EXPERT BIO
ANNETTE GIESECKE
Annette Giesecke is Professor of Classics and Chair of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Classical Mythology A to Z: An Encyclopedia of Gods & Goddesses, Heroes & Heroines, Nymphs, Spirits, Monsters and Places (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2020).
According to Herodotus it was the poets Homer and Hesiod, writing in the 8th century BCE, who gave the Greeks their gods. Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century BCE, was himself a Greek from the city of Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey. He was right about Homer and Hesiod, or more properly, the works attributed to them. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, together with Hesiod’s Theogony, are the oldest existing works of literature in the Western world. In both of these book-length poems, all the major gods appear as characters with distinct personalities and powers. In his Theogony, which translates as ‘Origin of the Gods’, Hesiod explains how exactly the Greek gods came into being. Hesiod’s divine-creation myth is also a cosmogony, a story of the origins of Nature and the Universe. The first gods were elemental. They were deified physical parts of the Universe, but they gradually became anthropomorphised, believed – at least sometimes – to have human emotions and form. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Poseidon and the other familiar Olympian gods did not at first exist, only coming into being after the creation of Earth and Sky, which also were considered gods.
CREATION MYTH
According to Hesiod, the Universe existed first as a vast nothingness, a vacant space for which the Greek word is ‘Chaos’. From Chaos arose Gaia, who was conceived both as our planet Earth and as a great mother goddess. More primordial elemental gods would follow. Eros, the force of desire, also arose from Chaos, and next came Erebos (Darkness) and Nyx (Night). Erebos and Nyx together bore Aether (the bright upper sky) and Hemera (Day). Wanting companionship and protection, Gaia herself produced Ouranos (Sky) to cover her on all sides.
Gaia and Ouranos became the parents
