‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony

Hesiod devises his cosmogony in order to provide the basic context for his account, part narrative and part genealogy, of Zeus’ conquest of the Titans and establishment of the primacy of justice among gods and humans. The project of this essay is to explore Hesiod’s choice of ‘Chaos’ as the ‘first’ of all the divinities to come into being. The full significance of Hesiod’s choice emerges only if we recognize that his thinking led him to two very different possibilities, Chaos and Tartaros. Accordingly, in Part I of this essay I will try to bring to view their different claims to the status of being the ‘first.’ This will require challenging the now prevailing interpretation of the coming-into-being of Chaos (Theogony 116ff.), examining two suggestive passages, 726-728 and 736-738 (= 807-809), in Hesiod’s description of the underworld, and rereading the main cosmogonic passage, 116-133, in the new context opened up by these reflections. Rediscovering the alternatives Hesiod faced will position us, in turn, to recognize two different kinds of considerations, semantic and ethical, that likely motivated his decision, and in Part II I will lay these out and consider how they may be related. Semantically, to begin from Chaos is to affirm the priority of difference to the undifferentiated. Ethically, it is to suggest that the priority of the ‘half’ to the ‘all’ (Works and Days 40), that is, of sharing and justice to grasping and violence, belongs to the very nature of the cosmos. On this reading of the cosmogony, Zeus’s establishing of the primacy of justice both reflects and gains legitimacy from the most basic character of the world itself. First, to provide a shared starting-point, let me present the key texts in Greek and in translation: