Genealogy of the Gods

In the beginning, says Hesiod, was Chaos — the yawning gap — and from it came Gaia, broad-breasted Earth, who bore starry Uranus to be her equal and her mate. Their children were the Titans, youngest and most terrible of whom was Kronos, who unmanned his father with the sickle and reigned until his own son served him the same measure. Zeus, hidden from his devouring father by Rhea and raised in Crete, cast down the Titans and divided the world by lot with his brothers: the sky to himself, the sea to Poseidon, the unseen realm below to Hades.

Solid lines: parentage · double bar: union · dashed: attested only in later tradition. Tap a name to open its entry.

The second Olympian generation is Zeus’s: Athena sprung from his head, the twins Apollo and Artemis by Leto, Hermes by Maia, Dionysus by mortal Semele. On Aphrodite the poets divide — Homer calls her daughter of Zeus and Dione; Hesiod births her from the sea-foam of Uranus’s wound — a disagreement the dashed line in the tree preserves honestly. The Platonists read the whole genealogy as theology in the mode of myth: each generation a procession of causes, from the ineffable first principle down through intellect to soul and cosmos.