Adaptations of Creation Theories: Hesiod to the Presocratic Natural Philosophers

Interpretation of fundamental belief systems can change over time in any society. This was the case for archaic and ancient Greece, regarding their explanations of creation. The first written literature of Greece was epic poetry from the eighth to seventh centuries BCE. The epic poet Hesiod in his poem Theogony recorded in writing for the first time the traditional creation cosmogony myth which explained how the world, universe, gods and humankind came into existence. One popular argument is that this stemmed from an established oral mythological corpus which in turn represented the standard accepted belief system of the wider Greeks.

In the sixth century BCE the natural Presocratic philosophers came to prominence. They also put forth theories regarding creation. However, these differed in key ways to the beliefs Hesiod had established. The Presocratic philosophers attempted to explain creation in a more scientific way. They used empirical observation and logic to argue for a “first principle” by which everything was created. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of both the shared and differing themes of the theories of creation in these two mediums to explore the direct adaptations of theories of creation the later natural philosophers made to the epic poetry. This paper concludes the natural philosophers adapted the cosmogony myth of the epic poetry and traditional oral mythological corpus according to the emergence of early quasi-scientific methods to reinterpret the details of Greece’s original cosmogony within a more logical framework.

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