Erebus

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Erebus — Greek Erebos — is the primordial darkness of early Greek cosmogony: one of the first beings to come into existence, and also the name of the gloom that lies between the world of the living and the depths of the dead. The word does double duty, naming a god and naming a place, and the Greeks do not seem to have felt the need to keep the two apart. To say that a dead man has gone into Erebos is, in the same breath, to name the dark he passes through and the power that is that dark. The shadow and the deity are one noun.

Nyx (Night), the consort of Erebos, surrounded by the creatures of the dark — watercolor by Gustave Moreau, c. 1880, Pushkin Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

That fusion is older than any mythographer’s attempt to tidy it. The name itself carries it. Erebos descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning darkness — the same root that surfaces, far afield, in the Sanskrit rajas, the murky lower air, in the Gothic riqis and the Old Norse røkkr, the dusk in which the world’s colors fail. The Greek word inherits both senses at once: the quality, darkness, and the locale, the place of nether dark. When a poet reaches for it, he is not choosing between a substance and a region; the language has already decided that the lowest dark is a thing one can be, and a thing one can enter.

Hesiod’s order: darkness first

The fullest early account is Hesiod’s Theogony, the eighth- or seventh-century poem that set the standard genealogy of the gods and, in setting it, fixed the sequence in which the cosmos comes to be. Hesiod does not begin with a maker. He begins with a gap. First of all, he sings, came Chaos — not disorder in the later sense but a yawning chasm, a sheer opening; the word is kin to the verb for gaping wide. After Chaos came broad-breasted Earth, and dim Tartarus in the depths, and Eros. And then, out of Chaos, came forth Erebos and black Night, Nyx; and from the union of Erebos and Nyx were born Aither, the bright upper air, and Hemera, Day.

Hesiod, whose Theogony fixed the genealogy in which Erebos comes forth from Chaos, shown with the Muse — oil on wood by Gustave Moreau, 1891, Musée d’Orsay, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The sequence is itself an argument, and a startling one. Darkness comes first. Light is not the antagonist that the dark must be cleared away to reveal; light is the offspring of the dark — Aither and Day are children begotten of Erebos upon Night. The lit world does not break in upon a prior gloom from outside. It is generated from within it, by descent, the way every later thing in the poem is generated: by parentage. There is no creating word here, no fiat, no dividing of light from darkness by an external will. The order of being is the order of birth, and birth runs from the obscure to the radiant, not the reverse.

This is worth dwelling on, because it inverts a habit so deep that it is easy to read past. In much later cosmology — and in the everyday intuition that survives in our metaphors — darkness is privation, the mere absence of light, and so secondary by definition: one cannot subtract what was never added. Hesiod’s grammar runs the other way. Erebos and Nyx are primary, substantial, generative; Aither and Hemera are the derived terms, the bright remainder cast off by the dark in the act of mating. The cosmos lightens as it ages. To stand in the day, on this reckoning, is to stand at one remove from the origin, in the grandchildren of the gap. Scholars who read the poem closely — Mitchell Miller among them, parsing the semantics of that opening first of all — have pressed exactly this point: the order of generation is not idle scene-setting but a claim about what is fundamental and what is downstream of it.

The contrast with the celestial light is sharp, and the genealogy keeps the two firmly apart. The principle of light-above belongs not to this primal household but to the next great generation, to the Titan Hyperion, the watcher on high who fathers the Sun and the Moon and the Dawn — light individuated, given faces and a daily course across the sky. Erebos is the prior term, the dark out of which even the upper air, Aither, is first squeezed before any luminary crosses it. Hyperion’s children rise and set; Erebos neither rises nor sets, because he is what they rise out of and return into. The two name the poles of the early Greek world-picture — light above, dark below; the generated and the generative — and the poem is careful never to let the lower fold into the upper. Aither, the bright air, is Erebos’s child but lives in the sky; the darkness stays beneath, retaining its station at the root of things even as its luminous offspring climb away from it.

Erebos sits, in this scheme, at the hinge between the very first things and the ordered world that follows. He is a child of the gap and a father of the light — the bridge across which the bright air is handed up out of the chasm. His partner Nyx, black Night, goes on in the same poem to bear a long brood of powers without any father at all: Doom and Fate, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams, Blame and Woe, the Hesperides, the Moirai who allot good and ill. Erebos is not credited with that swarm; his recorded issue is the luminous pair. The darkness, in Hesiod, is fertile chiefly toward the light.

Variant genealogies

The broad shape held; the details moved. Later writers kept Erebos near the head of the family tree but rearranged the branches, and the disagreements are themselves instructive about how loosely these primordial figures were held. A theogony summarized by the sixth-century Neoplatonist Damascius — drawing on earlier and now-shadowy authorities, and corroborated in part by the second-century apologist Athenagoras — opens not with a gap but with primordial Water and Mud, from which rises a serpentine figure of Unaging Time, Chronos; and it is Time who generates Aither, Chaos, and Erebos together, before laying the world-egg from which a first-born god breaks forth. Here Erebos is no longer Chaos’s child but Time’s, and stands beside Chaos rather than after it. The dating of this scheme is disputed — some place its composition not long after the third century BCE, others as late as the second century CE — but the mythographic point is plain: Erebos is a fixed term in early Greek cosmogony, a name the cosmos cannot do without near its beginning, while his exact parentage and his neighbors shift from poem to poem.

Rome: the deity and the region

The Roman poets carried the name into Latin without translating it, and there the double life of god-and-place became, if anything, more pronounced. Erebus in Latin verse names both a deity in the genealogies and a quarter of the underworld in the narrative — and the two senses sit side by side on the page. The mythographer Hyginus, in the preface to his Fabulae, gives a Latin family tree in which Erebus, with Night, fathers a whole population of grim and shadowed abstractions: Fate and Old Age, Death and Sleep, the tribe of Dreams, Toil and Envy and Misery, and, oddly among them, Love. Cicero, in the third book of On the Nature of the Gods, runs through a closely matching catalog — Aether and Day from Night and Erebus, and after them the same dim procession of Death and Toil and Fraud and the Fates — not as devout theology but as a survey of what the poets and the genealogists had made of the divine names. The darkness, in this Roman reckoning, is the patriarch of everything that haunts the edges of a mortal life.

One strand of that Latin pedigree deserves a careful word, because it is easy to collapse. Among the children Hyginus and Cicero assign to Night and Erebus are the Somnia, the Dreams. But the dream-shaper Morpheus, the figure who would carry the dream into later imagination, is not drawn from that genealogy. He is a far later, purely literary invention, lodged by Ovid in the Metamorphoses not in the house of Erebus but in the cave of Sleep — a different arrangement, downstream by centuries. The kinship of darkness and dreaming is genuinely old, written into the family of Night; the particular god of dreams is not. The one belongs to cosmogony, the other to a poet’s late embellishment of it.

As a place, Erebus is the threshold dark — the shadowed passage the dead enter on the way down, often used loosely as a name for the underworld as a whole.

Odysseus summoning the dead from Erebos to consult the seer Tiresias — Lucanian red-figure calyx-krater attributed to the Dolon Painter, c. 380 BC, Cabinet des Médailles, Paris; photo by Jastrow, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Homer sends souls there: in the great descent of the Odyssey, the shades of the dead come crowding up out of Erebos at the world’s edge, where the sun never throws a beam; in the Iliad it is the murk below in which dread powers keep their seat. The usage rarely carries much theological weight. A Greek could say Erebos for the gloom under the earth the way one might say the dark without meaning a named god by it — the word stood ready for the lower murk whether or not a deity was in view. The Latin poets inherited that elasticity. In Virgil’s underworld the lowest reaches are the depths of Erebus; in later epic a poet can style the king of the dead simply the lord of Erebus, letting the region’s name stand in for its sovereign — though that sovereign is Hades himself, into whose realm Erebos is only the dark forecourt and the descent, and never the throne. The reach of that realm runs all the way down to where Persephone holds her doubled court between the upper light and the deep; Erebos is the first dark a soul crosses on the road toward her.

The realm beyond Erebos: Persephone overseeing Sisyphus and his stone in the underworld — Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the Swing Painter, c. 530 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich; photo by Bibi Saint-Pol, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Placed at the origin, absent from the stories

Unlike the Olympians — and unlike the great chthonic powers who received real worship — Erebos was never the object of cult, and no story turns on a choice he makes or a wrong he avenges. He never schemes, never loves beyond that single cosmogonic union, never appears as a character with wants. He is named, placed, and made a father, and there the record very nearly stops: a figure of cosmogony and poetry, invoked to explain where things came from and to name the dark a soul goes into, rather than a power approached with offerings.

That thinness is not an oversight; it is of a piece with what he is. The powers the Greeks actually approached with prayer and sacrifice were powers that could be moved — that withheld rain or granted it, that closed the womb or opened it, that could be angered and appeased. Erebos can be none of these. He is not a will at the far end of an offering; he is a condition the world was in before there were wills to address. One does not petition the dark for anything, any more than one petitions the chasm or the day; one simply finds oneself born downstream of it, and bound, in the end, to return.

This is the recurring move of early Greek thought, and Erebos is one of its cleanest instances. Again and again the tradition placed something formless and dark at the origin — Chaos the gap, Nyx the night, Erebos the gloom — and then derived the ordered, lit world from it by descent, the way a family is derived from its forebears. The primordial names are doing cosmological work in the only idiom the poets had, which was the idiom of persons and parentage: to say how the world came to be at all, one said who begot whom. Whether such figures were ever the warm objects of belief, or were from the first closer to the apparatus a singer needed in order to begin — a way of giving the unsayable a genealogy — is not something the sources will resolve, and they read, on the whole, less like the record of a faith than like cosmology spoken in the grammar of birth. What survives is consistent on the essential point. Before the gods who ruled and the world they ruled, the early Greeks placed the dark, and gave it a name.

Sources and scholarship

The primary witness is Hesiod, Theogony (lines 116–125 for the opening cosmogony; Erebos and Nyx at 123, their luminous children at 124–125). The standard critical edition with commentary is Martin L. West, Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); West’s later The Orphic Poems (Oxford, 1983) reconstructs the rival theogonic schemes, including the one preserved by Damascius in which Time, not Chaos, begets Erebos. A widely used public-domain English rendering is the Hugh G. Evelyn-White translation in the Loeb series, freely hosted in the Theoi Classical Texts Library.

For the Latin afterlife of the name, the relevant genealogical catalogs are the preface to Hyginus, Fabulae — accessible in translation in the Theoi Classical Texts Library — and Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.17, both of which make Erebus, with Night, the father of Death, Sleep, the Dreams, and a procession of allied shadows; the underworld-as-place sense pervades Virgil, Aeneid 6 and Georgics 4.

The indispensable modern reference is Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), which assembles, source by source, every early attestation of the primordial genealogies; an open-access companion that indexes Gantz’s literary and artistic sources is hosted by the University of Georgia. On the philosophical stakes of Hesiod’s generation-order — why it matters that light is the child of darkness rather than its rival — see Mitchell Miller, “‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony,” in the journal Ancient Philosophy.

→ Related: Iapetos · Hyperion · Persephone · Morpheus