Theogony

The Birth of the Gods — A New Translation with Introduction and Notes

The poem that invented the universe.

Before Homer's heroes sailed to Troy, before Odysseus wandered the wine-dark sea, a Boeotian shepherd named Hesiod stood on Mount Helicon and received from the Muses the oldest surviving account of how everything began.

The Theogony is the foundational text of Greek mythology — the poem that gave the gods their genealogy, the cosmos its architecture, and Western literature its first creation story. From the primordial abyss of Chaos to the rise of Zeus, from the castration of Uranus to the birth of Aphrodite from the foam of the sea, Hesiod's thousand-line poem maps the violent, erotic, magnificent origins of the world the Greeks inhabited.

This is not a children's retelling. This is the original source — the text that Aeschylus, Plato, and Virgil knew by heart — rendered in contemporary English verse that preserves the raw power and narrative momentum of the Greek. Where other translations flatten Hesiod into academic prose, this edition restores the poem's voice: incantatory, brutal, and strangely intimate.

What's inside:

A complete verse translation of the Theogony, faithful to the Greek original while written in accessible, literary English. A substantial introduction exploring the poem's philosophy, politics, and enduring relevance — from the problem of power to the role of desire in the origins of the cosmos. A biographical essay on Hesiod, the first named author in Western literature to speak about himself as an individual. Section headings and line references for easy navigation.

Why read the Theogony now?

Because every superhero franchise, every fantasy epic, every story about gods and monsters descends from this poem. Because the questions Hesiod asks — Where does power come from? What is the cost of order? Can desire and justice coexist? — are still our questions. Because the Greek myths are not decorative stories but a system of thought, and the Theogony is where that system begins.

If you've read Stephen Fry's Mythos, Madeline Miller's Circe, or Emily Wilson's Odyssey and want to go deeper — back to the source itself — this is where you start.

Henry Bugalho is a Brazilian philosopher, writer, and translator based in Spain, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the author of over thirty books on philosophy, classical literature, and political analysis. His translations of ancient texts combine scholarly precision with literary force.