Before Homer's epics, there was Hesiod: the other founding father of Western literature. This collection gathers the oldest surviving Greek poetry after the Iliad and Odyssey, preserving the raw, strange world where gods were born in blood and titans warred for supremacy. The Theogony offers nothing less than the complete family history of the cosmos, from chaotic void to Zeus's thundering reign, a creation story that shaped everything from Greek tragedy to Milton to modern fantasy. Works and Days is something rarer still: a working poet's guide to moral living, folded into a farmer's calendar, warning against idleness and hubris through the fable of Pandora's box and the tale of Hesiod's crooked brother Perses. Here you'll find the origin of the myth of Prometheus, the two kinds of Strife (one that builds, one that destroys), and the oldest sustained argument for the dignity of labor in Western letters. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica extend this volume with devotional poems to the gods and tantalizing fragments of lost epics. This is where Western mythology begins.
