5Before the sea and the lands and the sky that covers all, nature had one face throughout the whole world, which men called chaos: a rough and unordered mass, nothing but inert weight, and, heaped together in the same place, the warring seeds of things ill joined. 10No Titan yet supplied the world with light, nor did Phoebe renew her new horns by waxing, nor did the earth hang in the air poured around it, balanced by its own weight, nor had Amphitrite stretched out her arms along the long margin of the lands; 15And though there was air there, and land and sea and aether too, 16Even so, the land was unstable, the water unswimmable, the air lacking light: nothing kept its own form, and one thing stood in the way of another, because in a single body cold things fought with hot, moist with dry, soft with hard, things without weight with things that had weight.
21This strife a god and kindlier nature settled. 22For he cut off the lands from the sky and the waters from the lands, and separated the clear sky from the thick air. 24After he had unrolled these and taken them out of the blind heap, he bound them, set apart in their places, in harmonious peace. 26The fiery, weightless force of the vaulted sky flashed out and made itself a place on the highest summit: next to it in lightness and in place is the air: denser than these, the earth drew the heavy elements with it and was pressed down by its own weight: the encircling water took possession of the last place and confined the solid world.
32When he, whichever of the gods he was, had thus arranged that mass and divided it, and reduced what he had divided into members, first, so that it should not be unequal on any side, he wound the earth into the shape of a great ball. 36Then he spread out the seas and ordered them to swell with the rushing winds and to surround the shores of the encircled earth. 38He added also springs and vast pools and lakes, and bound the descending rivers with slanting banks; these, differing in their places, are partly swallowed by the earth itself, partly reach the sea and, received into the plain of freer water, beat against shores instead of banks.
43He ordered the plains too to stretch out, the valleys to sink, the woods to be covered with leaves, the stony mountains to rise. 45And as two zones cut the sky on the right and as many on the left, and a fifth is hotter than these, so the care of the god marked off the enclosed mass with the same number, and as many regions are stamped upon the earth. 49Of these, the one in the middle is not habitable for the heat: deep snow covers two: between the two he placed as many more and gave them a temperate climate, flame mixed with cold. 52Over these hangs the air.
52And by as much as the weight of water is lighter than the weight of earth, by so much is the air heavier than fire. 54There he ordered the mists, there the clouds to settle, and the thunder that would trouble human minds, and the winds that make lightning flashes along with thunderbolts. 57To these too the maker of the world did not grant possession of the air at random: even now they are scarcely prevented, though each governs his blasts in a different tract, from tearing the world apart: so great is the discord of the brothers. 61Eurus withdrew to the Dawn and the Nabataean kingdoms, and to Persia and the ridges that lie beneath the morning rays; 63the evening and the shores that grow warm under the setting sun are nearest to Zephyrus: Scythia and the Seven Plough-oxen