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What the sources argue about here

• Hera: who the children were — and whether Hephaestus belongs here

  Her sole claim to a child conceived without Zeus rests on one Hesiodic passage, and Homer flatly contradicts it by treating the smith as the son of both. Ancient readers did not reconcile the two, and the difference decides whether she is a goddess capable of generating on her own terms or a wife whose retaliation was limited to complaint.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 927-929 · Homer, Iliad 14.338 and 1.578

• Aphrodite: who the parents were — and whether Zeus belongs here

  In Hesiod she comes up out of the foam that gathers around what Kronos cut from his father and threw into the sea, which places her a whole generation above the Olympians and gives her no mother at all. Homer, repeatedly and without argument, calls her the daughter of Zeus by the goddess Dione, who nurses her when Diomedes wounds her hand at Troy. Both accounts were current in the same century and neither poet shows any sign of knowing he is contradicting the other.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 188-200 · Homer, Iliad 5.370-430

• Aphrodite: who the partner was — and whether Hephaestus belongs here

  The song Demodocus sings in the Odyssey makes her Hephaestus' wife and catches her with Ares in a net of unbreakable wire. Hesiod gives the smith a different wife entirely - Aglaia, youngest of the Graces - and never mentions the affair. The marriage everybody knows is therefore one poem's arrangement rather than a fixed fact of the pantheon.

  Argued between: Homer, Odyssey 8.266-366 · Hesiod, Theogony 945-946

• Hephaestus: who the parents were — and whether Zeus belongs here

  Two fathers or none. Hesiod says Hera bore him alone, in anger and without the act of love, as her reply to Athena's birth out of Zeus's head. In the Iliad he calls Zeus father outright and is thrown from Olympus by him for taking his mother's side. The choice is not cosmetic: the fatherless version is what makes his expulsion legible as a mother's rejection of a son she made by herself.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 927-929 · Homer, Iliad 1.571-579

• Dionysus: who the parents were — and whether Persephone belongs here

  Theban tradition and the Bacchae give him Zeus and Semele, with the burning of the mother and the thigh-birth that follows. The Orphic poems give him Zeus and Persephone, dismembered as the child Zagreus by the Titans, and humanity formed from their ashes. Diodorus, faced with the problem, simply reports three separate Dionysoi. Only one of these accounts has a mystery cult and a doctrine of the soul attached.

  Argued between: Euripides, Bacchae 1-3 · the Orphic theogonies (Olympiodorus, In Phaedonem) · Diodorus Siculus 3.62

• Persephone: who the parents were — and whether Rhea belongs here

  The Hymn assumes what everyone assumes: Zeus and Demeter. Orphic theogony puts a different mother in the position - Rhea, who is then identified with Demeter and is also her own daughter's grandmother - and goes on to have Zeus father Dionysus on Persephone. That is not a variant of the Eleusinian story but a rival theology using the same names, and the two genealogies cannot be drawn on one chart without a note.

  Argued between: Homeric Hymn to Demeter · the Orphic Rhapsodies (in Damascius and Proclus)

• Hecate: who the parents were — and whether Nyx belongs here

  Hesiod makes her the daughter of the Titans Perses and Asteria and then gives her an extraordinary sixty-line hymn of praise that fits nothing else in the poem, which is why editors have suspected the passage of being an insertion for two hundred years. Bacchylides calls her a daughter of Night instead, and the Orphic material attaches her variously to Demeter and to Zeus. She is one of the few major figures whose place in the tree was never settled.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 409-411 · Bacchylides, fragment 1B · Orphic Hymn 1

• Eros: who the parents were — and whether Aphrodite belongs here

  Hesiod lists him among the first things that came into being, alongside Chaos and Earth, when there was nobody available to be his parent. Later poetry demotes him to Aphrodite's small son, and the sources cannot agree whose son: Simonides gives him to Aphrodite and Ares, other poets to Aphrodite and Hermes or Ouranos. Plato's Symposium stages the argument openly and then has Diotima deny he is a god at all, making him the child of Resource and Poverty conceived at Aphrodite's birthday feast.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 116-122 · Plato, Symposium 178b and 203b · Simonides, fragment 575

• Nemesis: who the children were — and whether Helen belongs here

  The lost epic Cypria made her the mother of Helen: pursued by Zeus, she fled through a sequence of animal shapes into the sea, was caught as a goose, and laid the egg that Leda merely received. The Homeric and Spartan tradition knows only Leda. Pausanias, describing the shrine at Rhamnous, reports the Cypria version and its rival side by side and declines to choose.

  Argued between: the Cypria · Homer, Odyssey 11.298-300 · Pausanias 1.33

• Helios: whether this is one figure or two — and whether Apollo belongs here

  Homer and Hesiod keep the sun and the archer entirely apart: Helios drives, sees everything and owns cattle, while Apollo does none of these things. The identification of the two is not securely attested before the fifth century, and it becomes standard only in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, by which point Apollo has absorbed the chariot and the epithet Phoebus is read as solar. Every ancient text that treats them as one is younger than every text that treats them as two.

