Nox- Roman PrimordialPrimordial"Goddess of Night"

The Descent to Avernus

Virgil gives Nox her due at the threshold of the underworld. When Aeneas descends to Avernus in the sixth book of the Aeneid, the Sibyl instructs him to make sacrifices in the silence of night. Black cattle are slaughtered. Wine is poured. Nox is invoked alongside the chthonic gods before the earth groans open and Aeneas steps into the dark. She is not a figure he meets below. She is the condition that allows the passage.

Nox belongs to the oldest generation of powers, born from Chaos before the cosmos took its present shape. Cicero in De Natura Deorum and Hyginus in the Fabulae both place her among the first beings, mother to Mors and Somnus, to the Fates and the Furies.

The Cave of Sleep

Ovid describes the home of her son Somnus deep inside a hollow mountain. No sun reaches there. No rooster crows. Fog breathes from the ground, and a stream of Lethe water trickles over pebbles at the entrance. Poppies grow on the hillside. Inside the cave, Somnus lies on a black couch heaped with dark feathers, and around him a thousand dreams take shifting shapes.

The silence is total. Even the door has no hinges, so that nothing creaks.

Jupiter Withdraws

Nox held a power that kept Jupiter at a distance. The story, told first in the Iliad and carried into Roman tradition, runs simply. Juno once employed Somnus to put Jupiter to sleep so she could move against Hercules. When Jupiter woke and discovered the trick, he raged through Olympus looking for Somnus. The god of sleep ran to his mother Nox and hid behind her. Jupiter stopped. He would not enter into conflict with Night. He let Somnus go.

No explanation is given for Jupiter's restraint. Nox is simply older than his authority and beyond the reach of his thunderbolts.