Then she gave birth to the mountains, where the Nymphs live in the hills and the forests. Gaia's first such child was Uranus, the starry heavens that fit around her perfectly and that provide a home for the immortals. Gaia, the divine personification of the earth, gave birth to three offspring without any sexual concourse. Erebos and Nyx made love and from their union came Aether, the air, and Hemera, the day. Next came Tartaros, the depth in the Earth where condemned dead souls go to their punishment, and Eros, the love that overwhelms bodies and minds, and Erebos, the darkness, and Nyx, the night. Out of it first emerged Gaia, the earth, which is the foundation of all. In the beginning, there was Chaos, the abyss. Her name survives appropriately in the word 'Geology', the study of the Earth (Ge-ology), and in other words that begin with 'geo'. The title of the story below is 'Gaia', the poetic version of the name of the female deity who personified the Earth for the ancient Greeks. As the title of the book-length poem would suggest, Ovid's Metamorphoses is about change, which certainly happens in his story of the origins of humans, which comes from Greek mythology. The last two paragraphs of this account come from Book I of the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid. An accompanying chart titled 'The Ancient Greek Gods' shows the genealogy of some of these deities. The rest of the Theogony, like the rest of the account below, is concerned with the deities and their interactions. Thus the origin of the Earth, or of the Earth personified by deities, that is given here in the first two paragraphs below comes from just Lines 115 to 134 of the Theogony, which is 1030 lines long. The Theogony is mostly concerned with the origin of the Greek gods. He makes this identification again at Amyklai and at Olympia, upon looking at statues and illustrations where Eos (Hemera) is present.Creation Stories Much of this account of the origin of the Earth and its divinities comes from the Theogony written by Hesiod, a Greek poet estimated to have lived around 700 BC, and thus roughly at the time of Homer. Pausanias makes this identification with Eos upon looking at the tiling of the royal portico in Athens, where the myth of Eos and Kephalos is illustrated. Pausanias seems to confuse Hemera with Eos when saying that she carried Cephalus away. Nyx and Hemera draw near and greet one another as they pass the great threshold of bronze: and while the one is about to go down into the house, the other comes out at the door.' Hyginus lists their children as Uranus, Gaia, and Thalassa (the primordial sea goddess), while Hesiod only lists Thalassa as their child.Īccording to Hesiod's Theogony, Hemera left Tartarus just as Nyx entered it when Hemera returned, Nyx left: Hemera was the female counterpart of her brother and consort, Aether (Light), but neither of them figured actively in myth or cult. The poet Bacchylides states that Nyx and Chronos are the parents, but Hyginus in his preface to the Fabulae mentions Chaos as the mother/father and Nyx as her sister. Hemera is remarked upon in Cicero's De Natura Deorum, where it is logically determined that Dies (Hemera) must be a god, if Uranus is a god.

Hemera mythology