23. About Hesiod

But Hesiod the poet says that he, too, heard thus from the Muses about Nature. The Muses, however, are the daughters of Zeus. For Zeus having from excess of desire companied with Mnemosyne for nine days and nights consecutively, she conceived these nine in her single womb, receiving one every night. Now Hesiod invokes the nine Muses from Pieria, that is from Olympus, and prays them to teach him:

“How first the gods and earth became;
The rivers and th’ immeasureable sea
High-raging in its foam: the glittering stars;
The wide-impending heaven; ...
Say how their treasures, how their honours each
Allotted shared: how first they held abode
On many-caved Olympus:—this declare
Ye Muses! dwellers of the heavenly mount
From the beginning; say who first arose?

“First Chaos was, next ample-bosomed Earth,
The seat eternal and immoveable
Of deathless gods, who still the Olympian height
Snow-topt inhabit. Third in hollow depth
Of the vast ground, expanded wide above
The gloomy Tartarus, Love then arose
Most beauteous of immortals: he at once
Of every god and every mortal man
Unnerves the limbs; dissolves the wiser breast
By reason steel’d, and quells the very soul.

“From Chaos, Erebus and sable Night...
From Night arose the Sunshine and the Day
Whom she with dark embrace of Erebus
Commingling bore.

“Her first-born Earth produced
Of like immensity, the starry Heaven:
That he might sheltering compass her around
On every side, and be for evermore
To the blest gods a mansion unremoved.

“Next the high hills arose, the pleasant haunts
Of goddess-nymphs, who dwell among the glens
Of mountains. With no aid of tender love
Gave she to birth the sterile Sea, high-swol’n
In raging foam; and Heaven-embraced, anon
She teemed with Ocean, rolling in deep whirls
His vast abyss of waters

“Crœus then,
Cœus, Hyperion and Iäpetus,
Themis and Thea rose; Mnemosyne
And Rhea; Phœbe diademed with gold,
And love-inspiring Tethys; and of these,
Youngest in birth, the wily Kronos came,
The sternest of her sons; and he abhorred
The sire that gave him life

“Then brought she forth
The Cyclops haughty of spirit.”

And he enumerates all the other Giants descended from Kronos. But last he tells how Zeus was born from Rhea.

All these men, then, declared, as we have set forth, their opinions about the nature and birth of the universe. But they all, departing from the Divine for lower things, busied themselves about the substance of the things that are. So that when struck with the grandeurs of creation and thinking that these were the Divine, each of them preferred before the rest a different part of what was created. But they discovered not the God and fashioner of them.

The opinions therefore of those among the Greeks who have undertaken to philosophize, I think I have sufficiently set forth. Starting from which opinions the heretics have made the attempts we shall shortly narrate. It seems fitting, however, that we, first making public the mystic rites, should also declare whatever things certain men have superfluously fancied about stars or magnitudes; for truly those who have taken their starting-points from these notions are deemed by the many to speak prodigies. Thereafter, we shall make plain consecutively the vain opinions invented by them.

END OF BOOK I