Hemera

Also Known As: Ionic Hemere; Doric Amera; Roman Dies
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the daylight itself, a primordial substance rather than a personality, and she carries the all-seeing light over the earth for as long as her shift lasts.
Role in Mythos: She and her mother Night alternate in an unbreakable rota, one always abroad over the world while the other waits indoors.
Relation to Humans: Mortals lived entirely inside her working hours and never built her a temple, a festival or a priesthood. Where later Greeks wanted a goddess of the morning to fall in love, grieve and carry men off, they used Eos, and Hemera’s name survived mostly as another word for her.

At the ends of the earth, past the roots of land and sea, where Atlas stands with the sky on his head and his arms unwearying under it, there is a house. It is wrapped in dark cloud and it has a threshold of bronze, and across that threshold there is exactly one piece of traffic each way, twice a day, forever. One figure steps out as the other steps in. They meet in the doorway. They greet one another, and then one of them goes down into the dark of the house to wait, and the other goes out over the world holding the light.

That is nearly the whole of Hemera, and it is one of the strangest images Hesiod ever built. The Theogony puts Night and Day at the far edge of creation as two women sharing a home neither can occupy at the same time, and it is careful to make the rule explicit: the house never holds them both within. When Hemera is out, her mother is home. When her mother rises, Hemera goes in. Nobody enforces this. Nobody had to.

The genealogy is stranger still. From Chaos came Erebos, who is darkness, and black Nyx, who is night, and from Nyx, conceived in love with Erebos, came Aether and Hemera: the shining upper air, and the day. Darkness produced light, in the dark, without any help. The day is the child of the night, and her brother is the bright ether she moves through, and in the Roman mythographers he becomes her husband as well. Hyginus, who begins his catalogue with Mist, makes Aether and Dies the parents of Earth, Sky and Sea. Cicero, dismantling the whole business in a philosophical argument, notes drily that if the sky is a god then his parents Aether and Day must be gods too, and their parents Darkness and Night after them, and where exactly is a person meant to stop.

Other poets shuffled the family. Bacchylides addresses her as the radiant daughter of Chronos, who is Time, and of Night. Alcman, in a cosmogony so battered that scholars still argue over what the surviving words are doing, seems to set Day beside the Moon and Darkness at the moment when the world was first sorted out, and the ancient commentator on him explains that before that moment there was only darkness, and afterwards, when it had been differentiated, light came into being.

That is the physics underneath her. To the archaic Greeks, day and night were not effects. They were things, poured out and drawn back like weather. Night pulled a dark veil over the sky each evening and hid the blue of the ether behind it, and each morning Hemera came out and dispersed the mist and let the world be seen again. The sun ruled the day. The sun did not make it. Helios drove his chariot through daylight that was already there, waiting for him, and had been there before he arrived.

Ask what she looked like and the record goes quiet. Hesiod is not writing a person; he is writing a substance with a doorway. No temple was raised to her, no festival kept, no priest appointed. Nobody prayed to her. What survives is a single line from an anonymous lyric poet, preserved because Plutarch happened to quote it, about the far-shining ambrosial face of horse-driving Hemera, and that is enough to tell us that somewhere in the tradition she had a face and a team of horses and a road to drive them along. On a black-figure lekythos in New York a goddess of daylight lifts her chariot out of the sea while Night rides away and Helios climbs behind her, and the museum label calls the figure Eos-Hemera, because there is no honest way to choose.

The choosing had already stopped by the classical period. Pausanias, walking through Athens, looks up at the tiles of the Royal Portico and sees Hemera carrying off Cephalus, whom she loved. He sees the same abduction again in Laconia, carved into the throne of Apollo at Amyclae, Cephalus taken for his beauty. At Olympia he finds a semicircular pedestal with Zeus at the centre and Thetis and Hemera on either side of him, each pleading for her son, and at the two edges of the stone the sons themselves, Achilles and Memnon, set opposite each other in fighting stance. Every one of those stories belongs to Eos everywhere else. The Greeks simply used the two names for the same goddess and stopped worrying about it.

