Nyx

The chest was cedar, dedicated at Olympia by the descendants of a Corinthian tyrant, and on one of its carved panels stood a woman with a child cradled on each arm. One child was white and asleep. The other was black and only appeared to be. Their feet were turned in opposite directions, which was the sculptor’s way of saying that these two go different places. Inscriptions named them, though Pausanias noted that nobody needed the inscriptions. Everyone recognised Sleep and Death, and everyone recognised the woman holding them. She was Night, and she was nurse to both.

Nyx is the oldest thing in Greek myth that still has a face. Hesiod put her at the very beginning: out of Chaos came Erebos, darkness, and Nyx, night, and from their union came the two bright things, Aither and Hemera, the upper air and the day. That is the whole of her genealogy on the paternal side, and it is over in three lines. What follows is much longer, because Nyx then produced an enormous brood entirely on her own, lying with no one.

The list reads like an inventory of everything that can go wrong with being alive. Moros, doom. The Keres, the death spirits who drink from the wounded. Thanatos and Hypnos, death and sleep, the pair from the cedar chest. The Oneiroi, the tribe of dreams. Momos, mockery. Oizys, misery. Nemesis, who measures out what people deserve and delivers it. Apate, deceit. Philotes, affection, sitting incongruously in the middle of the register like a coin found in a grave. Geras, old age. Eris, strife, who would eventually roll a golden apple across a wedding feast and start a war. The Hesperides, who tend a garden at the western edge of things. And the Moirai, the three who spin, measure and cut, which means that fate itself is a daughter of night.

Her house sits at the far edge of the world, past the streams of Ocean, near the place where Atlas holds up the sky and the roots of earth and sea and Tartaros run down together. Hesiod describes a bronze threshold at its entrance, and a rule the two occupants keep without fail. Night and Day never sit under the same roof. One is always out crossing the sky while the other waits inside, and they meet only in passing on that threshold, exchanging a word in the grey moment when the light changes. Hemera steps out through the door as Nyx comes in from the world with sleep gathered in her arms. The bronze underfoot is cold. Neither stops walking.

The most revealing story about her is one in which she barely appears. In the fourteenth book of the Iliad, Hera wants Zeus unconscious so the Greeks can have their way on the plain, and she goes to Hypnos to arrange it. Hypnos refuses at first, and explains why. He had done this once before, and when Zeus woke and understood what had happened he went through the halls throwing gods around, hunting for him, and would have flung him out of the bright air into the sea. Hypnos ran to his mother. Zeus arrived at the door of Night, saw who was standing there, and stopped. Homer says he held back because he shrank from doing anything displeasing to swift Night. The king of the gods, at the height of his rage, in his own cosmos, decided against it and went home. He is not recorded as fearing anyone else.

The Orphics took that hint and built a theology on it. In their cosmogonies Nyx is not an early figure but the first, or near enough, a black-winged power sitting in a cave and giving oracles, advising Zeus on how to hold his kingdom together and telling him where the boundaries of the world should go. The third of the Orphic Hymns addresses her as the origin of all things, mother of gods and men, and asks her to come to the initiates while the torches burn. Resin smoke, a dark room, a goddess invoked as the source rather than the shadow. It is a very different Night from Hesiod’s, and both were current at once.

Public worship of her was thin. Pausanias, climbing the citadel of Megara, found a temple of Dionysos of the Night, a sanctuary of Aphrodite, a roofless temple of Zeus and an oracle called that of Night, all crowded onto the same height, and he moves past it in half a sentence. A commentator on Pindar claimed she had held the oracle at Delphi before Themis and the serpent. Beyond that there is very little: no festival calendar, no great temple, no priesthood worth the name.

The vase painters were more interested. She turns up on black-figure and red-figure pottery from the late sixth and early fifth centuries as a veiled woman swathed in dark vapour, sometimes winged, most often standing in a light two-horse chariot with the reins gathered in her fists and the horses black and lathered, wheeling down the sky while Helios and his team climb out of the sea on the other side of the scene. The rendering is atmospheric rather than anatomical. She is drawn the way weather is drawn.

Her powers follow directly from what she is. She covers, and under cover things happen that could not happen in daylight: theft, ambush, prophecy, conception, death. She does not need to persuade anyone. Sleep and death are hers by descent rather than by conquest, so her authority over the end of a life needs no myth to justify it, and the Fates, the Keres and Nemesis all work under her name. Zeus’s deference in the Iliad is the clearest statement of her rank in the whole tradition, and it costs him nothing to give, because she does not want his throne.

Her limits are equally structural. She has almost no myths of her own. Nyx acts through her children and is otherwise a condition rather than a character, which is why she is never a protagonist and never loses a fight: there is no story in which she can be beaten, and no story in which she does much. She is also strictly bound to the cycle. She cannot linger, cannot share her house with Hemera, and must leave every morning whether she wishes to or not. The oldest power in the cosmos keeps to a timetable, and gives up the sky each dawn to a daughter of her own making.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nyx in Greek mythology?

Nyx is the Greek goddess and personification of night, one of the primordial beings who appeared at the beginning of the cosmos. In Hesiod’s Theogony she is born from Chaos and, together with Erebos, produces Aither and Hemera. The Romans knew her as Nox.

Who are the children of Nyx?

With Erebos she bore Aither (upper air) and Hemera (day). Alone, without a father, she produced Moros, the Keres, Thanatos, Hypnos, the Oneiroi, Momos, Oizys, the Hesperides, the Moirai, Nemesis, Apate, Philotes, Geras and Eris. The list amounts to most of the forces that limit or end a human life, including fate and death themselves.

Why was Zeus afraid of Nyx?

In Book 14 of the Iliad, Hypnos tells Hera that he once put Zeus to sleep and was hunted through the halls for it, escaping only by fleeing to his mother Nyx. Zeus stopped at her door and let the matter drop because he shrank from displeasing swift Night. Nyx is the only figure Zeus is recorded as backing away from.

Where does Nyx live?

Hesiod places her house at the outer edge of the world, beyond the streams of Ocean near where Atlas holds up the sky and the roots of earth, sea and Tartaros converge. It has a bronze threshold that Nyx and her daughter Hemera cross in turn. The two are never inside together, which is why day and night never occupy the sky at the same time.

Was Nyx worshipped in ancient Greece?

Barely. Pausanias records an oracle of Night on the acropolis of Megara, and the Orphic Hymns invoke her by torchlight during initiations, but she had no major temple, festival or priesthood. Her importance was mythological and cosmological rather than devotional.

Related Entries

Erebus, Hemera, Aether, Chaos, Thanatos, Nemesis, Apate, Hesperides, Ananke, Phanes, Tartarus, Gaia, Uranus, Selene, Charon