Now the goddess took on the form of a great dove and brooded over the waves. In time, she produced an enormous egg, the Universal Egg, which contained everything that was to come. At her request, the serpent Ophion coiled around it seven times to keep it warm until it hatched and split in two. From the egg tumbled out all the children of Eurynome: the sun, the moon, the planets, and stars. The last child was Earth with its wonderful features: mountains and valleys, rivers and streams, trees, plants, and all living creatures.

Eurynome and the serpent took up residence on Mount Olympus, until they quarreled. When he claimed that he, not she, had created everything, she banished him to a dark cave deep underground. Next the goddess created seven planetary powers, and set a Titan and Titaness to rule over each. Then she made the mortals. The first human was Pelasgus, who sprang from the soil of Arcadia. He became the ancestor of all mankind.

Well, that is a second version of creation, anyway. There is still another.

The marriage of Mother Earth and Father Heaven—whose names were Gaia and Uranus—brought forth the first inhabitants, huge creatures with all the force of volcanoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The first three were giants with a hundred hands and fifty heads. The next three were the gigantic Cyclopes, each with one eye, huge as a wheel, set in the middle of his forehead. The last were the Titans, as large and powerful as their brothers, but not all violent or destructive. Some of them, in fact, were to be the benefactors of a new race: mankind, yet to be invented.

Uranus hated his children. As soon as the monstrous giants were born, he imprisoned them in caverns deep underground. Earth was furious, and she appealed to the other children, the Cyclopes and the Titans, to do something about this outrage. Cronos, the youngest Titan, was the only one of her children who had enough courage to help his mother. He fought Uranus, wounding him horribly. From the blood that spilled onto the ground sprang the giants and the Furies.

Cronos was now the sovereign of Heaven and Earth, ruling with his queen, his sister Rhea. They became the parents of the gods, but Cronos too was a jealous father. The dying Uranus had predicted that Cronos would suffer the same fate as he: that one of his sons would dethrone him. But Cronos thought he had figured out a way to prevent this. As each of his children was born, he swallowed them—first the three daughters, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera; then his sons, Hades and Poseidon.

Now it was Rhea’s turn to be enraged at the father of her children. When the youngest, named Zeus, was born, she did not let Cronos see him, but quickly gave him to Mother Earth to care for. Then she wrapped the infant’s swaddling clothes around a stone, and Cronos swallowed it, thinking that it was the baby.

When Zeus was grown to manhood, he determined to take vengeance on his father and rescue his siblings. Secretly he returned home to confer with his mother Rhea, who agreed to help him. She gave Cronos a drink that made him sick, and he began to throw up. First the stone came up, then each of Zeus’s older brothers and sisters, unhurt and grateful to their younger brother for their deliverance. Understandably displeased about their treatment by Cronos, they begged Zeus to lead them in a war against the Titans.

In the long struggle for possession of Heaven and Earth that followed, the Titans and gods fought fiercely. The Titans, led by Atlas, were huge and more powerful than the young gods. They seemed most likely to win. But Zeus enlisted the aid of his father’s siblings, the Cyclopes and the hundred–handed monsters, who held a mighty grudge against their brother Cronos.

The Cyclopes were...