The Olympian gods are the ruling family of Greek myth, and their tree begins in violence between generations. The Titans Cronus and Rhea produce six children — Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus — but Cronus, fearing overthrow, swallows each at birth. Rhea hides the youngest; Zeus grows up, forces his father to disgorge his siblings, and leads them in war against the Titans. The victors divide the cosmos, and Zeus takes the sky, Olympus, and the role of father-king around whom the whole family orbits.
At the center sits the marriage of Zeus and Hera — brother and sister, king and queen, and one of mythology's most turbulent unions. Their children include Ares, god of war, Hebe, and Eileithyia, while Hephaestus is variously called their son or Hera's alone, conceived without a father in retaliation for Zeus's own solo births. For Zeus is endlessly unfaithful, and the tree branches out through his affairs: Athena springs fully armed from his head after he swallows the pregnant Metis; Apollo and Artemis are born to Leto; Hermes to Maia; Dionysus to the mortal Semele; and Persephone to his sister Demeter. Hera's jealousy of these children and their mothers drives much of the mythology's plot.
The genogram is a study in overlapping and irregular kinship. Aphrodite, in the tradition this tree follows, is not Zeus's daughter at all but older than the Olympians entirely — born from the sea-foam where the severed genitals of Uranus, Cronus's own father, fell. Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, is then carried off by her uncle Hades to be queen of the underworld, a marriage between close kin that the family both mourns and sanctions. Nearly every Olympian is simultaneously sibling, cousin, and rival to the others, and Zeus stands at the hub as father or brother to almost all of them.
This family tree follows Hesiod's Theogony, composed around 700 BCE — the earliest systematic account of where the Greek gods came from and how they are related. Later poets and local cults contradicted it freely; Aphrodite in particular is elsewhere made the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and this tree notes such forks rather than pretending they resolve. What Hesiod gave the Greeks was a divine genealogy that doubled as a theory of the world itself — each god a natural or social force, the whole quarrelsome household a map of why existence is ordered the way it is.
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