- Looks after
- The first thing to exist: the gap before the world
Chaos
Χάος
In Hesiod's Theogony, Chaos is the first thing that comes to be, and every other god descends from what follows.
Hesiod begins the story of the gods with a single line: first of all Chaos came to be, and then broad-breasted Earth. For the Greeks the word did not mean disorder. It meant a gap or yawning space, the opening in which the ordered world could appear.
Hesiod does not say what Chaos is, or that anyone made it. After Chaos came Gaia (Earth), Tartarus in the depths and Eros, the force of attraction. From Chaos itself came two children without a partner, Erebus (darkness) and Nyx (night). This is why the family tree of the gods on this site starts here.
Chaos was not worshipped and has no myths of its own. She is a starting point, and later writers such as Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, used the word for the shapeless mass before creation, which is closer to how English uses it today.
In later art and language
The word reached modern science by an odd route. The seventeenth-century chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont coined the word gas, apparently from the Greek chaos.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 116-125
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 1