Styx

• 1. Introduction

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  The name Styx means Shuddering, and the Greeks gave it to both a goddess and a river of the Underworld. Few figures in mythology were a person and a place at the same time. Why would the rulers of Olympus bind their promises to a stream? What happened to a god who lied with her water as witness? And is there anywhere on a real map where a traveler could stand beside the Styx?

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• 2. Family Tree

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  Oceanus, the great river that encircled the world, and his sister and wife, the Titaness Tethys, are the usual parents given for Styx. In this account she was the eldest of their many daughters, the Oceanids. The Roman mythographer Hyginus told it differently. He made her the daughter of Nox, meaning Night, and Erebus, meaning Darkness. Nox is the Roman counterpart of the Greek Nyx.

  Styx married the Titan Pallas, and their four children were personifications of ideas rather than ordinary gods. Zelus stood for Glory and Emulation. Nike was Victory. Kratos embodied Strength and Dominion, and Bia embodied Force and Violence. The geographer Pausanias reports a stranger claim from Epimenides of Crete. In that version Styx bore the monster Echidna to Perias, who is otherwise unknown.

  Persephone's parentage also wobbles. Demeter is usually named as her mother by Zeus, but the mythographer Apollodorus gives that role to Styx. Even so, when Apollodorus tells of the abduction of Persephone, Demeter is the one who searches, angry and distraught. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter adds a gentler picture. There Persephone names Styx among her "frolicking" Oceanid companions at the moment Hades carried her off.

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• 3. Reward For Loyalty

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  Hesiod's Theogony explains how Styx earned her unusual office, and the story begins with a war. During the Titanomachy, Zeus and his fellow Olympians fought Cronus and the other Titans. Zeus summoned all the deathless gods to Olympus and made an offer. Anyone who joined him would keep whatever rights and offices they held. Those who had none under Cronus would receive them under Zeus.

  Styx acted first. On the advice of her father Oceanus, she came to Zeus before any other god and brought her children by Pallas with her. Zeus repaid her by appointing her the great oath of the gods and keeping her children at his side for good.

  Hesiod also gives her a home. She lived at the entrance to Hades, in a cave he describes as "propped up to heaven all round with silver pillars." When the gods needed to swear, Zeus sent Iris, the messenger of the gods, to fetch the "famous cold water" of Styx. A libation poured from that water was what made a vow binding.

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• 4. Oaths And Penalties

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  Homer called Styx the "dread river of oath." In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, swearing by her water is "the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods." Different speakers repeat the formula almost word for word. In the Iliad, Hera swears by Styx to Zeus that she is not to blame for Poseidon helping the Greeks in the Trojan War. Hypnos makes Hera swear "by the inviolable water of Styx" in the same poem. In the Odyssey, Calypso uses the formula to promise Odysseus that she will stop plotting against him.

  The Homeric Hymns show the habit continuing. Demeter asks the "implacable" water of Styx to be her witness when she swears to Metaneira. Leto swears to the personified Delos by the same water, calling it the "most powerful and dreadful oath that the blessed gods can swear." Apollo asks Hermes to swear to him on the "dread" water.

  Hesiod spells out the cost of breaking such a vow. A god who poured the libation and then lied lay breathless for a full year. He was cut off from ambrosia and nectar, voiceless and spiritless in a heavy trance. A harder penance followed. For nine full years the offender was shut out of the councils and feasts of the eternal gods. Only in the tenth year did he return to the assemblies on Olympus.

  The Roman poet Ovid shows the oath trapping even the king of the gods. Jove, the Roman Zeus, swore by the waters of Styx when he made a promise to Semele. He had to keep it, even after he saw with horror that her request would lead to her death. Sol, the Roman counterpart of Helios, made a similar promise to his son Phaethon, who asked to drive his father's chariot for a day. The boy died.

