Tartarus

Also Known As: Greek Τάρταρος, Tartaros; also the plural form Tartara; Latin Tartarus; the name has no secure Greek derivation, and Strabo guessed Homer had bent the name of Iberian Tartessos into a word for the furthest place down
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It lies as far beneath the earth as the sky stands above it, walled in bronze and gated by Poseidon, and it holds beings that cannot be killed.
Role in Mythos: It is the prison of the defeated Titans and of Typhoeus in the older cosmology, and from the fifth century BC onward the place of punishment for the wicked dead.
Relation to Humans: Living mortals do not go there, and the archaic pit is not built for them at all; it is a threat the gods hold over each other. Once Tartarus was reimagined as a hell, human souls judged incurable were sent down to stay, while lesser offenders were flushed out after a year to beg pardon from the people they had wronged.

A brazen anvil dropped from the floor of heaven falls for nine nights and days and strikes the earth on the tenth. Push the same anvil off the edge of the earth and it falls nine nights and days more before it reaches bottom. Hesiod measures the depth of Tartarus in falling anvils, which is either admirably concrete or a quiet admission that nobody had a better unit. The arithmetic makes his point regardless. The pit beneath the world lies as far under the ground as the sky stands above it, and the fall is long enough to think about on the way down.

A wall of bronze runs all the way around it. Poseidon set gates of bronze into that wall, and night lies about the whole structure in three folds, like a collar at a throat. Overhead grow the roots of the earth and of the barren sea. Inside there is mist, standing damp, and a smell of rot that Hesiod says even the gods will not go near. The air will not hold still. A man who got past the gates would not touch the floor for a full year, and he would not fall cleanly; blast after blast would shove him sideways in the dark the entire way.

None of that describes a hell. The older Tartarus is a piece of cosmic engineering, and in the Theogony it arrives third, after the yawning gap and after Earth, which makes it less a thing built than one of the first things there are. Homer knows it the same way: the lowest depth beneath the ground, fitted with iron gates and a threshold of bronze, useful mainly as a threat. Zeus warns the assembled gods that anyone caught helping either side at Troy against his will goes down there, and he tells Hera he does not care if she strays to the undermost limits of earth and sea, where Iapetus and Cronus sit with no sunlight and no wind to please them and Tartarus standing deep about them. Hesiod also gives the pit a will of its own. Tartarus is a protogenos, one of the elemental first gods, and by Earth he fathers exactly one child.

That child is Typhoeus, and the pit earned its reputation before he was born. Uranus had already used it, throwing the Cyclopes and the hundred-handed brothers down there under a jailer called Campe. Earth told Zeus the war for heaven would turn if he got them out, so he killed Campe and unbarred the gates, and the freed Cyclopes handed him thunder, lightning and the thunderbolt in return. Ten years of fighting ended with the mountains coming apart and the sea ringing. Then the hundred-handed brothers buried the Titans under a weight of thrown rock, bound them in chains, and carried them down below the wide-pathed earth. Gyes, Cottus and Obriareus stayed at the gates as Zeus’s warders. Three of them, three hundred arms between them, standing in a triple ring of darkness with a bronze wall at their backs, listening to nothing in particular for as long as the world lasts.

Tartarus took its own son next. Typhoeus rose against Zeus for the throne of heaven, and Zeus burned him down with lightning until the ground itself melted and ran in the glens the way tin runs in a channelled crucible, and then flung the wreck of him into the pit. He is still there, and he is why the weather is bad. The storm winds that scatter ships and strip the fields blow up out of Tartarus off the body of Typhoeus, and the three good winds have nothing to do with him.

Around the fifth century BC the pit changed jobs. Poets and philosophers stopped treating Tartarus as the basement of the universe and began treating it as a prison for the wicked dead, set against Elysium the way punishment is set against reward. In Plato’s Gorgias the dead arrive stripped of body, ancestry and wealth so that the judges can see the soul plainly, and Rhadamanthus reads the scarring on it the way a physician reads a wound. Souls he finds incurable go down and stay down as exhibits, and Plato observes without much sympathy that most of the exhibits are kings, tyrants and public administrators, since they had the freedom to commit the worst things.

