n Greek mythical 

cosmogony, particularly in the Theogony (Origin of the Gods) of Hesiod (8th–7th

century BC), Chaos is the original dark void from which everything else appeared. First
came Gaia (Earth) and Eros (Love), then Erebus and his sister Nyx (Night). These siblings produced
children together which included Aether, Hemera(Day), and Nemesis.[4] Other cosmogonies, such as
the lost Heptamychos of Pherecydes of Syros, also have the gods being born from Chaos, but in a
different way.

Hesiod's cosmogony may have influenced the 6th century BC philosopher Anaximander,[5] although

this is debated.[6] Anaximander taught that the indefinite or apeiron was the source of all things.
[7]
 Some ideas similar to those of Hesiod also appear in the Hiranyagarbha of Vedic cosmogony, and
in the Babylonian Enûma Eliš.[8] The book ofGenesis in the Bible refers to the earliest conditions of the
Earth as "without form, and void",[9] while Ovid's Metamorphoses describes the initial state of the
Universe as a disorganised mixture of the four elements:

Rather a rude and indigested mass:

A lifeless lump, unfashion'd, and unfram'd,
Of jarring seeds; and justly Chaos nam'd.
No sun was lighted up, the world to view;
No moon did yet her blunted horns renew:
Nor yet was Earth suspended in the sky,
Nor pois'd, did on her own foundations lye:
Nor seas about the shores their arms had thrown;
But earth, and air, and water, were in one.
Thus air was void of light, and earth unstable,
And water's dark abyss unnavigable.[10]

[edit]Plato, Aristotle, and later philosophy

Plato expresses a similar idea to Ovid in his Timaeus, where he says:

As I said at first, when all things were in disorder God created in each thing in relation to itself, and in
all things in relation to each other, all the measures and harmonies which they could possibly receive.
For in those days nothing had any proportion except by accident; nor did any of the things which now
have names deserve to be named at all — as, for example, fire, water, and the rest of the elements.
All these the creator first set in order, and out of them he constructed the universe. [11]

Plato acknowledges a debt to Hesiod in this dialogue, but Hesiod's concept of Chaos has been
altered somewhat here,[12] and begins to approach the informal sense of chaos as disorder, both
within the constituents of matter, as well in their random distribution. [13]