The " rhapsodic theogony " in particular exercised great influence on Neoplatonism.
Yet the first indistinct germ of such an idea appears to emerge in combination with that of creation in some of the ancient systems of theogony.
Besides early work on Aristophanes, Pindar, and Sappho, whose character he vindicated, he edited Alcman (1815), Hipponax (1817), Theognis (1826) and the Theogony of Hesiod (1865), and published a Sylloge epigrammatum Graecorum (Bonn, 1828).
Such a theory must be mythical in form, and, after gods have arisen, is likely to be a theogony (0E6s, god) as well as a cosmogony (Babylonia, Egypt, Phoenicia, Polynesia).
In Hesiod (Theogony, 1013) he is the son of Odysseus and Circe, and ruler of the Tyrsenians; in Virgil, the son of Faunus and the nymph Marica, a national genealogy being substituted for the Hesiodic, which probably originated from a Greek source.