Theogony (Illustrated): The Birth of the Greek Gods — The Illuminated Edition

Seventy original paintings, one across every two-page spread

The complete 1914 Evelyn-White translation, unabridged

The poem alone: no commentary, no notes, no introduction

Before the gods there was Chaos. Then Earth, and Night, and Sky, and after them a war that made the world.

Hesiod's Theogony is the oldest surviving account of how the Greek universe came into being, written some seven hundred years before Christ. It is not a gentle creation story. A father is unmade by his own son. A mother hides her children inside the earth. A stone is swallowed in place of a god. The Titans and the Olympians burn the sky for ten years, and something wins.

This edition gives the poem whole, in Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation, unabridged and unaltered, across seventy painted openings. Every opening is a single painting spanning both pages, with the verse laid into the darkness of the picture, so the text and the image are never separate things.

The paintings move from heat to cold as the poem does. The early world is copper and ember, the colour of metal being worked: Chaos giving way, the first gods, the sickle, the thunderbolt. What comes after the war is ash and bone and lead, with no warmth left in it. The poem begins in the first light and ends in the second, and it does not turn back.

Contains the complete text: the Hymn to the Muses, the catalogue of the first gods, the castration of Ouranos, the swallowing of the children, the Titanomachy, the binding of Typhoeus, and the closing catalogue of the goddesses who lay with mortal men.

A note on reading: because every opening is one wide painting carried across both pages, this edition is best read on a tablet or a large screen held in landscape, so the two halves of each painting meet as they were made to. A larger screen is strongly recommended.

The Illuminated Edition · Ancient Mythology · Volume I