Abstract

Although conflicting accounts were inevitably offered of the origins of the gods and the physical universe, Hesiod’s Theogony, an epic history of the divine order composed in about 700 BC (see p. 9), came to be accepted by the Greeks as the standard mythical account of the earliest history of the world; and we will thus adopt it as our main guide in the first section of this book, while examining how the world and the lesser and higher deities were supposed to have come into existence, and how Zeus and the Olympian gods attained supreme authority.