They do not, however, bother to introduce the gods and goddesses who are their main characters, since readers and listeners would already have been familiar with them.Īround 700 BC, the poet Hesiod’s Theogony offered the first written cosmogony, or origin story, of Greek mythology. The poet Homer’s 8th-century BC epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, for example, tell the story of the Trojan War as a divine conflict as well as a human one.