CHAOS

First of all, Chaos came to be. Hesiod sets nothing before it and gives it no maker: a yawning gap at the beginning of everything, out of which the cosmos opens. After it — but not from it — arose broad-breasted Gaia, the ever-sure seat of the immortals, and dim Tartarus in the depths of the earth. From Chaos itself were born Erebus and black Night, and Night, mingling in love with Erebus, bore their bright opposites, Aether and Day. 1Hesiod — Theogony 116–125⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above

Among the first beings that arose alongside the gap, Hesiod counts one more: Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men. In this oldest telling, the power of love is no child of any goddess but a primordial force as ancient as Chaos, Gaia and Tartarus, present before any generation so that generation itself could begin. 2Hesiod — Theogony 116–122⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above

The gap did not close when the world filled. When Zeus at last loosed his full strength against the Titans, hurling lightning until the life-giving earth crashed and burned, an astounding heat seized Chaos, and it seemed as if Earth and wide Heaven above were coming together again. And in the poem's map of the deep places, the defeated Titans dwell away from all the gods, beyond gloomy Chaos — the primal gap become the far boundary of the prison-world. 3Hesiod — Theogony 700, 813–814

Ovid keeps the name but dissolves the being. Before the sea and the lands and the sky that covers all, nature wore a single face, which men called Chaos: a rough, unordered mass, nothing but inert weight and the discordant seeds of things heaped together, where cold fought hot and wet fought dry. It took a god — and kinder nature — to settle the strife, cutting sky from earth and earth from water, and so unpack the world from the heap. 4Ovid — Metamorphoses 1.5–32⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above

Hyginus, in the genealogical preface to his Fabulae, does what no Greek poet had dared: he gives Chaos a mother. From Caligo — Mist — Chaos was born, and from Chaos and Caligo together came Night, Day, Erebus and Aether. The unparented first thing of Hesiod's cosmos becomes one link in a tidy Roman chain of descent, with something dimmer still standing behind it. 5Hyginus — Fabulae, preface (Theogony) 1–2⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above