The most haunting version of the merger stands in Egypt. Callistratus describes the colossus at Thebes that the Greeks called Memnon, a stone figure that spoke at sunrise: when Hemera came, the statue was filled with joy at the arrival of its mother and gave voice to it, and when she left at evening it groaned, piteous and mournful, at her going. The grieving goddess was consoled by the sound of her dead son’s stone throat, and gave up looking for him. A statue that sings at dawn and moans at dusk is a very literal way of saying that a mother is only ever with her child during the day.

Her powers are the plainest in the pantheon and the least negotiable. She lifts the mist. She carries the light that lets every visible thing be seen, and she carries it over the whole earth without hurry, at the same pace, whatever is happening below. Nothing petitions her successfully and nothing delays her, though Philostratus, describing a painting of Phaethon’s fall, shows the one moment when the schedule broke: Night driving Day out of the noonday sky, the sun’s orb plunging toward the earth and dragging the stars behind it, and the Hours abandoning their posts at the gates of heaven and fleeing toward the gloom coming up to meet them.

The limits are equally plain. She has no weapon, no cult, no worshippers and no myth of her own, and she cannot stay: the bronze threshold works both ways, and the same rule that guarantees her return guarantees her departure. Time, in the end, took her name away as well. The Romans kept her only as Dies, a joint in a genealogy, and the Greeks handed her stories to a goddess with better ones. In the Theogony the two women still pass each other in the doorway and speak. Whatever they say to one another is the only conversation Hemera is recorded as having.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hemera in Greek mythology?

Hemera is the Greek primordial goddess of the day, the daylight itself rather than a personality with a biography. In Hesiod’s Theogony she is the daughter of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness) and the sister of Aether, the shining upper air. She has no temples, no cult and no myths of her own, and her role is simply to carry the light over the earth while her mother waits indoors.

Who are Hemera’s parents?

The standard account, from Hesiod’s Theogony, makes Hemera the daughter of Nyx and Erebos, born together with her brother Aether. Other poets disagree: Bacchylides calls her the daughter of Chronos (Time) and Nyx, and Hyginus has her born directly from Chaos alongside Night, Darkness and Aether. In the Roman mythographers Hemera, as Dies, pairs with Aether to produce Earth, Sky and Sea.

What is the difference between Hemera and Eos?

Hemera is the day and Eos is the dawn, but the Greeks blurred them almost completely. Pausanias attributes to Hemera the stories that belong to Eos everywhere else, including the abduction of Cephalus and the mother’s plea to Zeus for her son Memnon, and Athenian vase painters produced daylight goddesses that cannot be assigned to one or the other. In practice Eos absorbed Hemera’s mythology and left her a name.

Did the Greeks worship Hemera?

No. There is no record of a temple, festival, priesthood or sacrifice for Hemera anywhere in the Greek world. Hesiod treats her more as a divine substance than as a goddess who could be approached, and later Greeks who wanted a goddess of the morning to pray to, or to tell stories about, used Eos instead.

What is the house of Night in Hesiod?

The house of Night stands at the ends of the earth, near where Atlas holds up the sky, and it has a great bronze threshold. Night and Day pass each other there twice a day, greeting one another as one enters and the other leaves, and the house never contains them both at once. It is Hesiod’s way of explaining the alternation of daylight and darkness as a strict rota kept by two goddesses.

Sources & Further Reading

Hesiod, Theogony 123-125 and 744-757 (trans. Evelyn-White), Hesiod, Theogony, Greek text and translation, Perseus Digital Library, Alcman, Fragment 5, with the scholiast’s commentary (Greek Lyric II, trans. Campbell), Bacchylides, Fragment 7 (Greek Lyric IV, trans. Campbell), Greek Lyric V, Anonymous Fragment 1010, quoted by Plutarch, Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.3.1, 3.18.12 and 5.22.2, Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.17, Hyginus, Fabulae, Preface, Philostratus the Elder, Imagines 1.11, Callistratus, Descriptions 1 and 9