ABSTRACT
In his Theogony, Hesiod writes what the muses reveal to him—he organizes in genealogies the numerous gods and goddesses from various local pantheons, in order to present the foundations of a Greek panhellenic religion, in which the figure of Zeus already announces monotheism. Thales chose water, a stuff that, in the Hesiodic division of the universe, represents the source and limits of the worlds of the humans. Parmenides, who was writing some two hundred years after Hesiod, is the first western philosopher to propose an ontology. His philosophy shares much with Hesiod’s primordial Earth, the mother, in godly generations, of all that ‘is’, leaving aside the catalogue of abstract negative divinities, like Blame or Deceit, that are the offspring of Chaos and Night. When speaking of two goddesses, both bearing the same name of Eris, Hesiod presents a dialectic vision of theology: both good and evil, both truth and lies are part of the realm of the gods.
