Tartarus- Greek LocationLocation · Realm"The Murky Pit"

The Abyss

Hesiod measured the depth of Tartarus in falling metal. If a bronze anvil dropped from heaven, it would fall nine days and nine nights before striking earth on the tenth. If dropped again from earth, nine more days and nights before reaching Tartarus. The pit lies at the roots of the cosmos, beneath even Hades.

Tartarus is wrapped in a darkness that has never known light. A fence of bronze surrounds it, with gates of iron that Poseidon himself set in place. A triple wall of night runs around the whole. Hesiod calls it a "great gulf": if a man fell from its edge, terrible blasts of wind would toss him for a full year without his feet touching ground. At its roots stand the sources and ends of earth and sea. Even the gods find it hateful. Hesiod says it is loathsome to the deathless gods.

Tartarus is also a being. Hesiod names him among the first entities to emerge from Chaos, born at the same time as Gaia and Erebus. The abyss existed before there were prisoners to fill it, before Kronos swallowed his children or Zeus raised his thunderbolt. It was already there, dark and patient.

Typhon

When Gaia mated with Tartarus, she bore Typhon. A hundred serpent heads grew from his shoulders, and fire poured from every one. When he attacked Olympus, the gods fled to Egypt and hid in animal forms. Zeus alone stood to fight.

He lost. Typhon severed the sinews from the god's hands and feet and hid them in a cave in Cilicia, guarded by the she-dragon Delphyne. Zeus lay helpless. Hermes and Aegipan stole the sinews back. Zeus returned to the battlefield and hurled thunderbolts while Typhon flung whole mountains, until the monster fell beneath them. Zeus buried him under Mount Etna in Sicily. The mountain still erupts with his breath.

The Prison

After the ten-year Titanomachy, Zeus cast the defeated Titans into Tartarus. Kronos, who once swallowed his own children, now lies bound in perpetual night. His Titan siblings share his fate behind the bronze walls and iron gates. They cannot die, but neither can they escape. When the Giants rose against Olympus in the Gigantomachy, those who survived were hurled in as well. Zeus sent more prisoners down, and the pit never filled.

The Hecatoncheires guard the gates: Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, each with a hundred hands and fifty heads. Uranus feared their power and locked them inside. Kronos kept them there. Zeus freed them for the Titanomachy, and they hurled three hundred boulders at a time at the Titan lines. After the victory, Zeus set them at the gates as wardens. Their prison became their post.

The Great Sinners

Beyond the gods and giants, Tartarus holds mortal sinners condemned past death. Sisyphus, the king of Corinth who twice cheated death, rolls a massive boulder up a steep hill. Each time he nears the summit, the stone slips and tumbles back to the bottom. He begins again. He will always begin again.

Tantalus butchered his son Pelops and served the flesh to the gods to test their omniscience. He stands in a pool of water beneath trees heavy with fruit. When he bends to drink, the water recedes. When he reaches for fruit, the branches pull away. He will never eat or drink again.

Others endure their own sentences. Ixion spins on a wheel of fire for his attempt on Hera. Tityos lies stretched across nine acres while two vultures devour his liver, which grows back each night.

The Threat Below

Zeus wields Tartarus against rebellious gods. In the Iliad, he warns that any deity who defies him will be hurled into "murky Tartarus, far, far away, where the gates are iron and the threshold bronze." Even immortals fear the pit. When the god Hypnos recalls how he once angered Zeus by lulling him to sleep during the Trojan War, he says he escaped only by fleeing to Night, whose triple wall encloses Tartarus. Night is a power Zeus does not challenge.

Not all the dead descend this far. The broader realm of Hades receives ordinary souls, who drift as shadows through fields of asphodel and drink from the river Lethe. Tartarus lies below even that dim country. In Plato's Gorgias, judges of the dead sort souls: the curable go to temporary punishment, the incurable to Tartarus forever. In the Republic's Myth of Er, souls that committed the worst wrongs are seized by "savage men of fiery aspect" and thrown into the pit. The door shuts behind them.