The Four First Things of the Greek Cosmos

Lines one hundred sixteen to one hundred twenty of Hesiod's Theogony name the four things that exist before any god is born from another god. Chaos comes to be first, a word that in Hesiod's Greek means a yawning gap or chasm rather than the disorder later ages read into it, a space opened between what will become sky and what will become earth. Next comes wide bosomed Earth, called the ever sure foundation of the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, already imagined as the ground the later gods will stand on before those gods exist to stand on it. Dim Tartarus follows, set in the depth of Earth's own wide paths, the pit that later becomes the prison of the defeated Titans. Last comes Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, described by the single power he holds over every god and every man alike, to unnerve the limbs and overcome the mind and wise counsels within them. None of the four is born from a parent or shaped by a maker. Each simply comes to be, a verb Hesiod repeats rather than varies, so the passage reads as an inventory of what was already there the moment anything could be said to exist, the stage on which the poem's long chain of births is about to begin.