Tartarus Location

The pit of Tartarus was born at the beginning of the cosmos, emerging from Chaos alongside Gaia the Earth and Eros the force of desire. But while Gaia became the foundation of life and Eros the engine of creation, Tartarus became the foundation of punishment, the cosmic dungeon into which order cast disorder. The Greek poet Hesiod described it as a vast chasm, dismal and dank, as far beneath the earth as the heavens were above it. A bronze anvil dropped from the sky would fall for nine days to reach the earth, and then fall for another nine days before it struck the floor of Tartarus. The pit was surrounded by a fence of bronze, and night wrapped around it in triple lines like a collar. Above it grew the roots of the earth and the unfruitful sea. It was a place of decay, of misty gloom, of perpetual darkness so absolute that no light from the sun or moon or stars could ever reach it. And it was into this place that the first prisoners were thrown before the world had even learned what imprisonment meant.

The first inmates of Tartarus were not the Titans, but the children of Uranus, the sky god, and Gaia. Uranus had fathered three races of monstrous children upon the Earth Mother: the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants of immense strength; the Hecatoncheires, hundred-armed giants with fifty heads each; and the Titans, the twelve elder gods who would one day rule the world. Uranus hated these children and hid them deep within Gaia's womb, causing her such pain that she fashioned a sickle of adamant and persuaded her youngest son, Cronus, to ambush his father. When Cronus castrated Uranus and seized power, he did not free his monstrous brothers. Instead, he cast the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires into Tartarus, setting the monster Campe as their guard. Campe was a creature of nightmare, part scorpion, with a ring of animal heads snapping around her waist and a whip to torture the prisoners. There the giants languished until Zeus, the youngest son of Cronus, slew Campe and freed them to fight alongside him in the war against the Titans.

The Titanomachy, the war between the Titans and the Olympians, lasted for ten years and convulsed the universe. When Zeus and his brothers and sisters finally prevailed, the defeated Titans were not killed but cast into Tartarus, the very abyss from which the young gods had rescued their allies. The Hecatoncheires, now loyal to Zeus, became the eternal warders of the bronze gates, their hundred arms ready to seize any prisoner who tried to escape. Cronus, the king of the Titans who had swallowed his own children to prevent his overthrow, was imprisoned there alongside his brothers Hyperion, Iapetus, Crius, and Coeus. The female Titans were spared, and Prometheus and Epimetheus were not cast into the pit because they had sided with Zeus. But the rest of the old generation was buried beneath the earth in misty gloom, in a dank place at the ends of the huge earth, where they would remain for eternity, guarded by bronze gates and the ever-vigilant Hecatoncheires.

But Tartarus was not only for gods. Over time, it became the destination for the most wicked mortals, those who had committed crimes so terrible that ordinary death in Hades was not punishment enough. Sisyphus, the king of Corinth who had cheated death twice, once by trapping Thanatos, the personification of death, in chains and once by persuading Persephone, the queen of the dead, to let him return to the living world, was condemned to roll a massive boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every time he neared the top. Tantalus, who had murdered his own son and served him as a meal to the gods to test their omniscience, was sentenced to stand in a pool of water beneath fruit-laden branches, with the water receding whenever he bent to drink and the branches lifting beyond his reach whenever he reached for food. Ixion, who had murdered his father-in-law and then attempted to seduce Hera, the queen of the gods, was bound to a burning wheel that spins forever through the sky. The Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaus who murdered their husbands on their wedding night, were forced to endlessly pour water into leaking vessels. Each punishment was tailored to the crime, a divine irony that made the torment eternal and inescapable.

The place of Tartarus was separated from the rest of the underworld by rivers of fire and darkness. The Phlegethon, the river of flame, burned around its borders, and the Styx, the river of unbreakable oaths, flowed nearby. In some accounts, Tartarus was connected to Hades, the realm of the dead, but in others it was a separate and deeper realm entirely, a place even Hades himself did not rule. The Greek philosophers debated whether the souls in Tartarus could ever be cleansed of their sins, with some arguing that even the worst offenders might eventually find redemption, while others insisted that certain crimes were unforgivable and the punishment must last forever. When the Roman poet Virgil wrote his Aeneid, he placed Tartarus at the center of the underworld, describing it as a place where the wicked were judged by Rhadamanthus, one of the three judges of the dead, and then cast into eternal torment. By the time Christianity emerged, the concept of Tartarus as a place of fire, darkness, and eternal punishment had so permeated the Mediterranean imagination that it became one of the models for the Christian Hell, and the name itself entered the New Testament as a verb, tartaroo, meaning to cast into the deepest abyss. The pit that Hesiod had described as dim and misty had become, over a thousand years, the template for the eternal fire that still burns in the Western imagination of damnation.