Creation and the Titans

Hesiod measured the universe with a falling anvil: nine days from the sky to the earth, nine more down to Tartarus.

First came Chaos

The fullest Greek account of how the world began is Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem of about 1,022 lines whose title means "the birth of the gods". Hesiod was a farmer-poet from Ascra in Boeotia, in central Greece, and he says the Muses taught him to sing while he was herding sheep on Mount Helicon. Many scholars date the poem not long after 700 BCE. At line 116 the creation story begins: "First of all Chaos came to be." Then came Gaia, the Earth, then Tartarus, a dark pit deep below the earth, and Eros, desire.

Chaos in Greek did not mean a mess. The word is related to a verb for gaping, and it meant a yawning gap or empty space. Our modern sense of "complete disorder" came much later. Hesiod does not say what made these first beings appear. They simply come to be, and everything else is born from them, so the poem reads like a family tree that turns into a history of power.

Sky, Earth and a sickle

Gaia gave birth to Ouranos, the starry Sky, who covered her on every side. Together they had twelve Titans, among them Kronos, Rhea, Iapetos, Okeanos and Themis, as well as the one-eyed Cyclopes and three monstrous brothers with a hundred hands and fifty heads each, the Hundred-Handers. Ouranos hated his children and pushed them back inside the earth. Gaia, in pain, made a great sickle and asked her sons for help. Only Kronos, the youngest Titan, agreed. When Ouranos came to lie with Gaia, Kronos cut him with the sickle and threw the severed flesh into the sea. Hesiod says Aphrodite grew in the white foam that spread around it, while the drops of blood that fell on the earth produced the Furies and the Giants.

The war of gods and Titans

Zeus and his brothers and sisters fought the older Titans for control of the world. The gods held Mount Olympus and the Titans held Mount Othrys, and according to Hesiod the war had lasted ten years with no winner. Then Zeus freed the Cyclopes, who gave him the thunderbolt, and on Gaia’s advice he brought up the Hundred-Handers from under the earth. They threw rocks three hundred at a time, Zeus hurled lightning until the land and sea boiled, and the Titans were beaten. They were chained in Tartarus, behind bronze gates guarded by the Hundred-Handers.

How deep is Tartarus? Hesiod answers with a picture. A bronze anvil dropped from the sky would fall for nine days and nine nights and reach the earth on the tenth. Dropped from the earth, it would fall another nine days and nights and reach Tartarus on the tenth. Tartarus is therefore as far below the earth as the sky is above it. The world has three levels, and the defeated gods are locked at the bottom.

Dividing the world

After the victory the three brothers shared out the world. In the Iliad, Poseidon remembers that they drew lots: Zeus got the sky, Poseidon the grey sea and Hades the misty underworld, while the earth and Olympus belonged to all three. Hesiod tells it differently, with the gods simply asking Zeus to be king. Even in victory the new order was not safe. Gaia bore one more monster, Typhon, and Zeus had to defeat him too before his rule was settled.