“From the Muses of Helicon let us begin to sing.” The line every later epic invocation imitates, opening the oldest Greek poem about how the world and the gods were born. Read in Hesiod's own archaic Greek.
The proem is live as a word-depth beta: the opening of the Theogony in archaic Greek, every word glossed with its sense and the flowing English beside it. The invocation of the Muses, their dance on Helicon around the spring and the altar of Zeus, and the springs where they bathe. This is a long poem; it grows down the Theogony, and Works and Days joins later.
❦ Read Hesiod's Theogony in GreekA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of Hesiod: Theogony word by word.
The oldest map of the Greek cosmos, and it opens with a dance. Before a single god is born, the Muses sing and dance on Mount Helicon, and one of them hands the shepherd Hesiod his staff and his song. You are reading that opening in the original archaic Greek.
Hesiod lived in Boeotia, in central Greece, around 700 BC, about as long ago from classical Athens as the Middle Ages are from us. He is the first European poet to give his own name and tell his own story: a working farmer and shepherd who says the Muses met him on the mountainside. The Theogony is his account of how the gods came to be, from the first gap of Chaos to the kingship of Zeus. The Greek here follows the 1908 Teubner edition of Alois Rzach, checked against a second public-domain edition.
The poem's most famous moment comes a few lines after this opening, when the Muses tell the shepherds of Helicon something unsettling about poetry itself: that they know how to speak many false things that look just like the truth, and how, when they wish, to sing the truth. It is the earliest European reflection on the difference between a beautiful lie and a true song, put in the mouths of the goddesses of song.
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