Gaia stands at the beginning of Hesiod's cosmos, emerging near the start and bringing forth the sky, sea and mountains without a mate, and from her the whole divine genealogy descends. But she was more than a figure of cosmogony. As the solid ground on which everything rests and beneath which the dead lie, Ge or Gaia was called to witness the most binding oaths, sworn together with Sky and the powers below, and she received offerings of grain, honey and the firstfruits as the giver of increase. At Delphi one tradition made her the first holder of the oracle, before Themis and Apollo, so that prophecy itself was thought to rise out of the earth.
Gaia's most recognisable ancient image shows her rising only waist-high from the earth itself, half-emerged, an iconographic convention used both for the birth of Erichthonius, the early Athenian king whom Gaia hands up to Athena to raise, and for her appeal to Zeus on behalf of her giant offspring on the Pergamon Altar frieze, where a nearly life-size Gaia strains up out of the stone ground pleading for her children's lives even as they are cut down above her. The motif of the earth-goddess perpetually half-buried in her own element, never standing fully free of the ground she personifies, is one of the more visually distinctive conventions in Greek religious art.