- Looks after
- The bright upper air
- Roman name
- Aether
Aether
Αἰθήρ
Aether is the pure upper air that the gods breathe, born from Erebus and Nyx.
Aether is the shining air of the upper sky, different from the thick lower air (aer) that humans breathe. Hesiod makes him a child of Erebus and Nyx and the brother of Hemera, Day.
He has almost no stories of his own. His importance is as an idea: the stuff of the heavens. Greek philosophers made much of it. Aristotle added it to the four elements as a fifth, the unchanging substance that the stars are made of.
That fifth element is the one later called the quintessence, a word that now just means the purest example of something.
In later art and language
The luminiferous ether of nineteenth-century physics, a hypothetical medium for light, took its name from this word, and chemical ether does as well.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 124-125
- Aristotle, On the Heavens 1.3