WHAT IS THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF OUR CONCEPT OF CHAOS?

The term 'chaos' appears for the first time in world literature in a remarkable passage in Hesiod's Theogony, but almost certainly it does not have the meaning there that it has in modern languages; and this modern meaning cannot be found attested in any ancient Greek or Latin text before it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The lecture examines the figure of Chaos at the beginning of the cosmogony in the Theogony and considers the meaning that Hesiod may have plausibly been thought likely to have assigned to it there, and the various interpretations, explicit and implicit, found in the ancient and medieval exegetical traditions to this passage and in other comparable Greek cosmogonies. It then examines the passage in the Metamorphoses that may plausibly be claimed to be the source of the modern understanding of the concept and asks how Ovid might have come up with this usage.