![]() ![]() According to an Orphic tradition, Erebus was the brother of Chaos and Aether, who all sprang from Chronos, the personification of time.īesides being the embodiment of darkness, Erebus was also the name applied to a dark region of the underworld that souls passed through on their way to Hades, the realm of the dead. The theology of ancient Greece’s Orphic religion had a different role for Erebus. Eros and Chaos then mate and produce birds. In that work Chaos, Night, Erebus, and Tartarus were the first primordial entities, and “blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus.” After ages pass, the egg hatches and Eros springs forth. Greek playwright Aristophanes proposed a different cosmology in his play Birds. ![]() According to Cicero, Carneades claimed that, in addition to Light and Day, Erebus and Nyx were the progenitors of Love, Guile, Toil, Envy, Fate, Old Age, Death, Darkness, Misery, Lamentation, Fraud, and Obstinacy, among others. Once again they are mostly dreadful forces of nature. In his De natura deorum ( On the Nature of Gods), the Roman statesman and scholar Cicero noted that the Greek philosopher Carneades attributed many children to Erebus and Nyx together. It was Gaea’s line that produced most of the well-known Olympian deities, including Zeus and Hera. Erebus and Nyx’s children were largely abstract, as they were only lightly personified forces of nature. Other writers, however, sometimes attributed these beings to both Nyx and Erebus. Nyx alone, however, was said to have produced Thanatos (death), Hypnos (sleep), the Moirai (Fates), Nemesis (retribution), and many other dark phenomena. Hesiod further claimed that Erebus and Nyx created Aether, the bright air, and Hemera, day. ![]() These beings were usually portrayed as forces or phenomena rather than the more anthropomorphic gods of popular mythology. From Chaos sprang her children, Erebus and Nyx. Chaos was joined by other primordial deities, including Gaea, the personification of the earth Tartarus, the underworld in the depths of the earth and Eros, the god of love. According to Hesiod, in the beginning of the universe there was Chaos, the formless abyss from which the form of the universe emerged. The standard cosmology of Greek myth comes from Hesiod’s Theogony, which describes a kind of genealogy of the gods. He is the son of Chaos, who is also the mother of Erebus’s wife, Nyx, the personification of night. Erebus is one of the primordial beings in the Greek creation myth.
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