Thanatos

Born of Night

Thanatos is death itself: the figure who comes for a mortal when the end arrives. Hesiod, an early Greek poet whose Theogony sets out the descent of the gods, gives him the shortest origin possible. Night bore him, with no father named, and in the same line she bore Sleep and the tribe of Dreams.

Hesiod puts Doom and black Fate beside Death, then names Blame, Woe, Nemesis (indignation at wrongdoing), Deceit, Age and Strife among the children Night bore without a partner. The Fates are her daughters too: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, who give each person good and evil at birth.

Where Sleep and Death live

Hesiod puts the house of Night at the ends of the earth. Night and Day greet one another at its great threshold of bronze as the one goes in and the other comes out, and the house never holds them both at once. The dwellings of her two children stand at that same place, and the sun never looks on Sleep or Death, going up into heaven or coming down from it.

The brothers share the ground and nothing else. Sleep roams peacefully over the earth and the broad back of the sea, and Hesiod calls him kindly to men. Death has a heart of iron and a spirit as pitiless as bronze. Whomever he once seizes he holds fast, and Hesiod adds that he is hateful even to the deathless gods.

The pair who carried Sarpedon

In the Iliad, Homer’s poem about the war at Troy, Death says nothing at all. He is half of a pair. When the Lycian warrior Sarpedon is killed in the fighting, Zeus sends Apollo to lift the body out of range of the weapons, wash it in a river, anoint it and clothe it, and then commit it to the arms of two swift messengers, Death and Sleep. Apollo does as he is told, and the two set Sarpedon down in Lycia, the dead man’s own country, for his brothers and kinsmen to bury.

Nothing in the scene has Death do any killing. Another god hands him a body, and he works as a carrier beside his brother.

Death onstage in Alcestis

In Alcestis, a tragedy by the playwright Euripides, Death walks on and speaks. The situation is already set when he does. Admetus was fated to die, Apollo tripped up the Fates by trickery and found him a substitute, and the wife of Admetus, Alcestis, promised to free her husband by dying in his place.

Death arrives to collect, and his complaint against Apollo is procedural: the god is “curtailing and annulling the prerogatives of the gods below”. Apollo asks only that Alcestis be allowed to reach old age. Death refuses, says he takes pleasure in his office, and adds that he wins greater honour when his victims are young. Postponing death for the doomed, he argues, would favour the rich, who could then buy death at an advanced age. Apollo calls him hateful to mortals and rejected by the gods, and warns him that a man is coming who will take the woman from him by force.

Then Death goes in to claim her. He carries a sword, and he uses it as a sacrificial knife: once it has consecrated the hair of someone’s head, that person is the sacred property of the gods below.

Heracles at the tomb

The man Apollo promised is Heracles, who comes to the house of Admetus as a guest and is entertained while the household is in mourning. A serving-man tells him who has died and where the tomb stands, beside the road to Larisa. Heracles sets out to look for “the black-robed lord of the dead, Death himself”, expecting to find him drinking from the offerings at the grave, and means to catch him in a crushing grip and hold him until he releases the woman. If Death does not come to the blood offering, Heracles will go down to the house of Persephone and her lord and ask for Alcestis there.

He does not need the second plan. Asked afterwards where the fight took place, Heracles says he lay in wait hard by the tomb and seized Death with his arms. Alcestis comes back veiled and silent, and may not speak until the third day, when she is purified in the sight of the gods below.

The images and the ground

Pausanias, who travelled Greece and wrote down what he saw, records two places where Death stood as a figure people could look at. At Olympia he describes a cedar chest, dedicated by the descendants of Cypselus of Corinth and kept in the temple of Hera, carrying Night with two children asleep in her arms, one white and one black, named by inscriptions as Death and Sleep. At Sparta he saw images of Sleep and of Death near the altar of Athena of the Bronze House, and reports that the Spartans held the two to be brothers on the authority of the Iliad.

Later Latin poets mention offerings to Death, but no ancient writer records a temple to him.