How Order Was Won, and Who Got What

The Theogony is less a creation story than an account of a struggle for power that ended well. Chaos comes first, then Earth, then Tartaros and Eros; Earth bears Heaven and lies with him; Heaven will not let his children be born until Kronos cuts him; Kronos swallows his own children until Zeus is hidden and comes back. The war with the Titans runs ten years, Zeus wins it with the help of the hundred handed ones he releases from beneath the earth, and one last monster, Typhoeus, is put down after the victory. Only then does the poem reach its real subject, which is the distribution of honours. The gods ask Zeus to rule, and he apportions the timai, the specific privileges each deity holds. The settled order of the world is that apportionment, not any act of making.

One episode inside it explains something a Greek did at every festival. At Mekone, Prometheus divides an ox and offers Zeus a choice between two portions, good meat hidden inside an ugly stomach and bare bones dressed in glistening fat. Zeus takes the fat and the bones. That, Hesiod says, is why mortals burn the white bones of sacrificial animals for the gods on smoking altars and keep the meat for themselves. A worshipper watching an offering was watching the outcome of a trick played once at the beginning.