Tartarus

• 1. Introduction

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  Tartarus sits at the very bottom of the Greek cosmos. Hesiod put a number on its depth: a bronze anvil falling from heaven would need nine days to reach the earth. Nine more days would carry it from there to Tartarus. Zeus, in the Iliad, described it as "as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth." No other place in ancient mythology was mapped so precisely against the structure of the universe. What makes Tartarus stranger still is that it was never simply a location. In Hesiod's Theogony, written around the late 8th century BC, Tartarus ranked as the third primordial deity. It appeared after Chaos and Gaia and before Eros. A god, not just a pit, lay at the floor of creation. That double nature raises questions. Why did the Greeks need both a divine Tartarus and a geographical one? Who ended up there, and by whose judgment? And how did a concept born in Greek poetry find its way into the earliest Christian writings?

• 2. God Before the Gods

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  Tartarus and Gaia, according to Hesiod, produced the monster Typhon. The deepest abyss was itself a parent. The mythographer Hyginus proposed a different genealogy for Tartarus, making it the offspring of Aether and Gaia rather than a self-arising force. These two accounts were never reconciled in the ancient tradition. What they share is the conviction that Tartarus was a person, not merely a region of the underworld. It had parentage and it produced offspring. That status as a living being, rather than a simple location, gave the abyss a quality that no distance could capture. When Zeus later defeated Typhon and hurled him into "wide Tartarus," the act carried a strange reflexivity. A son had been cast into his father.

• 3. The Titan Prison

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  When Cronus rose to power as King of the Titans, he imprisoned the ancient one-eyed Cyclopes and the hundred-armed Hecatonchires in Tartarus. He did not leave them unguarded. Campe stood watch, a monster described as part scorpion, ringed at the waist with snapping animal heads. She carried a whip to torture the imprisoned giants. Zeus killed Campe and released those giants to help fight the Titans, a tactical exchange that helped decide the war. After the gods of Olympus won, Cronus and many fellow Titans were banished to Tartarus. The jailer had become an inmate. Not all Titans shared that fate. Prometheus, Epimetheus, and female Titans such as Metis were spared. The Hecatonchires, once prisoners themselves, were put to work as guards of Tartarus's new population. Even among the Olympian gods, the threat of Tartarus carried weight. In the Homeric hymn to Hermes, Apollo threatens to throw Hermes into Tartarus. Apollo himself came close to that fate when Zeus considered condemning him for killing the Cyclops. In later mythology, the population would expand far beyond gods and Titans, to include mortal kings whose offenses against Zeus had been both audacious and calculating.

• 4. Punishments Fit the Crime

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  Sisyphus, the king condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity, earned his fate through a series of calculated outrages. He killed guests and travelers at his castle, violating the sacred obligations of hospitality. He seduced his niece. He told the river god Asopus the whereabouts of his daughter Aegina, whom Zeus had taken. The real offense, in Zeus's eyes, was that Sisyphus treated himself as an equal of the gods. He thought he had the right to report their indiscretions. Sisyphus even managed to delay his punishment. When Zeus sent Thanatos, the god of death, to chain him in Tartarus, Sisyphus asked how the chains worked and ended up chaining Thanatos himself. The result was that no one could die. Ares freed Thanatos and delivered Sisyphus, but Sisyphus secured one more escape. He persuaded Persephone to send him back to the surface to scold his wife for not burying him properly. Hermes was sent to drag him back. The eternal boulder, always nearly cresting and always rolling back, encapsulated Zeus's judgment. A man who thought himself cleverer than the gods was condemned to fail, forever, at the same absurd task.

  Tantalus cut up his son Pelops, boiled him, and served the result to the gods at dinner. He also stole the gods' ambrosia and revealed its secrets to mortals. A further offense involved a golden dog forged by Hephaestus. Pandareus had stolen it; Tantalus held it and later denied having it. His punishment gave the world a new word. Standing in a pool beneath a fruit tree, Tantalus could reach neither the fruit nor the water. The branches lifted his meal out of reach when he stretched toward them. The water receded when he bent to drink. The word "tantalize" carries his name.

  Ixion was king of the Lapiths, the most ancient tribe of Thessaly. He committed what mythology recorded as the first kin-related murder, pushing his father-in-law onto a bed of coal and wood. Zeus, remarkably, took pity on him and invited him to dine on Olympus. Ixion repaid the gesture by attempting to seduce Hera. Zeus created a cloud replica of Hera, named Nephele, to test how far Ixion would go. He went all the way. Their encounter produced Centaurus, who fathered the Centaurs on Magnesian mares at Mount Pelion. Zeus struck Ixion with a thunderbolt and tied him to a spinning, winged wheel of flame, first in the sky and then in Tartarus. Only when Orpheus descended to the underworld to rescue Eurydice did the music stop the wheel, briefly.

