Books Dave Has Read

The Theogony

Hesiod



Rank: C
No. Times Read: 1
Last Read: Fall, 2009
Reviewed By: Dave
Date Review Added: 12 / 20 / 2009

• Review: So, I was trying to think of the worst joke possible to open this review, and I came up with the following:
  
  Person A: So, I heard you read Hesiod's The Theogony. What was it like?
  
  Me: Oh, Theogony!
  
  Ta da!
  
  Actually, it wasn't that bad (The Theogony, not the joke. The joke was that bad). After all, it's really short, and it's not too terrible. The thing is...it's not really a story.
  
  If I can go back to the beginning, Hesiod is a dude who's most famous for writing something other than The Theogony. In fact, if you go to a place like Amazon.com and type in "theogony" (I'm assuming that you, like me, type in all lower case letters when typing something into a search window), what you get is a half a dozen books whose titles are something like Theogony and Works and Days, or Works and Days and Theogony, etc. Evidently Works and Days is his most famous. Makes me wish I'd read that instead of this.
  
  Back to The Theogony, it's an epic poem, stylistically, but it really has no business being an epic poem. What it is is a catalog of the various Greek gods and their origins. That might sound exciting, but it's rather dry—something like the book of Numbers in the Bible. Undoubtedly, the average American is familiar with some of the stories (e.g. Athena springing forth from Zeus's head), and some of them are, admittedly, pretty wild. Unfortunately, what Hesiod is chiefly concerned with is writing a kind of genealogy of all the gods, and so he keeps the stories short (usually a couple lines, if that). The result is a great big list.
  
  If The Theogony has any real value today, it's as a reference work. If ever you find yourself wondering who Hephaestus's parents are, or if he has any brothers or sisters, this is the place to go (for example, did you know that Zeus and Hera are brother and sister?! I had no idea!). If you want a good story—or, really, any story at all—go elsewhere. If this were written today, it'd just be a list on a webpage compiled by a fan. Since the old Greeks had no internet, we got The Theogony. Guess that means the internet is a...good thing? Bad thing? Just a thing...?


• Categories: Epic, Greek, Poetry, Short, Translation


• URL: <http://dedalvs.com/read/search_key.php?cid=257>


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