Who Is Hesiod's Theogony?

Mythology on paper acted as a catalyst to a new way of thinking about the natural world, very differently to the way that Hesiod, writer of “The Theogony” a book of Greek myth with no sense of justification, thought. It affected the minds of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes to question nature, have an urge to find an explanation of life through “phusis” (402), or nature itself, and put forth a singular material that makes up the world. While Thales was the first and was able to give some form of evidence, Anaximander, and Anaximenes had more trouble fining justification, connecting them to myth and Hesiod.
Why might Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes thought processes be different then that of Hesiod’s? Maybe it’s because Greek society started to become different: people started to become literate. Before this, mythology was taught through songs and story telling. Once writing became more accessible, myths were written down. The questions of a “definitive order on the universe” (origins 402) …show more content…
While agreeing with Thales that there is one single material that made up everything, he did not agree with Thales’ idea surrounding water. He believed that what binds us, what is our one answer of nature, couldn’t be something as definite as water; it cannot be one of the “elements”. If it is a fixed material of its own, how can it make up everything else? Thus, Anaximander argued that the cause of everything, the answer to everything, was this indefinable stuff he called the boundless. He believed that the boundless was neither water, nor, any of the other “elements”, but some kind of substance that seems to be infinite. From the boundless arise all the heavens and the worlds within them, including the earth below our feet. Anaximander’s way of justifying his proposition was clear, yet started to lean closer to the justification used in myth as Hesiod did, for something that is boundless is difficult to