First of all there was Chaos, the yawning gap, and out of it came Gaia the broad earth, dark Tartarus in the depths, and Eros, desire, the oldest force that loosens the limbs of gods and men. Then Gaia bore Uranus, the starry sky, to cover her on every side, and lay with him.

From Night came Sleep and Death and the Fates; from Earth and Sky came the twelve Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred-handed giants. Creation here is not a craftsman's work but a genealogy: the world comes into being by being born, generation upon generation.

Uranus hates his children and presses them back into Gaia's body, refusing to let them be born. In agony the earth forges a great sickle and asks her sons to act; only the youngest Titan, Cronus, dares. He lies in wait and unmans his father as the sky comes down to the earth.

From the blood that falls on Gaia spring the avenging Furies and the giants; from the severed flesh cast into the sea rises Aphrodite, goddess of desire, born of the very violence that ended the first divine king. The pattern is set: each ruler falls to his own child.

Cronus rules, but he has learned to fear his father's fate: warned that his own child will overthrow him, he swallows each one at birth. Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, all go down into their father's belly.

When the sixth child comes, Rhea has had enough. She hides the infant Zeus in a Cretan cave and hands Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he swallows without looking. The prophesied child is loose in the world, growing in secret, and the second divine king has already sown his own fall.

Zeus rules, but rule is not the same as justice, and the Theogony does not pretend it is. When Prometheus tricks Zeus over the division of sacrifice and steals fire for humankind in a fennel stalk, Zeus answers with two punishments. Prometheus he chains to a crag for an eagle to devour daily, and Atlas he condemns to hold up the sky forever.

On humankind he sends Pandora, the first woman, beautiful and bringing with her the jar of every evil. The new cosmic order is stable, but it is bought with binding, punishment, and the sorrows loosed upon mortals. Order has a price, and others pay it.