The Phaedo keeps the older geology and installs machinery in it. There Tartarus is the one chasm bored clean through the earth, and every river on the planet runs into it and out again, because the liquid at the bottom has nothing to rest on. It swings up and down like a chest breathing, and the wind swings with it, in and out, in blasts nothing can stand against. Pyriphlegethon arrives boiling and muddy and sends lava up through the ground at various places. Cocytus comes in on the opposite side out of the lapis-dark water of the Styx.

Virgil built the version most people picture. Aeneas, walking the underworld beside the Sibyl, takes the right fork toward Elysium and glances left, and sees a broad fortress girt with a triple wall and encircled by a torrent of flame. The gate is pillared with adamant that no god could pull down. Tisiphone sits on the threshold in a bloodied cloak and does not sleep, and out of the dark come groans, the crack of a lash, the clank of iron and the dragging of chains. No clean soul may cross that step, the Sibyl says, and then she lists the tenants: the Titans hurled down by the thunderbolt, the twin giants who tried to tear heaven open, Salmoneus who drove a torch-lit chariot through Elis pretending to be thunder, Tityus stretched across nine acres with a vulture in a liver that grows back as fast as it is eaten, Ixion, Tantalus with a banquet spread before him and a Fury’s arm across it. Behind them the ordinary damned, men who hated their brothers, struck their fathers, hoarded their money or sold their country. She breaks off, saying a hundred tongues would not get to the end of the list.

What Tartarus does, it does by holding, and its strength is not really the bronze. The distance is the punishment. Chains and gates and hundred-armed warders are all secondary to the plain fact that the climb back up takes longer than anyone has, which is why it works even on the immortal, who have nothing to lose but time and lose all of it. It also works as leverage without being used at all. When Apollo killed the Cyclopes in revenge for Asclepius, Zeus was ready to throw his own son down the hole, and Leto talked him into a year of servitude instead. The threat was sufficient.

Its limits are the interesting part. Tartarus is not escape-proof by nature, or Zeus would not have needed Poseidon’s gates and three warders at them, and those warders had themselves been prisoners in it ten years earlier. It leaks in both directions. Plato’s version releases the merely bad after a year, washing them out through Cocytus and Pyriphlegethon into the Acherusian lake, where they have to call to the people they killed or outraged and beg to be let out; refused, they are carried back down to try again. The stories also disagree about Cronus. Aeschylus has the cavernous gloom of Tartarus still holding him and his allies inside it, while other traditions have him loosed and ruling somewhere considerably better. Even the name resists explanation. It looks nothing like Greek, and Strabo, reaching for something, supposed that Homer had heard of Tartessos on the far Iberian coast, the westernmost place anyone could name, and altered a letter or two to make a word for the furthest place down.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Tartarus in Greek mythology?

Tartarus is the abyss beneath the earth in Greek myth, as far below the ground as the sky is above it, ringed by a bronze wall and closed with bronze gates set by Poseidon. In the oldest cosmology it is a piece of the structure of the universe and a prison for the defeated Titans. From about the fifth century BC, Greek writers reimagined it as a place of punishment for the wicked dead.

Who is imprisoned in Tartarus?

The Titans were chained in Tartarus after losing the ten-year war against Zeus, guarded at the gates by the hundred-handed brothers Gyes, Cottus and Obriareus. The storm-giant Typhoeus was hurled down after Zeus struck him with lightning, and the hurricane winds are said to blow up out of the pit from his body. Virgil later filled it with punished mortals including Tityus, Ixion, Tantalus and Salmoneus.

How deep is Tartarus?

Hesiod gives the depth as the distance a bronze anvil would fall in nine nights and days, having already fallen nine nights and days from heaven to earth. Homer puts it as far beneath the house of Hades as the sky is above the earth. Hesiod adds that a man who got inside the gates would not reach the floor for a whole year, blown sideways by blast after blast the entire way down.

Is Tartarus the same as Hades?

Not originally. The archaic poets placed Hades, the land of the dead, at the ends of the earth or in the hollows of it, and put Tartarus far below that as a separate cosmic pit. Later Greek and Roman writers collapsed the two, treating Tartarus as the deepest and harshest quarter of Hades, which is how Virgil describes it in the Aeneid.

Can anyone escape Tartarus?

The archaic pit was held shut by Poseidon’s bronze gates and the hundred-handed warders rather than by any property of the place, and the Cyclopes and hundred-handers were themselves released from it by Zeus during the war against the Titans. Plato’s version lets curable souls out after a year, flushing them through the underworld rivers to plead with those they wronged. Souls judged incurable never come back up.