- Looks after
- The deepest pit under the earth
Tartarus
Τάρταρος
Tartarus is both a place and a god: the deepest region of the underworld, and an early primordial being.
Family at a glance
Hesiod lists Tartarus among the first things to appear, after Gaia. He describes it as a damp, gloomy pit as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky. A bronze anvil dropped from the sky would take nine days to reach the earth, and nine more to reach Tartarus.
It is where Uranus first hid his children, where Zeus imprisoned the defeated Titans after the Titanomachy, and the home of the hundred-handed giants who guard them. It is walled in bronze, with the house of Night close to its gates.
As a god, Tartarus fathers the monster Typhon with Gaia. In Plato's Phaedo and in later writers Tartarus becomes a place of punishment for the wicked dead. Famous prisoners include Tantalus, Ixion and Sisyphus.
In later art and language
Later writers treated Tartarus mainly as a place, and in Christian literature the word was borrowed for hell: the second epistle of Peter uses the verb tartaroo, to cast into Tartarus.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 116-119, 713-735, 820-822
- Homer, Iliad 8.13-16