Hesiod and the
pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of
cosmogony. Hesiod's Chaos has been interpreted as either "the gaping void above the Earth created when Earth and Sky are separated from their primordial unity" or "the gaping space below the Earth on which Earth rests". Passages in Hesiod's
Theogony suggest that Chaos was located below Earth but above
Tartarus. Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as
Heraclitus.
Early Greece In
Hesiod's
Theogony, Chaos was the first thing to exist: "at first Chaos came to be" (or was), but next (possibly out of Chaos) came
Gaia,
Tartarus, and
Eros (elsewhere the name
Eros is used for a son of
Aphrodite). Unambiguously "born" from Chaos were
Erebus and
Nyx. For Hesiod, Chaos, like Tartarus, though personified enough to have borne children, was also a place, far away, underground and "gloomy", beyond which lived the
Titans; and, like the earth, the ocean, and the upper air, it was also capable of being affected by Zeus's thunderbolts. The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of
immortality. The main object of the first efforts to explain the world remained the description of its growth, from a beginning. They believed that the world arose out from a primal unity, and that this substance was the permanent base of all its being.
Anaximander claims that the origin is
apeiron (the unlimited), a divine and perpetual substance less definite than the common elements (
water,
air,
fire, and
earth) as they were understood to the early Greek philosophers. Everything is generated from
apeiron, and must return there according to necessity. A conception of the nature of the world was that the earth below its surface stretches down indefinitely and has its roots on or above
Tartarus, the lower part of the underworld. In a phrase of
Xenophanes, "The upper limit of the earth borders on air, near our feet. The lower limit reaches down to the "apeiron" (i.e. the unlimited)." The sources and limits of the earth, the sea, the sky,
Tartarus, and all things are located in a great windy-gap, which seems to be infinite, and is a later specification of "chaos".
Classical Greece In
Aristophanes's comedy
Birds, first there was Chaos, Night, Erebus, and Tartarus, from Night came Eros, and from Eros and Chaos came the race of birds. In
Plato's
Timaeus, the main work of Platonic cosmology, the concept of chaos finds its equivalent in the Greek expression
chôra, which is interpreted, for instance, as shapeless space (
chôra) in which material traces (
ichnê) of the elements are in disordered motion (Timaeus 53a–b). However, the Platonic
chôra is not a variation of the
atomistic interpretation of the origin of the world, as is made clear by Plato's statement that the most appropriate definition of the chôra is "a receptacle of all becoming – its wetnurse, as it were" (Timaeus 49a), notabene a receptacle for the creative act of the demiurge, the world-maker.
Aristotle, in the context of his investigation of the concept of space in physics, "problematizes the interpretation of Hesiod's chaos as 'void' or 'place without anything in it'. Aristotle understands chaos as something that exists independently of bodies and without which no perceptible bodies can exist. 'Chaos' is thus brought within the framework of an explicitly physical investigation. It has now outgrown the mythological understanding to a great extent and, in Aristotle's work, serves above all to challenge the atomists who assert the existence of empty space."
Roman tradition For
Ovid, (43 BC – 17/18 AD), in his
Metamorphoses, Chaos was an unformed mass, where all the elements were jumbled up together in a "shapeless heap". According to the
Fabulae (c. 2nd century AD), attributed to
Hyginus: "From Mist (
Caligo) came Chaos. From Chaos and Mist, came Night (
Nox), Day (
Dies), Darkness (
Erebus), and
Aether." An
Orphic tradition apparently had Chaos as the son of
Chronus and
Ananke. ==Old Testament studies==