Before the gods there was Chaos. Then came wide-bosomed Gaia, dim Tartarus in the depths, and Eros — and from the union of Earth and Sky were born the twelve Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred-handed ones, the first generation of the deathless cosmos.1
Out of Chaos
First of all Chaos came to be; then wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of the deathless ones, dim Tartarus in her depths, and Eros. From Chaos were born Erebus and black Night, and from Night in turn Aether and Day. Ovid tells it otherwise — not a yawning gap but a rude, unordered mass that a god sorted into sea, earth and sky.2
Earth and Sky
Gaia first bore starry Uranus, equal to herself, to cover her on every side; then the tall mountains and the barren sea. Lying with Uranus she bore the twelve Titans, the Cyclopes, and the hundred-handed ones — and their father hated them from the first.3
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How the centuries saw it
The Mutilation of Uranus by Saturn
Giorgio Vasari & Cristofano Gherardi, c. 1560
Ceiling painting from the Sala degli Elementi of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, rendering Hesiod's pivotal cosmogonic act: Cronus unmans his father Uranus with the adamantine sickle Gaia forged, and from the blood and foam the Erinyes, Giants and Aphrodite will spring. The image anchors the succession myth that opens the Theogony and the whole cosmic cycle shelf.
Saturn Devouring His Son
Peter Paul Rubens, 1636
Commissioned for the Torre de la Parada, Rubens depicts Cronus tearing into an infant son beneath his scythe — the devouring that Hesiod places between the castration of Uranus and the birth of Zeus. The painting visualizes the second age of the cosmos, when Rhea would save the youngest child with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes.