the servant of the
 Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old and the blessed gods
 who inhabit Olympus , at once
 he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all; but the
 gifts of the goddesses soon turn him away from these.
 

 
 Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are
 for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy
 Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and
 earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging
 swell, and the gleaming
 stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them,
 givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they
 shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took
 many-folded Olympus . These
 things declare to me from the beginning, you Muses who dwell in the
 house of Olympus , and tell me which of them first came
 to be. In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed
 Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all Earth, in the cosmology of Hesiod, is a disk
 surrounded by the river Oceanus and floating upon a waste of
 waters. It is called the foundation of all (the
 qualification “the deathless ones...” etc. is an
 interpolation), because not only trees, men, and animals,
 but even the hills and seas (ll. 129, 131) are
 supported by it. the deathless ones who hold the peaks of
 snowy Olympus , and dim
 Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the
 deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise
 counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth
 Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether Aether is the bright, untainted upper atmosphere,
 as distinguished from Aer, the lower atmosphere of the
 earth. and Day,