The substance of Hesiod’s charming account of these three groups of gods is as follows:—­

First of all things was Chaos.  Next was broad-bosomed Earth, or Gaia.  Then was Tartarus, dark and dim, below the earth.  Next appears Eros, or Love, most beautiful among the Immortals.  From Chaos came Erebus and black Night, and then sprang forth Ether and Day, children of Erebus and Night.  Then Earth brought forth the starry Heaven, Uranos, like to herself in size, that he might shelter her around.  Gaia, or Earth, also bore the mountains, and Pontus or the barren Sea.

Then Gaia intermarried with Uranos, and produced the Titans and Titanides, namely, Ocean, Koeos, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe with golden coronet, and lovely Thethys.  Lastly came Kronos, or Time; with the Cyclopes and the hundred-headed giants.  All these children were hid in the earth by Uranos, who dreaded them, till by a contrivance of Gaia and Kronos, Uranos was dethroned, and the first age of the gods was terminated by the birth from the sea of the last and sweetest of the children of the Heaven, Aphrodite, or Immortal Beauty,—­the only one of this second generation who continued to reign on Olympus; an awful, beauteous goddess, says Hesiod, beneath whose delicate feet the verdure throve around, born in wave-washed Cyprus, but floating past divine Cythera.  Her Eros accompanied, and fair Desire followed.

Thus was completed the second generation of gods, the children of Heaven and Earth, called Titans.  These had many children.  The children of Ocean and Tethys were the nymphs of Ocean.  Hyperion and Theia had, as children, Helios, Selene and Eos, or Sun, Moon, and Dawn.  Koeos and Phoebe had Leto and Asteria.  One of the children of Krios was Pallas; those of Iapetus were Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Atlas.  Kronos married his sister Rhea, and their children were Hestia, Demeter and Here; Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus,—­all, except Hades or Pluto, belonging to the subsequent Olympian deities.

The Olympian gods, with their cousins of the same generation, have grown into persons, ceasing to be abstract ideas, or powers of nature.  Five were the children of Kronos, namely, Zeus, Poseidon, Here, Hestia, and Demeter; six were children of Zeus, Apollo and Artemis, Hephaestos and Ares, Hermes and Athene.  The twelfth of the Olympian group, Aphrodite, belonged to the second generation, being daughter of Uranos and of the Ocean.  Beauty, divine child of Sky and Sea, was conceived of as older than Power.

These are the three successive groups of deities; the second supplanting the first, the third displacing the second.  The earlier gods we must needs consider, not as persons, but as powers of nature, not yet humanized.[219] The last, seated on Olympus, are “fair humanities.”

But now, it is remarkable that there must have been, in point of fact, three stages of religious development, and three successive actual theologies in Greece, corresponding very nearly to these three legendary generations of gods.