Night
Erebos
ἜρεβοςRoman: Erebus
The darkness itself, and the road the dead take through it.
- 1
- epithet
- 0
- cult sites
- 0
- offspring
- 0
- unions
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Primordial
- Generation
- 0
- Domains
- darkness, the dark between the world and the dead
- Accent
- Night — darkness, the moon, sleep, the crossroads
- Sacred symbols
- unlit depth
- Principal cult sites
- No cult attested
What they were called
Ἔρεβος
the covered place, the gloom
Lineage
See in the treeDescent
Erebos and Nyx come out of Chaos in the same line and are counted in the same generation as it, so this record is deliberately level rather than descending.
Offspring in this roster
None recorded among the figures modelled here.
Ties
Notable myths
Aither and Hemera
Erebos and Nyx, the two dark things out of Chaos, lay together and produced Aither and Hemera — the shining upper air and the daylight. It is the first time in the Theogony that anything generates its own opposite, and it establishes the pattern the rest of the poem runs on.
Hesiod, Theogony 124-125
The account
Erebos is darkness as a place rather than an absence of light. He comes out of Chaos with Nyx, and their union produces the two things that are their opposites: Aither, the bright upper air the gods breathe, and Hemera, the day. That pairing is the point of him. Hesiod's cosmology is built out of couples that generate their own contraries, and Erebos is the first term in the first of them. In Homer and later poets the name drifts from a person toward a region — the dark that the dead pass through on the way down, or a synonym for the underworld itself, so that a shade is said to go into Erebos. He has no myths of his own, no image and no cult, and he is one of the figures on this site with no surviving classical portrait, because there was never anything to portray. He is a condition that has a name and a genealogical position and nothing else.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 123
- Hesiod, Theogony 124-125
Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.
Image credit
No classical portrait of this figure survives, so the mark on this page is generated from their Greek initial and their domain accent rather than taken from an artwork.