Order and chaos in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophical imagination

Abstract When did chaos come to be opposed to order? This paper considers the earliest references in the Western world to the concepts of “chaos” (Xάος) and “order” (κόσμος), understood as cosmological concepts; these terms are first attested in the epic Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod and the treatise On Nature of the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus of Croton. This paper argues by way of a close reading of these texts that originally chaos was instrumental to an orderly Universe and that this idea persisted in the formal development of cosmological texts in the Greek world. The paper concludes by suggesting that the first person in the Western world to make chaos the opposite of order, i.e. absence of order or disorder, was the Roman epic poet Ovid in his celebrated Metamorphoses some seven hundred years after Hesiod first accounted for the role of chaos in instantiating the world order.