Erebus

In Hesiod's great genealogy of the gods, the Theogony, the world begins with Chaos, the yawning gap, and then come Gaia the Earth, dim Tartarus in her depths, and Eros the love that binds. And from Chaos itself came two more, a pair who are never separated in the old poems: black Erebus and Nyx, Darkness and Night. Erebus is therefore older than the Titans, older than the sky-god Uranus, older than every Olympian, a being of the first generation of existence itself. Yet he is a strange kind of god. He has no adventures, wins no battles, founds no cities, seduces no nymphs. The Greeks made no temples to him and carved no statues in his honour, because Erebus is not a character in the stories but part of the stage on which all stories happen: the darkness that was there before the light, and that waits underneath everything still. He is less a person than a presence, the divine name the Greeks gave to the simple, enormous fact that the world contains the dark.

What he does, in the only mythic act attributed to him, is father the light. From Night, says Hesiod, came Aether and Hemera, born of her union with Erebus: the shining upper air in which the gods breathe, and the Day that walks the earth. The logic is worth pausing on. The Greeks did not imagine the world as light first and darkness second, a lamp switched off at the end of each day. They imagined it the other way round: darkness is the elder, the original condition, and light is its child, born new every morning out of the marriage of Darkness and Night. Later poets expanded the family far beyond Hesiod's pair. The Roman mythographers give Erebus and Nox a whole shadowy nursery: Doom and Old Age, Death and the Dissolution that follows it, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams, the Fates and the Hesperides, Misery and Mourning, and, surprisingly, some gentle children too, Friendship and Favour and Mercy. Darkness and Night, it seems, produce the griefs of the world and its consolations in the same litter. The lesson is the same as their mother's: the dark is not evil. It is simply the half of existence where most things happen unseen.

Then Erebus became a place. In Homer the word already slides between the god and the geography, and the geography is precise: Erebus is the dark region beneath the earth, the gloom through which the dead pass downward to the house of Hades. When Odysseus sails to the edge of the world to consult the prophet Tiresias, Circe tells him the dead will come up out of Erebus to drink the blood he pours, and they do: his mother, his comrades, the seer himself, rising from the dark below the dark. When the old prophet Theoclymenus looks at the feasting suitors of Penelope and sees the porch full of ghosts, he cries that they are hurrying down to Erebus beneath the darkness, and within days every one of them is dead. Even the sun's daily dying was described in his terms: the crag of the monster Scylla, says the Odyssey, faces westward, toward Erebus, toward the quarter of the sky where the light goes down. Later poets finished the transformation. Virgil and Ovid use Erebus simply as the underworld itself, and the god who began as the darkness before creation ends as the name of the darkness after death, the shadow at both ends of life.

His very name carries the sunset in it. Scholars have long traced erebos to a Semitic root, ereb, the word for evening, for the going down of the sun, for the west where the day dies: the darkness of Erebus is specifically the western darkness, the gloom that pours in from the edge of the world when the light is spent. The cosmogonies beyond Hesiod kept him at the beginning of things. Aristophanes, parodying the priests and their creation-songs in The Birds, sings that first was Chaos, and Night, and black Erebus, and broad Tartarus, and that in the boundless bosom of Erebus black-winged Night laid a wind-egg, from which, as the ages turned, hatched golden-winged Love, who mingled all things together and made the world. The Orphic theogonies set him among the first principles again, alongside Time and Aether and Chaos, in the age before the egg of the world split open. The pattern never changes. When the Greeks and their neighbours reached back to the very first moment, what they found there was the dark, and Erebus is that dark with a name, a parent and a place in the family of things.

The name has never stopped working. Latin poetry kept him as the gloom of the grave, and the usage passed into English verse as the grandest word for darkness a poet could reach for: when Shakespeare's Brutus urges the conspirators to hide their plot from the day, he swears that not Erebus itself were dim enough to conceal them. Sailors carried him to the coldest places on earth. In 1841 Sir James Clark Ross, pushing south into the Antarctic pack, named a great smoking volcano on Ross Island Mount Erebus, after his ship, and the mountain still burns above the ice, a pillar of fire in the land of the long dark. That ship, HMS Erebus, then sailed north with Sir John Franklin's expedition in 1845 and vanished with all hands into the Arctic night, and when her wreck was finally found in the black waters of the far north in 2014, the name had completed its own story: Erebus had gone down into the darkness, and lain there, and been spoken of again. The primordial gloom endures, because darkness endures. Every evening when the sun goes down into the west, the oldest god there is quietly takes back his kingdom.