What is the great gulf mentioned by Hesiod?

Question

In Hesiod's Theogony he mentions a place where the sources and ends of the Earth, Tartarus, Sea and Heaven are located:

And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of gloomy earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven, loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. It is a great gulf, and if once a man were within the gates, he would not reach the floor until a whole year had reached its end, but cruel blast upon blast would carry him this way and that. And this marvel is awful even to the deathless gods.

Later he repeats the first lines and states that the titans live beyond this great gulf:

And there, all in their order, are the sources and ends of the dark earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea and starry heaven, loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. And there are shining gates and an immoveable threshold of bronze having unending roots and it is grown of itself. And beyond, away from all the gods, live the Titans, beyond gloomy Chaos.

What is this great gulf described by Hesiod? I ask because i hadn't read anything about it before

Does it have anything to do with Chaos? I ask this because Hesiod mentions the gloomy Chaos in the last line.

Answer 1

Yes, this "great gulf" (χάσμα μέγ') and chaos are one and the same. Gulf, chasm, abyss, void, or gap is an older meaning (LSJ; Wiki) for a term that in modern English has come to mean something rather different: the opposite of order. In Hesiod's chaos, indeed, the start and end points of the other realms are said to be present "all in their order," as you quote above (lines 738 & 809, Evelyn-White trans.).

Chaos at line 116 is listed as the first of four primeval beings. At that point Hesiod has just announced his overall theme by bidding the Muses say how things (gods, Earth, rivers, etc.) first came into being (εἴπατε δ᾽, ὡς τὰ πρῶτα . . . γένοντο, 108). Possibly Hesiod considered some more or less empty space as prerequisite for anything's coming into being: After all, a few centuries later, Parmenides of Elea reasoned his way from the supposed impossibility of void or vacuum to the dismissal of all becoming, change, or motion as illusory. (The famous paradoxes of his pupil Zeno were offered in support of this conclusion.)

Norse myth similarly sets its cosmogony within a gap or chasm, Ginnungagap (Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, Chaps. 4-8).