Theogony 116-120

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.

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.