The Birth Of God In Hesiod's Theogony

Hesiod was a Poet, whose project took on many of the questions later taken up by philosophers. So while the Theogony is a pre-philosophical recounting of the birth of the world, it also makes philosophical claims about nature and the origin of the Greek social order Hesiod intertwines his interest in these topics with parable tales from myth, the record of these myths indicates that the poet was searching for the answers that later would be the domain of the philosopher. Mythology was the manner in which the Greek peoples made sense of their world, myths in ancient societies provided a framework in the absence of philosophy, that made sense of a senseless world. Hesiod’s stories carry ideas in them, the narrative is a kind of sugar coating, that makes the pill easy to swallow. Hesiod is in a position at the base of the tree of Greek knowledge, his though informs the tradition that comes after it. One might see the ideas of the rule of law among the Gods enforced by Zeus as the birth of our ideas about law and sovereignty.

There is a sense that this kind of universal scope is what makes Hesiod philosophical, just as Plato or Aristotle wrestle with questions of meaning, so does Hesiod. And just as later philosophers, Hesiod’s answers are representative of the best wisdom of the time.

In Hesiod’s Theogony, as in all of the creation stories that I have read, natural phenomena are made human as to clear up the nature of the cosmos by applying human characteristics. This structure gives ease to understanding the meaning of things, and reinforce a world order that is designed after what the gods have done. This is like that natural law of philosophers that come later and provides rationale for ancient western