Chapter III.—Appion Proceeds to Interpret the
Myths.
“There was once a time when nothing existed
but chaos and a confused mixture of orderless elements, which were as
yet simply heaped together. This nature
testifies, and great men have been of opinion that it was so. Of
these great men I shall bring forward to you him who excelled them all
in wisdom, Homer, where he says, with a reference to the original
confused mass, ‘But may you all become water and
earth;’ implying that from
these all things had their origin, and that all things return to their
first state, which is chaos, when the watery and earthy substances are
separated. And Hesiod in the Theogony
says, ‘Assuredly chaos was the very first to come into
being.’ Now, by
‘come into being,’ he evidently means that chaos came into
being, as having a beginning, and did not always exist, without
beginning. And Orpheus likens chaos to an egg, in which was the
confused mixture of the primordial elements. This chaos, which
Orpheus calls an egg, is taken for granted by Hesiod, having a
beginning, produced from infinite matter, and originated in the
following way.