My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies. 1 Ye Gods, (for you it was who changed them,) favor my attempts, 2 and bring down the lengthened narrative from the very beginning of the world, even to my own times. 3
God reduces Chaos into order. He separates the four elements, and disposes the several bodies, of which the universe is formed, into their proper situations.
At first, the sea, the earth, and the heaven, which covers all things, were the only face of nature throughout 10 I. 6-26 the whole universe, 2 I. 6-26 which men have named Chaos; a rude and undigested mass, 4 and nothing more than an inert weight, and the discordant atoms of things not harmonizing, heaped together in the same spot. No Sun 5 as yet gave light to the world; nor did the Moon, 6 by increasing, recover her horns anew. The Earth did not as yet hang in the surrounding air, balanced by its own weight, nor had Amphitrite 7 stretched out her arms along the lengthened margin of the coasts. Wherever, too, was the land, there also was the sea and the air; and thus was the earth without firmness, the sea unnavigable, the air void of light; in no one of them did its present form exist. And one was ever obstructing the other; because in the same body the cold was striving with the hot, the moist with the dry, the soft with the hard, things having weight with those devoid of weight.