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Hesiod’s Theogony provides one of the most widely authoritative accounts of the origin of the cosmos, but his account has always been challenged by rivals claiming to be older, wiser, and better, and the name of Orpheus has always been privileged in the evidence for ancient rivals to Hesiod. The Orphic accounts play their variations on the Hesiodic themes, riffing in different ways on the idea of the ultimate origin of the cosmos; the processes of reproduction by which subsequent entities were generated; the conflicts between these divinities that created the changes from the original state to the current one; the way in which humans entered the story; and the final resolution of the conflicts and changes that created the current, normal order of Zeus. The shocking innovations they introduce in the images of the theogonic narrative serve to bolster the authority of their often less shockingly innovative cosmological ideas.

In ancient Rome, the epic is much occupied with beginnings and endings, foundation and destruction. The history of Roman epic begins with the translation into Latin of Homer's Odyssey by Livius Andronicus in the later third century BCE. Roman epic developed as part of a Hellenistic culture adopted with a high degree of self-consciousness by a nation anxious to define itself within an international community of Greek and Italian states. It was by no means the sole, and perhaps not at first even the most important, Greek literary form to be adopted in Rome. Disputed is the relationship between epic poet and patron. A genre that tells stories about national origins and military power is also self-conscious about its own history and authority. This article examines the social and political background against which to read the six surviving epics of the first 120 or 130 years of the Principate: Virgil's Aeneid, Lucan's Civil War, Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica, Statius's Thebaid and Achilleid, and Silius Italicus's Punica. It also discusses the link between narrative epic and didactic poetry.

The Hesiodic view of the supernatural varies within individual compositions, in tune with oral-traditional poetic practice. The flexibility and dramatization inherent in the medium led ancient philosophers to treat Hesiod and Homer as deficient “theology.” Taken as religious fictions, with attention to their diction and devices, the Hesiodic poems are distinct from the Homeric in orientation toward and expressions about the divine world. The Theogony frames itself as a praise poem to Zeus but must downplay the self-interested character of such compositions. Zeus’s sovereignty is depicted in diachronic terms as wisely integrating earlier powers. The Works and Days deals synchronically with the upshot of the world-shaping Prometheus and Pandora complex, projecting onto the mythic level its tale of contemporary fraternal strife and advice for living under a regime of divine justice.