  The giant Tityos attempted to rape Leto at Hera's direction. Apollo and Artemis killed him for it. Stretched out in Tartarus, he had his liver fed upon by two vultures, a fate strikingly similar to Prometheus's punishment. King Salmoneus was imprisoned for passing himself off as Zeus. Arke, a goddess who had served as messenger for the Titans, had her wings removed by Zeus and was cast down with them. Ocnus was condemned to weave a rope of straw for eternity; a donkey ate the rope as fast as he wove it. The ancient sources give no reason for his fate. King Phlegyas set fire to the temple of Apollo at Delphi after Apollo killed his pregnant daughter Coronis. Apollo killed Phlegyas in return. In Tartarus, Phlegyas was entombed in a rock and starved before an eternal feast. From that position he shouts to the other inhabitants not to despise the gods. Plato, writing around 400 BC, would later attempt to systematize which offenses sent a soul to Tartarus and which might eventually earn release.

• 5. Plato's Moral Geography

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  Plato's Gorgias, written around 400 BC, assigned Tartarus a degree of moral precision that earlier poets had not attempted. Three judges presided. Rhadamanthus evaluated Asian souls, Aeacus evaluated European ones, and Minos served as the deciding vote for Greek souls. Souls deemed unjust or perjured went to Tartarus. Those whose crimes were seen as curable could be purified there. Those deemed incurable stayed forever, as a warning to the living. In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates argue this point to Callicles, a man who believes that might makes right. Socrates insists that committing injustice is worse than suffering it, and that the most incurable inmates of Tartarus are tyrants. Archelaus I of Macedon is named as a likely example. Thersites is described as curable, specifically because he lacked the power to commit large crimes.

  Plato's Phaedo offered a more specific taxonomy of the incurable: temple robbers and murderers. It also introduced categories of partial guilt. A son who killed a parent in rage, and regretted it lifelong, would be released from Tartarus after one year. He could then approach his victim and ask for forgiveness. If granted, he left. If refused, he returned to Tartarus until finally pardoned. Involuntary manslaughterers received the same one-year term.

  In the Republic, Plato recounted the Myth of Er, a fallen soldier said to have risen from the dead and witnessed the realm directly. Er reported that punishments in Tartarus corresponded in length to the crimes committed. An adult responsible for many deaths, or who betrayed states or sold armies into slavery, served ten times the equivalent in earthly years. That calculation was set against a hundred-year human lifespan. Good deeds were rewarded in the same proportion. One entrance to Tartarus, the ancient Greeks noted, lay at a place called Aornum.

• 6. Virgil's Architecture

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  Virgil, in Book VI of the Aeneid, described Tartarus as expansive, enclosed within three perimeter walls. Beyond those walls ran a flaming river named the Phlegethon. Drinking from the Phlegethon would not kill a mortal. It would heal, while causing great pain. At the gate sat a hydra with fifty black, gaping jaws. The gate screeched when opened. Adamantine columns flanked the entrance, a material the ancients believed was so hard that nothing could cut through it. Inside the walls stood a wide-walled castle with a tall iron turret. Tisiphone, one of the Erinyes and the embodiment of vengeance, kept sleepless watch at the top of that turret. She lashed her whip without rest. The pit inside the castle extended twice as far below the living world as the living world lay below Olympus. At the bottom of that pit, Virgil placed the twin sons of the Titan Aloeus.

• 7. Into Scripture

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  The Book of Enoch, in its Greek text dated to between 400 and 200 BC, gave Tartarus a new administrative role. God placed the archangel Uriel "in charge of the world and of Tartarus." The tradition understood Tartarus as the prison of two hundred fallen Watchers, angels who had transgressed and been confined in the abyss. Passages in Enoch and in 5 Jubilees describe these angels imprisoned in fiery pits deep in the earth, drawing on the same Greek geography. The Septuagint also used Tartarus in its Greek rendering of Job and of Proverbs.

  The New Testament does not use the noun Tartarus itself. What 2 Peter 2:4 uses is a verb: tartaroō, meaning "throw to Tartarus." This is a compressed form of the classical Greek kata-tartaroō. The English Standard Version gives the Greek reading as a footnote. Adam Clarke, interpreting that verse, argued that Peter's Titan-linked language pointed to something specific. The ancient Greeks, Clarke reasoned, had preserved a memory of the punishment of fallen angels. Some Evangelical commentators later distinguished Tartarus, a place for wicked angels, from Gehenna, a place for wicked humans.

  The Gnostic text Hypostasis of the Archons, from before 350 AD, has Zoe, daughter of Sophia, cast Ialdabaoth the demiurge into Tartarus. The Gospel of Nicodemus called Satan "the prince of Tartarus." The Sibylline Oracles named a guardian angel Tartarouchos, meaning "keeper of Tartarus." The Testament of Solomon offered perhaps the most striking appropriation of all. Beelzebub himself claimed to have been the first angel, and described himself as now reigning over those bound in Tartarus.