Hesiod

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.

The Works and Days is addressed to a brother, Perses, in a quarrel over an inheritance that Perses is said to have won by bribing the lords, and the whole poem is bent toward the argument that this cannot stand. Zeus watches. Justice sits beside him as a person and reports crooked judgements, and thirty thousand immortal watchers walk the earth wrapped in mist keeping account of what men do. The five ages, gold, silver, bronze, the age of heroes and the iron present, describe a decline, and the men of the golden race did not simply die: they became spirits who guard mortals and give wealth. Pandora and her jar are told here as the answer to the trick at Mekone, and the point is not curiosity but that the punishment arrives looking like a gift.

The last part of the poem is a calendar. Certain days of the month are fit for certain work and others are not, and the poem lists them flatly, without argument or reason given. That is what makes the work a religious document rather than a farming manual. Right action means doing the correct thing at a moment which is already marked, and the marking is not something anyone negotiates. The Muses who met Hesiod on Helicon told him at the outset that they know how to say many false things resembling true ones, and true things when they choose to, which is an unusual warning for a poet to put in his own mouth.