The earliest systematic account of the Greek gods' origins, composed around the same era as Homer -- the Theogony traces the universe from primordial Chaos through the reign of Zeus.
Hesiod composed the Theogony around the 8th century BCE, roughly contemporary with Homer, but where Homer told stories of heroes, Hesiod set out to systematize the gods themselves -- their births, their wars, their genealogies, tracing existence back to Chaos and forward through successive divine generations to the reign of Zeus. It's the closest thing the Greek world had to a founding cosmological text, and it shaped how later Greek and Roman writers understood their own mythology for a thousand years. This edition presents the original Greek alongside its English translation, part of the same Loeb Classical Library tradition that has anchored much of this library's Greek and Latin material.