Thanatos
Also known as: Death, Mors (Roman)
Mythological Narrative
Scholarly Commentary & Evolution
## Son of Night
Hesiod names Thanatos among the children of Night, together with his brother Hypnos, Sleep. The two live in Night's house near Tartarus, where the sun never looks on them. Sleep goes gently over land and sea, but Death has a heart of iron and a pitiless spirit of bronze; whoever he seizes he holds, and he is hateful even to the immortal gods.
### Sarpedon's Bearer
In *Iliad* 16, when Zeus's son Sarpedon is killed at Troy, Apollo washes and anoints the body and hands it to the twin brothers Sleep and Death, who carry it swiftly to the broad land of Lycia for burial. The scene became a favourite of Athenian vase-painters, who show the two as winged young men lifting the body.
### Wrestling Death
In Euripides' *Alcestis*, Death comes to take Alcestis, who has agreed to die in her husband Admetus's place; Heracles waits by the tomb, wrestles Death and brings her back. Later tradition also told how the trickster Sisyphus chained Death so that no one could die until Ares freed him.
Academic Discussion & Critique
Exchange peer-reviewed hypotheses, comparative Indo-European etymologies, and archaeological field interpretations regarding Thanatos.
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