children in fact. The solution to this threat 

first employed by Ouranos was not to permit his children to be born but to keep them confined in 

the Earth, and Kronos in his turn allowed them to be born but then swallowed them, and even 

Zeus used this method to prevent a son stronger than himself from being born. He swallowed his 

first wife, Metis. These events represent, in mythical form, the attempt of each generation to 

solve the problem of succession, of being potent, that is, of having children, but not being 

succeeded by them. (Here, one might think of Donald Hall’s poem, My Son, My Executioner.) 

The attempts of Ouranos and Cronos fail, thanks in part to the efforts of Earth to prevent them 

from, as it were, swallowing up the future, the very promise of generation, whereas Zeus’ 

attempt seems to have succeeded for the time being (if we are still in his stage of cosmic history). 

A possible explanation of why Zeus succeeds in conquering generation, where his father and 

grandfather failed, is that when he swallows Metis [ῆ], she is a substance, so to speak, a 



95  Sweet 

 

separate divine entity, but in him she becomes metis [ῆ],
7
 the prudent power of the mind to 

solve problems, that is to say, not a substance but an attribute; as such he exercises her 

continuously when he formulates his many plans, and in doing so, he continuously gives birth to 

her. She has not simply disappeared into him.  

There are, however, other stories about a possible future son greater than Zeus, such as that of 

Thetis, stories which continue to point towards the fact that generated beings decay and die. As 

the universe develops, paradoxically, it develops in stages towards its own death. Teleologically, 

therefore, something must be said for each later stage as it emerges. The development may be 

from a static elemental world that is inert, while waiting for the impress of form, to the dynamic 

world of the Titans, whose dynamism is represented as willfulness, or pure power, to that of the 

Olympians, who represent the combination of power and intelligence, and thence perhaps to the 

stage of intelligence without any power other than that of intelligence itself, and this would be 

our world, the world of humans. Hence the notion is sometimes implicit in the accounts of the 

poets that humans are superior to gods on the grounds of their weakness; they are vulnerable to 

the assaults of nature, and they die. To ward off both, they need to exercise their intelligence in 

the form of the arts, and this is the story of Prometheus, but at the same time their weakness and 

mortality give them an advantage over the gods. Humans have a greater ability to love and to 

prize the value of articulate form and of beauty, precisely because they know what it is to lose 

their beauty and perish. Perhaps we might conjecture that this is also why the gods fall in love 

with humans. How poignant, how worthy of eros, can beauty be that never diminishes? 

Leaving this possibility aside, however, let us conclude by returning to the degenerative 

tendency of the Theogony as illustrated by Earth’s history, that is, by the stages that mark the 

differences between the children to whom she gives birth, from Sky and Sea to Typhoeus. In her 

prime she bears the Ouranids and the Pontids, but then her fecundity exceeds the ability of 

Ouranos’ principle of form to control it. She produces the Cyclopes, monsters with one eye, then 

the creatures with a hundred hands and fifty heads, and finally in a paroxysm of fertility, through 

the power of Aphrodite and the seed of Tartarus, she produces her last child, Typhoeus, and is 

barren thereafter. Briefly, to look for a moment at the consequence, the loss of the fertility of the 

Earth results in the next poem of Hesiod, the Works and Days. Through work, through the tilling 

of her as soil, she becomes fruitful again, but not abundantly so. She only produces enough so 

that humans, by learning to share, can survive, and by surviving and sharing, can learn to be just. 

While Earth’s power, as the principle of substance, declines over the course of the poem, 

Ouranos, as the principle of beautiful form, loses his power suddenly. The essence of Ouranos, 

however, is perhaps best represented by his last child, Aphrodite, who is his alone. She is born 

from his severed genitalia and brought to term in the sea. We might think of her as replacing the 

power of her father. She figures repeatedly towards the end of the poem as generative in herself 

and as the cause of generation in others.
8
 As Eros was present at the start of the process of 

generation, Aphrodite becomes the symbolic culmination of this process, which issues in the 

ever self-renewing, sometimes articulate, sometimes beautiful, sometimes intelligent, carriers of 

the future of the power of genesis, human beings.  



