One of you asked a great question after class: were there other Theogonies or beliefs about the creation of the world than the “mainstream” version we get in Hesiod?

Short answer: yes!

Disappointing addition: They’re quite tough to wrap your head around.

One alternate tradition can be pieced together from what survives on tablets and papyri of the Orphic cosmogony, in which it all starts with a cosmic egg (a trope found in other cultures too!) Many scholars find influence from the Ancient Near East in Orphism, whatever it actually was. Here is a relatively accessible, though sometimes hand-wavy, introduction to Orphism and its myths.

In a VERY different vein were the Presocratic Philosophers, including the familiar name Pythagoras (if he lived, he’s rather more mystic than mathematician…and a vegetarian whose followers believed in the reincarnation of souls!) Ancient sources by and about this diverse group of thinkers—unified mostly by their time period in the Archaic Age and often by their searches for what stuff is made of—are, again, often fragmentary and hard to piece together. These thinkers are also, on the whole, less totally rational and closer to “irrational, superstitious” writers in the tradition of Hesiod and Homer than some would have you believe. They asked some of the same questions modern science asks about the nature of the physical world and its laws, but were not necessarily more systematic or “scientific” in their investigations. They’re very interesting, though! The Wikipedia page on the Presocratics is good for some basics and gives you the rundown of their many different accounts of what the world is made of and how it works.