Night
Hypnos
ὝπνοςRoman: Somnus
Put Zeus to sleep twice and only got away with it because of his mother.
Bronze head — British Museum 267
- 3
- epithets
- 2
- cult sites
- 0
- offspring
- 0
- unions
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Personification
- Generation
- 1
- Domains
- sleep, the pause in everything
- Accent
- Night — darkness, the moon, sleep, the crossroads
- Sacred symbols
- the poppy, the horn of forgetting, wings at the temples
- Principal cult sites
- Sparta, Troizen
What they were called
ἥδυμος
sweet, honeyed
πανδαμάτωρ
subduer of all
ἄναξ πάντων τε θεῶν πάντων τ' ἀνθρώπων
lord of all gods and all men
Lineage
See in the tree
Offspring in this roster
None recorded among the figures modelled here.
Notable myths
The Price of a Grace
Hera asked Hypnos to close the eyes of Zeus. He said no, told her what had happened last time, and only agreed when she swore by the Styx to give him Pasithea, one of the Graces, whom he had wanted for years. He took the shape of a night bird in a pine on Ida and waited until it was done.
Homer, Iliad 14.231-291
The account
Hypnos is the mildest thing Night produced and the one with the most nerve. Hera needs Zeus unconscious, and comes to him with an offer. He refuses flatly, and explains why: he did this for her once before, over Herakles, and when Zeus woke he threw gods around the house looking for him, and would have flung him out of the sky into the sea if Night, who subdues gods and men, had not hidden him — and Zeus stopped, because he would not do anything to offend her. Hera raises the price to one of the Graces as a wife, names her, and he takes it. Then he perches in a fir tree on Ida disguised as a bird and puts the king of the gods under. Hesiod pairs him permanently with Thanatos, and the pairing runs through Greek art: two winged young men, one carrying the dead, indistinguishable except that one of them gives you back. Statues of him were kept in temples of Asklepios, where patients slept to be cured.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 211-212
- Homer, Iliad 14.231-291
Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.
Image credit
- Title
- Hypnos, British Museum No. 267
- Artist
- British Museum. Dept. of Greek and Roman Antiquities; Walters, Henry Beauchamp, 1867-1944
- Date
- 1915
- Licence
- Public domain