  Argued between: Homer, Odyssey 12 · Euripides, Phaethon · the Orphic Hymn to Apollo

• Selene: whether this is one figure or two — and whether Artemis belongs here

  Three separate goddesses stand behind the single moon-goddess of modern handbooks. Hesiod gives Selene her own Titan parentage; Artemis is not lunar in Homer or in archaic cult; Hecate is neither. The composite is visible only in later syncretism - the magical papyri address a triple goddess by all three names in one breath - and reading it back into archaic Greece removes three distinct cults to make one tidy one.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 371-374 · the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM IV) · Plutarch, De facie

• Nyx: who the parents were — and whether Chaos belongs here

  Hesiod puts Chaos first and Night second, born of it along with Erebus. The Orphic tradition reverses the order and makes Night the first principle of all, the one from whom the sky itself descends and the one whose oracles instruct Zeus. The Derveni commentator, writing in the fourth century BCE, is already treating that priority as doctrine. Nothing in the Hesiodic scheme can accommodate it, which is the point of it.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 116-125 · the Derveni papyrus · the Orphic Rhapsodies (in Damascius, De principiis)

• Uranus: who the children were — and whether Aphrodite belongs here

  Whether Aphrodite belongs on his line at all is the oldest open question in Greek genealogy. Hesiod generates her from his castrated flesh; Homer assigns her to Zeus and Dione and never connects her with Ouranos. Plato's Pausanias resolves it by inventing two goddesses - Aphrodite Ourania from the one account, Aphrodite Pandemos from the other - and Greek cult then went on using both titles.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony · Homer, Iliad · Plato, Symposium 180d

• Prometheus: who the parents were — and whether Gaia belongs here

  Hesiod makes him a son of the Titan Iapetus by the Oceanid Clymene, one of four brothers whose fates map four kinds of failure. The Prometheus Bound gives his mother as Themis and then states that Themis and Gaia are one being under two names - which moves him a generation upward and, more importantly, explains where his foreknowledge comes from. Whether Aeschylus even wrote the play is itself disputed.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 507-511 · Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 209-210

• Asclepius: who the parents were

  Pindar and the Epidaurian priesthood give him Apollo and Coronis of Thessaly, killed on her pyre with the child cut living from her. Messenia claimed a different mother - Arsinoe, daughter of Leucippus - and therefore a different birthplace and a different founding cult. Pausanias reports that the question was put to Delphi, which is what a city does when a genealogy is worth money.

  Argued between: Pindar, Pythian 3 · Pausanias 2.26.3-7 · the Homeric Hymn to Asclepius

• the Moirai: who the parents were — and whether Zeus belongs here

  The Theogony gives them twice, about seven hundred lines apart, and the two answers are incompatible. First they are borne by Night, without a father, in that catalogue of powers no one can bargain with; later they are the daughters of Zeus and Themis, given by their father the greatest honour. If Zeus fathered fate he can presumably alter it, which is precisely what the rest of Greek literature says he cannot do.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 211-217 · Hesiod, Theogony 901-906

• the Erinyes: who the parents were — and whether Nyx belongs here

  In Hesiod they spring from the drops of blood that fell on Earth when Kronos unmanned his father, which makes them the direct issue of a crime against a parent - the offence they exist to punish. Aeschylus, staging them in Athens a quarter of a millennium later, has them sing that they are the children of Night and name no father whatever. Both versions were in circulation in the same city.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 183-187 · Aeschylus, Eumenides 321-322

• Heracles: whether this is one figure or two

  Herodotus went to Tyre specifically to settle it and came back reporting two Heracleses: an ancient god whose worship he traced to Egypt and Phoenicia, and the much later son of Amphitryon, to whom the Greeks sacrifice as a hero. He recommends sacrificing to both, in two different ways. Pindar's compressed phrase hero-god says the same thing without choosing, and the funeral pyre on Oeta is the point at which the tradition tries to have it both ways.

  Argued between: Herodotus, Histories 2.43-44 · Pindar, Nemean 3.22

• Theseus: who the parents were — and whether Poseidon belongs here

  Athens never chose between them and did not want to. Bacchylides has him dive to the sea floor to prove Poseidon is his father, and comes back dry, garlanded by Amphitrite. The political tradition needs him to be the legitimate son of King Aegeus, because his claim to the throne rests on it. Plutarch's solution is to have Aethra lie with the king and the god on the same night, which resolves nothing and preserves everything.

  Argued between: Bacchylides 17 · Plutarch, Life of Theseus 3-6 · Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.15

• Ariadne: who the partner was

  In the Odyssey Artemis kills her on the island of Dia on Dionysus' testimony, before anything resembling a marriage. In Hesiod, Dionysus takes her as his wife and Zeus makes her deathless and unageing. One is a woman destroyed in transit between two men; the other is a goddess. The familiar version, in which Theseus simply abandons her on Naxos and Dionysus arrives, sits between them and is the least well attested of the three.

  Argued between: Homer, Odyssey 11.321-325 · Hesiod, Theogony 947-949

• Helen: who the parents were

  Sparta needed her to be Leda's daughter, because her brothers the Dioscuri and her marriage to Menelaus depend on it, and Homer supplies exactly that. The epic tradition behind the Cypria transferred the birth to Nemesis and left Leda as a foster mother. Euripides, who elsewhere sends the real Helen to Egypt and gives Troy a phantom, has her narrate the egg in her own prologue as though it were common knowledge - and treats it as the source of all her trouble.

  Argued between: Homer, Odyssey 4 and 11 · the Cypria · Euripides, Helen 17-21

• Pegasus: who the parents were — and whether Poseidon belongs here

  Hesiod is explicit: he leaps from the neck of Medusa at the moment of the beheading, fathered on her by Poseidon in a soft meadow among spring flowers. Later mythographers detach him from that paternity and have him spring from earth soaked with the Gorgon's blood, which makes him a birth of the ground rather than a son of the sea god. The Corinthian material, where Poseidon and the horse belong together, prefers Hesiod.

  Argued between: Hesiod, Theogony 280-283 · the scholia to Pindar, Olympian 13