Ancient Greece — Before Homer's heroes could sail and fight, someone had to build the universe they lived in. Hesiod's Theogony is his account of how the Greek cosmos came to be — from primordial Chaos through divine generations to Zeus's rule on Olympus.

At around a thousand lines it's closer to a long poem than a book, but its influence is wildly disproportionate to its length. Every Greek tragedy, every Roman epic, every Renaissance mythological painting traces back to the genealogies Hesiod laid down here.

The poem has a raw, archaic energy. These are not gentle bedtime stories — they're a culture working out its deepest anxieties about power, succession, and cosmic order.

A short essential read that makes everything else in the Great Books make more sense.