The Greek Creation Myth – From Chaos to Olympus

Other Greek Accounts of the Beginning

Hesiod's version became the standard one, but it was never the only one. In the Iliad, Hera calls Oceanus "origin of the gods" and Tethys their mother. Homer seems to imagine a watery first pair rather than a void. Plato and Aristotle both noticed this passage, and some ancient readers linked it to Thales' claim that everything comes from water.

The Orphic poems, attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus, told a very different story. In one widely reported form, a cosmic egg produces a shining, double-sexed, golden-winged first-born god called Phanes (or Protogonos), who creates the world. Night then plays a central role as adviser and successor, and the line of rulers runs Phanes, Night, Uranus, Cronus, Zeus and finally Dionysus. The Derveni Papyrus, a charred scroll found in northern Greece and dated to the fourth century BC, preserves a commentary on an early Orphic theogony in which Zeus swallows the first-born god and recreates the universe from within himself. Aristophanes parodies the egg version in Birds: black-winged Night lays a wind-egg in the depths of Erebus, and from it hatches Eros, who mates with Chaos to produce the birds before the gods.

A third account comes from Pherecydes of Syros (sixth century BC). He began with three eternal beings, Zas, Chronos (Time) and Chthonie, and had Zas marry Chthonie and give her a robe embroidered with earth and ocean, at which point she becomes Ge. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, Orpheus sings of yet another early regime: the Titan Ophion and the Oceanid Eurynome ruled from Olympus until Cronus and Rhea threw them into the sea.

Where Humans Come From

Hesiod's Theogony never explains how men were made. It simply assumes them, and only describes the creation of the first woman, Pandora, built by Hephaestus on Zeus's orders as punishment for Prometheus' theft of fire (see Pandora). In Works and Days, Hesiod offers the Myth of the Ages: a golden race under Cronus, a foolish silver race, a violent bronze race, a race of heroes who fought at Thebes and Troy, and finally the present race of iron, which is doomed to toil.

The famous image of Prometheus shaping people from clay comes later. It appears in Apollodorus and Ovid, and Pausanias reports seeing clay-coloured stones at Panopeus in Phocis that locals said were left over from the job. Another origin story follows the great flood: Deucalion and Pyrrha throw "the bones of their mother", the stones of the earth, over their shoulders, and the stones become men and women. Elsewhere, Athenians boasted of being autochthonous, literally born from their own soil, through ancestors such as Erichthonius.

Parallels from the Near East

Hesiod's succession myth has striking relatives outside Greece. The Hittite Song of Kumarbi (also called Kingship in Heaven), recorded centuries before Hesiod, tells of the sky-god Anu being overthrown by Kumarbi, who bites off his genitals and becomes pregnant with the storm-god Teshub. Kumarbi later swallows a stone, and Teshub eventually takes power. The Babylonian Enuma Elish likewise has generations of gods, a primordial couple, and a young storm-god, Marduk, who defeats the older powers and orders the world. Most scholars now see Hesiod's sequence of Uranus, Cronus and Zeus as a Greek version of this wider Near Eastern pattern, though no one knows exactly how it travelled.

What People Often Misunderstand

Greek gods did not create the universe. They are born inside it and inherit it. No single maker stands outside the cosmos in Hesiod. Second, "Chaos" does not mean disorder in early Greek. The word is related to verbs for gaping or yawning, and its sense of confusion came later, mostly through Roman writers like Ovid, whose Metamorphoses opens with a jumbled mass sorted out by an unnamed god. Third, the "Pelasgian creation myth" of Eurynome dancing with the serpent Ophion, often quoted online, is largely Robert Graves's twentieth-century reconstruction rather than an ancient story. The ten-year war that settled the cosmos is told in more detail at the Titanomachy, and the final challenge at Typhon.

Ancient sources

• Hesiod, Theogony: Chaos and the first beings (from line 116), Uranus's overthrow, Cronus swallowing his children, the Titanomachy and Typhon.
• Hesiod, Works and Days: the Prometheus and Pandora story and the five races or ages of humankind.
• Homer, Iliad 14: Oceanus and Tethys named as origin and mother of the gods (14.201).
• Aristophanes, Birds: the chorus's comic cosmogony of Night's wind-egg and the birth of Eros, drawing on Orphic ideas.
• Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, Book 1: Orpheus's song of creation, including Ophion and Eurynome ruling before Cronus.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1: a Roman creation from a formless mass, Prometheus moulding humans, the Ages, and the flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha.

Frequently asked questions

Who created the world in Greek mythology?

No one. In Hesiod, Chaos simply comes into being, and Gaia, Tartarus and Eros follow without a creator. The world develops through births and successions, not through a deliberate act of making.

Who created humans in Greek mythology?

Accounts differ. Later writers credit Prometheus with shaping humans from clay, Hesiod describes successive races made by the gods, and Pandora is the first woman. After the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha repopulate the earth from stones.

Is the Greek creation myth similar to the Bible's?

Only loosely. Both have a primeval state and a flood story, but Genesis has a single creator outside the world. The Greek myth is a family saga of gods born from the world itself. Its closest parallels are Hittite and Babylonian.

What came before Chaos?

Hesiod does not say. He writes only that "first of all Chaos came to be", and the question of what preceded it was later taken up by the Orphic poets and the philosophers.