Some Principles at Work in Hesiod’s Theogony  96 

 

There is more to be said about arresting the power of genesis among the gods, for this is the 

power that will subject them to the same fate confronting humans – some form either of death or 

of diminution into insignificance. Zeus halts the process of divine generation by swallowing 

Metis, his first wife, by using her power within him to organize the cosmos, to order it through 

various dispensations, by assigning prerogatives to the deities under his sway, but he preserves 

the generative principle by continuing to engage in a series of dynastic “marriages,” which in 

various ways produce either deities that do not generate or humans that do but are not a threat to 

him because they are mortal. By looking at these dynastic marriages one can see that he replaces 

physis with nomos, nature with law, genesis with poiesis.  But perhaps this is a matter for a talk 

at another conference of the ACTC. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. See the various forms of ί (gignomai) at lines 106, 108, 111, 115, 116, 123, 

124, 126, etc. 

 

2. Eros, the fourth entity to appear out of the pre-existent state, is the non-generative 

principal that can be considered the co-cause of what is to come, in conjunction with 

a generative urge within the phenomena themselves. Such an account, if accurate, 

would be in accord with the pre-philosophic Greek notion of dual causation, both 

internal within, and external to, the things themselves, a notion that is present in both 

epic and tragic poetry. 

 

The third entity is Tartarus, apparently necessary as the repository of immortal beings 

who are to be replaced by a later generation, e.g., the Titans, who lose their title to 

rule but who by definition cannot die. They reside in a place between Chaos and 

Earth. 

 

3. Phillipson, Paula. 1966. “Genealogie als mythische Form.” In Hesiod, ed. Ernst 

Heitsch. Wege der Forschung, v. 44. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 

661. 

 

4. See the Homeric phrase referring to teeth as the barrier through which ill-spoken 

words should not be allowed to pass. 

 

5. The Greeks conceived the Ocean to be the river that delimits the earth that is known 

to us. It was a substance like the sea, with elemental content, but at the periphery of 

our knowledge. It confined within its circumference the cosmos that was to come. 

The other Titans were different, if we can judge them by their names: Koios (= 



97  Sweet 

 

Poios), “of what sort?”; Kreios (= Kreion), “he who rules”; Hyperion, “he who goes 

on high”; Iapetos, “he who hurls”; Theia, “she who is divine”; Rhea, “she who flows 

abundantly”; Themis, “she who is fixed in position”; Mnemosyne, “she who 

remembers”; Phoibe, “she who shines brightly”; Tethys, “she who nurses”; Kronos, 

“he who accomplishes.” For the most part, grammatically, these are adjectives made 

into nouns. They represent attributes rather than substances. 

 

6. The meaning of the names of most of the Olympians is not known. The names may 

derive from non-Greek sources, some from a pre-Greek language, spoken by the 

people in the peninsula before the Greeks arrived, others from the religion of the 

Mycenaean Greeks themselves, whose meaning the Greeks lost in the destruction of 

their civilization at the end of the Bronze Age. Linguists debate about the meaning of 

the names of the deities of the Olympian pantheon, with the notable exceptions of 

Hestia (Hearth), Demeter (Earth Mother), and Zeus (god of the day sky). But there is 

continuing debate about the meanings of Hera, Athena, Poseidon, Hades, Apollo, 

Artemis, Ares, and Hephaestus. The ancient Greeks themselves wondered about the 

names of their gods and sometimes assigned meanings to them, but they did not 

debate about the meaning of the names of the elemental gods and the Titans. The 

meaning of these names lay clearly on the surface. 

 

7. There is of course no difference between “M” and “m” in classical Greek, but for us 

the orthographic distinction is useful in enabling us to mark the differentiation, which 

a Greek was aware of, between a substance and an attribute. 

 

8. Note the profusion of references to Aphrodite at the end of the poem, wherein she is 

both generative herself and the cause of generation in others, at this point most 

particularly in humans, where the future of generation may safely lie without threat to 

the gods.