Chaos, Combat and a God Named Desire

Hesiod's opening list draws two lines of comment that rarely meet. The first is structural. Nothing in these five lines fights, splits a body, or shapes a world from slain matter, which sets the passage apart from the creation accounts of Mesopotamia, where Marduk cuts Tiamat in two to make the sky, a scene this atlas also holds. Chaos, Earth, Tartarus and Eros simply come to be, one after another, with no combat and no maker named, a cosmogony built from a bare list rather than from an act. The second line of comment concerns Eros alone. Scholars have long puzzled over why desire counts among the four first things at all, since nowhere else in the poem does Eros act as an independent force the way Zeus or Aphrodite do. One reading treats him as a working cosmogonic principle, the drive that will push every later pairing of gods into offspring, and later Greek thought returned to the idea that Eros belongs among the oldest powers rather than the newest, a claim Plato has a speaker recall directly from Hesiod in the Symposium. A second reading treats Eros more modestly, as Hesiod's shorthand explanation for why a world of static first things becomes a world that generates history at all. The lines never say which reading is right, only that Eros stands beside Chaos, Earth and Tartarus at the very start.