My soul brings me to say forms having changed into new bodies; you gods (for you have  changed them and also) breathe to my undertaking, and guide down my perpetual songs from the beginning of the world to my time.  

            Before both the land, sea, and the sky which covers all things. There was one aspect of nature in the entire orb, whom they say was Chaos: an undeveloped and confused large mass, not anything except an helpless weight brought together to the same place, discordant seeds of things not well joined. No one titan had yet provided light for the world up to now, nor was Phoebe renewing new horns by increasing, nor was the earth hung in the surrounding air having been balanced by her own weight, nor had Amphitrite stretched out her arms to the long edge of the earth; and as there was earth and sea and air in that place, so earth was unsteady, the waves that cannot be swum, air needing light; nothing was remaining in her own shape, and someone else was opposing someone else, because the body is one the cold things were fighting against the hot things, wet and dry, soft with hard, without weight and having weight.

           This god, better than nature, cleaved quarrel. Because he tore apart earth from sky and sea from the earth, and separated the clear sky from the dense. Which after he unrolled and removed them away from the blind mass, he binded disjoined things a place with agreeing peace: a fiery force of the arch heavens leapt forward without weight and made a place for herself in the upper castle; nearest is the air to her in lightness and position; below, the denser earth than these, drew down large elements and it was firmly squeezed by her own gravity;  the flowing around liquid enclosed the solid sphere. 

           So when, whoever of the gods had placed this heap he cut it apart and gathered the cuts into limbs, at the beginning the earth, and not not equal to a pierce of a part, ​he amassed these big appearances into the orb.