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HesiodTheogony
HesiodFiction | Poem | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
In Greek, Hesiod composed the Theogony in the traditional meter for Greek and Roman epic poetry, dactylic hexameter. Each line has six metrical feet composed of either dactyls (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) or spondees (two stressed syllables). Dactylic hexameter was a powerful tool for oral poets, who recited their poems entirely by memory. Lines are easily divided into rearrangeable parts, like linguistic Legos. If a poet found himself in a pinch, forgetting a line or two in front of an audience, he could easily insert a preset placeholder (like Homer’s famous epithets, or stock descriptions of a hero, e.g. “swift-footed Achilles”) to finish a line and keep the narrative moving.
Hesiod’s Ionic dialect of Greek is more or less similar to Homer’s, though he uses a higher proportion of “Aeolicisms,” or regional twangs from his father’s homeland in Asia Minor.
In his lively, colloquial English translation, Stanley Lombardo tends to use anapests as his metrical foot of choice (two short syllables followed by one long syllable). Dactylic hexameter is famously difficult to replicate in English, which lacks the word order flexibility of Greek and Latin.
In his Translator’s Preface, Lombardo explains that he wanted his translation to have a “regional cast […] [which] might be described as south-central midland, the language of much of America’s small rural towns,” reflecting Hesiod’s identity as a “rural” country poet (Hesiod. Works and Days and Theogony. Translated by Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis, Indiana, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993, p. 20).
Catalogues
A catalogue is a literary device in which a poet lists (or catalogues) a series of things. Hesiod’s contemporary Homer is famous for his catalogues: Book 2 of his Iliad is an extended catalogue of the ships sailing to Troy. All epics following Homer utilize catalogues to some degree, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.
Broadly speaking, the Theogony is, itself, a massive catalog. It lists the origins of the Greek gods and goddesses. Within this narrative, Hesiod also inserts stricter versions of catalogues, meticulous lists of names like the list of oceanic nymphs, or Nereids (Lines 244-63); the list of exotic rivers (Lines 340-47); and the nymphs who acted as assistants to Apollo (Lines 351-63).
Sound
The Theogony is a highly aural poem, reflecting the oral nature of its composition. Greek contemporaries of Hesiod would have never read his works; rather, they listened to live recitations in public performances.
Among epic poets, Hesiod is especially interested in vivid, atmospheric descriptions of sonic activity. In the climatic fight between the Olympians and the Titans, he catalogues the soundscape of the battle:
And the unfathomable sea shrieked eerily,
The earth crashed and rumbled, the vast sky groaned
[…] a high whistling noise
Of insuppressible tumult and heavy missiles
That groaned and whined in flight. And the sound
Of each side shouting rose to starry heaven,
As they collided with a magnificent battle cry (Lines 681-89).
Hesiod’s point is clear: This supernatural, intensely violent conflict is discordant, awful to hear. He leverages a similar device in his description of the monster Typhoeus:
There were voices in each of [his] frightful heads
A phantasmagoria of unspeakable sound
Sometimes sounds that the gods understood, sometimes
The sound of a spirited bull, bellowing and snorting,
Or the uninhibited, shameless roar of a lion,
Or just like puppies yapping, an uncanny noise,
Or a whistle hissing through long ridges and hills (Lines 836-42).
Typhoeus here embodies anti-civilization. He only sometimes speaks in a way that the gods can understand, but otherwise makes terrifying inhuman sounds. This incoherent babble stands in stark contrast to the lovely words the Muses inspire, which “flow” from a king’s mouth “like honey” (Line 85). Hesiod thus uses sound in his Theogony to reenforce the dichotomy between chaos and civilization.
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