Greek family tree

The Greek divine genealogy is the largest and most argued-over family tree in European literature, and the reason is that it was never a family tree in the first place. It is a merger document. Hundreds of independent cities each had their own gods, their own founding heroes and their own claims, and poets — Hesiod above all — spent centuries fitting them into one descent so that the whole Greek world could be shown to be related.

Three generations, and a coup in each

The spine of the tree is a sequence of violent successions.

The primordials come first: Chaos, then Gaia, Tartarus and Eros in Hesiod's ordering, with Nyx and Erebos following. These are barely persons. They generate by parthenogenesis or by pairing with each other, and they have almost no stories — Gaia is the exception, and she acts throughout as the instigator of every overthrow.

The Titans are the children of Gaia and Ouranos. Cronus castrates his father at his mother's instigation, takes power, and is overthrown in turn by his own youngest son after the ten-year war. Several Titans stay active and honoured afterwards — Helios, Prometheus, Leto, Hecate — which is why the tree does not simply stop at the war.

The Olympians are the third generation, and the tree's density is entirely on this level. The six children of Cronus and Rhea, and then the very large number of children Zeus has by goddesses, Titanesses, nymphs and mortal women.

Why one god has forty children

The bulge is political. Aristocratic families and whole cities traced descent from a god, usually Zeus, through a local heroine, and every such claim added an edge to the genealogy. Perseus at Argos, Heracles at Thebes, Minos in Crete, Helen at Sparta, Aeacus on Aegina: each of these is a real dynastic claim recorded as a love affair.

This is why the tree looks like the record of an appalling personal life. It is better read as a map of who claimed what, assembled by poets whose job was to make all the claims fit at once. Where two cities produced incompatible ancestries, both usually survived — which is why so many figures on this tree appear on more than one line.

The lines the sources fight over

Several disputes are marked on the diagram, and these are the ones that matter most.

• Aphrodite. Hesiod's Theogony has her born from the sea-foam where the severed genitals of Ouranos fell, which puts her a full generation above the Olympians. Homer's Iliad repeatedly calls her the daughter of Zeus and Dione. The two cannot be reconciled and both were current at once.
• Hephaestus. Hesiod has Hera bear him alone, without a father, in answer to Zeus producing Athena from his head. Homer treats him as the son of both. The parthenogenetic version is the one that makes the story of his throwing from Olympus intelligible.
• Eros. A primordial power at the beginning of everything in Hesiod, and the young son of Aphrodite in later poetry and in nearly all art. This is the same name doing two entirely different jobs at different dates.
• Hecate. Hesiod gives her an extraordinary passage of praise as a Titan honoured across all three realms, which sits oddly with everything else in the poem and has been suspected of being an insertion. Her parentage varies between sources.
• Persephone's paternity and the Erinyes' origin are both given differently in different texts, and the Orphic tradition supplies a whole alternative genealogy that contradicts Hesiod on purpose.

Reading the diagram

Solid lines are descent that the main sources agree on. Broken lines carry a note naming the works that disagree. Horizontal links are marriages, consorts and liaisons without distinction, because Greek sources frequently do not distinguish them and imposing modern categories would be a silent editorial decision.

Mortal heroes appear where their divine parentage places them, which means the tree crosses the line between gods and humans repeatedly — as Greek genealogy does. That crossing is the whole point of the exercise for the families who commissioned it.

The Orphic alternative

One further complication is worth knowing about before the diagram confuses you. A separate body of poetry attributed to Orpheus gave a rival cosmogony in which Time or Night comes first, a cosmic egg is split, and a first-born god called Phanes emerges — followed by a succession that culminates in Dionysus rather than Zeus, and in a story of that god's dismemberment by the Titans from whose ashes humanity is formed. This tree follows the Hesiodic scheme, which was the mainstream, and marks the Orphic divergences where they touch a figure who appears here.

What the tree is good for

Two things become obvious on a diagram that are invisible in a list. The first is how much of the pantheon is one generation deep: the twelve who matter most are siblings and children of one couple, which explains the constant tone of family argument in the Iliad. The second is how many major figures marry into the family rather than being born into it, and how many of those come from the defeated Titan line — a pattern of victors absorbing the previous order rather than erasing it.

For the wider context of how this material reached us and which poet arranged which part of it, the Greek tradition hub is the place to start; this page is the structure, not the history.