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• 5. River Of Hades

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  Hesiod gave the goddess one-tenth of her father Oceanus's water. That tenth flows far underground through the dark night, then comes to the surface and pours from a high rock. In the Iliad, Styx forms a boundary of Hades, the realm of the dead. Athena mentions the "sheer-falling waters of Styx" that Heracles had to cross when he returned from capturing Cerberus. The shade of Patroclus begs Achilles for a quick burial so that he can pass the gates of Hades and join the dead "beyond the River."

  Virgil's Aeneid gives the river a shape. It winds nine times around the borders of Hades, and the boatman Charon ferries the dead across. Yet Acheron is more often named as the river or lake that divides the living from the dead. In the Odyssey, Circe links the two waterways by saying the Underworld river Cocytus is a branch of the Styx.

  Dante's Inferno turns the river into a place of punishment. Phlegyas ferries Virgil and Dante across its foul waters. There the Styx is a marsh that makes up the Fifth Circle of Hell, where the angry and sullen are punished. The adjective stygian grew out of the river's name by metonymy, and it now describes anything unpleasantly dark, gloomy, or forbidding.

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• 6. The Arcadian Waterfall

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  Homer connected the Styx to the Titaressus, a tributary of the river Peneius in Thessaly. Most often, though, the Styx has been identified with a stream and waterfall in Arcadia called the Mavronéri. It runs through a ravine on the north face of Mount Chelmos and flows into the Krathis river.

  Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, called it "the water of Styx" and placed it near the town of Nonacris, not far from Pheneus. He reported that the Spartan king Cleomenes made men take oaths on its water. His description is modest: "a stream of small appearance, dropping from a cliff into a pool," with a wall of stones around the pool. Pausanias visited in the second century AD, when Nonacris was already a partly buried ruin. He noted a nearby cliff taller than any other he knew, with water trickling down it.

  Legends gathered around the place. Aelian says Demeter caused this water to well up near Pheneus. According to Photius, a writer named Ptolemy Hephaestion knew a story in which an angry Demeter turned the water black. James George Frazer thought this fable explained why the falls look black from a distance.

  The water's reputation was deadly. Pliny, a natural philosopher of the first century, wrote that drinking it brought immediate death. He added that only the hoof of a female mule resisted its rot. Plutarch said only an ass's hoof could hold it, because its coldness and pungency would eat through any other vessel. Pausanias named a horse's hoof instead, and said the water poisoned men and animals alike. Some ancient writers even suspected that Alexander the Great died from this very water.

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• 7. Heel And Trial

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  Statius, a Roman poet of the first century AD, tells in the Achilleid how Thetis tried to make her newborn son Achilles immortal. She dipped him in the river Styx. The water missed the spot where she held him, his left heel. Paris later killed Achilles in the Trojan War by shooting an arrow into that heel.

  The second-century Metamorphoses of Apuleius gives the Styx a harsher role. Venus set Psyche a series of impossible trials, and one was to fetch water from the Styx. Apuleius says fierce dragons guarded the water, and fearsome cries of deadly warning rose from it. The task seemed so hopeless that Psyche went senseless, as if turned to stone. Jupiter's eagle scolded her for imagining she could steal or even touch a single drop. Mortals swear by the powers of the gods, it said, and the gods swear by "the majesty of the Styx."

  Venus's own description of the spring hints that the borrowing may have run the other way. She points Psyche to a steep peak where "dark waves flow down from a black spring." The Arcadian stream may have been named after the mythical Styx, but it may instead have been the model for it. For the Styx of Apuleius, the second seems to be the case. The dragons support the link, since two modern local names for the waterfall are the Black Water, Mavro Nero, and the Dragon Water, Drako Nero.

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• 8. A Moon Of Pluto

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  On the 2nd of July 2013, Styx officially became the name of one of Pluto's moons. The other moons carry names with the same theme. Charon, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos are all drawn from Greco-Roman mythology about the underworld, so together with Styx they give Pluto a set of moons named for the world below.

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