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. They believed that the world arose out from a primal unity, and that this substance was the permanent base of all its being. The main object of the first efforts to explain the world remained the description of its growth, from a beginning. The notion of the temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality. And, like the earth, the ocean, and the upper air, it was also capable of being affected by Zeus's thunderbolts. 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.

Unambiguously 'born' from Chaos were Erebus and Nyx. 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). Primal Chaos was sometimes said to be the true foundation of reality, particularly by philosophers such as Heraclitus. 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.

Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics use the Greek term in the context of cosmogony. Gustave Doré - And many more too long, Embryos, and idiots, eremites, and friars, c.

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