Characters
- Aether — bright upper air; child of Erebus and Nyx
- Chaos — grandparent source
- Erebus — Darkness; father with Nyx of Aether and Hemera
- Hemera — Day; child of Erebus and Nyx
- Nyx — mother; later mother of the grim brood (elsewhere)
Places
- Primordial cosmos — before Olympus and the Titan reign
Themes
Narrative
From Chaos, in Hesiod’s opening, came Erebus and black Night (Nyx). Night, joined in love with Erebus, bore Aether—the bright upper air—and Hemera, Day. Thus darkness couples with darkness to produce light: the first cosmological paradox of the *Theogony*. Day and shining air are not Chaos’s immediate children but grandchildren through Night’s embrace of Erebus. Later Night will bear a grim brood alone (Doom, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Blame, Distress, the Hesperides, the Moirae and Keres in one strand, Nemesis, Deceit, Affection, Old Age, Strife); this entry separates the earlier, luminous pairing—Aether and Hemera—from that fatherless catalogue of evils.