Underworld
Tartaros
ΤάρταροςRoman: Tartarus
The pit under the underworld, and the god who is that pit.
- 1
- epithet
- 0
- cult sites
- 0
- offspring
- 0
- unions
- 1
- recorded birth
Vitals
- Kind
- Primordial
- Generation
- 0
- Domains
- the pit below the underworld, confinement
- Accent
- Underworld — the dead, the pit, what is under the ground
- Sacred symbols
- the bronze gate, the threefold night
- Principal cult sites
- No cult attested
What they were called
ἠερόεις
murky
Lineage
See in the treeDescent
No parent recorded — Hesiod names them among the first things.
Named among the first things, with no descent given.
Offspring in this roster
None recorded among the figures modelled here.
Notable myths
Where the Titans Went
When the ten-year war ended, Zeus sent the defeated Titans down under the wide-pathed earth and bound them there in bitter chains, as far beneath the ground as the sky is above it. The Hundred-Handers were posted at the gates as guards. Hesiod describes the place as having roots and sources of everything above it, all of them ending at that boundary.
Hesiod, Theogony 717-745
The account
Tartaros is both a place and a person, and Hesiod moves between the two without apology. As a place it is as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky: he measures it as a bronze anvil falling nine days from heaven to earth and nine more from earth to the pit. A bronze wall runs around it and Night is poured around the neck of it three times over. As a person he is one of the first things, named alongside Chaos and Gaia, and he fathers Typhon on Gaia after the Olympians have won. What Tartaros is for is holding things that cannot be killed. The Titans go there after the war, guarded by the Hundred-Handers. Typhon goes there after Zeus burns him. Later writers put human offenders there too — Tantalos, Sisyphos, Ixion — and by the Roman period it has become a place of punishment with a moral structure. In Hesiod it is simpler and worse: it is where you put what will not stop existing.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 119
- Hesiod, Theogony 717-745
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.