Hypnos and Thanatos

Summary

Hypnos and Thanatos are Sleep and Death in Greek myth, twin brothers among the children of Nyx, Night. Hesiod says in the Theogony that Night bore hateful Doom, black Fate and Death, and bore Sleep and the tribe of Dreams. He then describes their dwelling in the far west beside the house of Night, where the sun never looks on them as he rises or sets: the one roams the earth and the sea's broad back peacefully and is kind to men; the other has a heart of iron and a spirit pitiless as bronze, holds fast whomever he once seizes, and is hateful even to the gods. Night carries Sleep, "the brother of Death", in her arms.

The best-known story of Sleep is in the Iliad. Hera wants to draw Zeus away from the battle so that she can help the Greeks; she adorns herself, borrows the girdle of desire from Aphrodite, and meets Sleep on Lemnos. She takes his hand and says: lull Zeus's eyes to sleep once I lie beside him, and I will give you a golden throne made by my son Hephaestus. He refuses. Any other god he would lull, even the river Ocean, but not Zeus: once before, at her bidding, he put Zeus to sleep on the day Heracles sailed from Troy, and she raised the winds against Zeus's son and carried him off to Cos; when Zeus woke he was furious, flung the gods about his palace and looked for Sleep above all, and would have hurled him from heaven into the sea had he not fled to Night, and Zeus held back for fear of displeasing Night. Then Hera promises him Pasithea, one of the Graces, whom he has longed for all his days. He makes her swear by the water of Styx, one hand on the earth and the other on the sea, calling the gods below to witness. They go to Mount Ida, and Sleep climbs a tall fir and hides in its branches in the shape of a clear-voiced mountain bird. When Zeus is asleep in his wife's arms, Sleep runs to the Greek ships and tells Poseidon: help them now, while Zeus sleeps.

The brothers appear together at the death of Sarpedon, king of Lycia and son of Zeus, when Patroclus kills him. Zeus tells Apollo: take him out of range of the darts, wash off the blood in the river, anoint him with ambrosia, clothe him in immortal raiment and give him to the swift bearers, Sleep and Death, the twin brothers, who will set him down in the wide land of Lycia, where his brothers and kin will bury him with mound and pillar, "for this is the due of the dead". Apollo does so.

The idea their story turns on is that sleep and death look alike and end differently. They are brothers of one mother and come out of the same darkness, but sleep takes a person and gives him back, while death holds him and does not. Even Zeus is overcome by sleep, and he fears its mother, Night. In the Iliad Death does not kill Sarpedon; he carries him to his people to be buried, so the brothers' work here is to bring the dead man to what is due to him, a grave and remembrance.

We read the names in the Arabic tongue like this. Θάνατος, Thanatos, comes from the verb θνῄσκω, to die, whose base is θαν-, as in its aorist ἔθανον; the rest, -ατος, forms the noun. The Greek essay reads it as fanāʾ, passing away, with th changed to f. Lane records this very change inside Arabic: the grave is called both jadaf and jadath, "for the Arabs made f and th interchangeable", and fūm and thūm, garlic, were both read in the Qurʾān, Ibn Masʿūd reading wa-thūmihā for wa-fūmihā. In Lane faniya is said of a thing that passed away and came to an end, was spent and perished, the contrary of baqāʾ, remaining. So Thanatos is fanāʾ, the passing away that leaves nothing once it takes hold. Ὕπνος, Hypnos, has the base ὑπ-, the -n- belonging to the noun's formation, and the essay reads it as ghafā: Arabic gh becomes the breath at the start of the Greek word, and p is f. In Lane ghafā and aghfā mean he slept, or slept lightly, or grew heavy with drowsiness. So Hypnos is ighfāʾ, the light sleep that comes and goes.

Linguistic Root

Thanatos and fanāʾ

LSJ gives θάνατος as death, whether natural or violent, from θνῄσκω. Greek th answers Arabic th in the Juthoor tables, so the base of the name is th-n. The Greek essay reads it as fanāʾ and says that th and f alternate in the Semitic languages. Lane gives the evidence inside Arabic itself: jadaf, a grave, is like jadath, because the Arabs made f and th interchangeable, the first being the dialect of Najd and the second that of Tihama; and fūm in the Qurʾānic verse is said to be thūm, Ibn Masʿūd reading it with th. On this alternation th-n and f-n are one word, and in Lane faniya is said of a thing that passed away and came to an end, was spent and perished; every created thing is subject to fanāʾ, and dār al-fanāʾ is this world. The same root has fānāhu, he soothed him, he quieted him, close to what Sleep does.

The essay gives another reading, thawā, to abide, from which comes mathwā, the last abode. It keeps the th without any change, but leaves the n of the name unaccounted for, while fanāʾ keeps both letters.

Hypnos and ghafā

LSJ gives ὕπνος as sleep, also the sleep of death, as in Iliad 11.241, "he slept the sleep of bronze", of a man killed. The word begins with a breath, which is what the Arabic throat letters become when they weaken in Greek: the Juthoor tables put ḥ, ʿ, kh and gh in one group that becomes h or disappears. The essay reads it as ghafā: gh is the breath, p is f, and the n belongs to the noun's formation, as in many Greek nouns. In Lane ghafā and aghfā mean he slept, or slept lightly, or grew heavy with drowsiness, and ighfāʾa is a light sleep. The root also has aghfā al-shajar, the trees let their branches hang down, close to the bird hiding among the branches in the Iliad. The limit of the reading is that Greek has no gh, so the reading takes the Greek breath as what remains of it, and there is no Greek witness of an older form with a throat letter.

The essay reads the name of their mother, Νύξ, Nyx, as naʿas, drowsiness and darkness, so the family joins night, drowsiness, light sleep and passing away.

Key Mythic Narratives

Night and her two children on the chest of Cypselus

Pausanias describes an old carved chest at Olympia on which a woman holds on her right arm a white child asleep and on her left a black child like one asleep, their feet turned different ways; the inscriptions say they are Death and Sleep, with Night the nurse of both.

Death bound and Death overcome

The story of Sisyphus tells that Zeus sent Thanatos to him and Sisyphus bound him, so that people stopped dying until Ares set him free. In Euripides' Alcestis Heracles brings Alcestis back to her husband Admetus after she has died, and when asked how he brought her up he says: I fought with the power that held her; I lay in wait by the tomb and seized him in my arms.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Death at Ugarit is also a person with a name, Mot, his mouth open with one lip to the underworld and one to the sky, swallowing Baal himself; Thanatos in Hesiod holds fast whomever he seizes. Both are images of a death that is never full and gives nothing back. The difference is that the Ugaritic Mot is fought, split, winnowed and returns, while the Greek Thanatos is bound and wrestled, in the stories of Sisyphus and Alcestis, but not killed.

In India Yama, king of the dead, has two envoys who roam among the people, dark-hued and insatiate, and the hymn asks them to give back to the living "a fair existence here and today, that we may see the sunlight". Yama's envoys roam among the people as Sleep roams earth and sea, and they take as Death takes.

Sleep and Death carry Sarpedon to Lycia so that he receives "the due of the dead", the mound and the pillar. At Ugarit the dead kings, the Rephaim, are invited to the house, receive sacrifices and are remembered; in both accounts the dead king is brought to his people and keeps a claim on them.

The brothers are twins of one mother who part in their work, one giving back and the other not, and so belong among the divine twins of the peoples.