They served the latinized counterpart of Hades, called Pluto (from Greek Plouton, Wealthy) or Dis Pater (Father of Riches) and his wife Proserpina, equated with Persephone. Their parents were still Nox (Night) and Erebus (Darkness), also mostly unchanged from their Greek roots. Hypnos was renamed Somnus or Sopor, and his dream servants the Somnia. Thanatos became known as Mors, or occasionally Letus. The Romans designated Sleep and Death as winged genii, with their Hellenistic attributes relatively unchanged, save for their names. The Daimones of Greek origin remained familiar, however. They even considered each member of the Roman household to have had their own guardian spirit, a personal juppiter or juno representing their inner psyche and their connection to the divine. They multiplied the genii into a host of common domestic guardians such as the lares and penates. The Romans seemed far more preoccupied with the tutelary roles of their spirits than the Greeks were. Like daimones, genii were divine or semidivine anthropomorphisms of natural forces and human qualities, and were likewise commonly represented as winged spirits. The Latin interpretation of the daimon was the genius, a term having the same root meaning (replete with wisdom). Thanatos on the other hand was most certainly a Kakodaimon, a spirit of necessary evil, though not necessarily an evil spirit. Hypnos was considered a benevolent spirit, called a Eudaimon or Kalodaimon. Being children of Night, their angelic countenance belied their daemonic nature particularly in the case of merciless Death, who had not an ounce of compassion in his brazen heart. Some lesser daimones were the venerated spirits of renowned heroes and rulers, tutelary spirits of the ancestral dead, or semidivine nature spirits like the Satyroi, but the greater daimones were full-fledged divinities like Hypnos and Thanatos.Ĭontrasting starkly with the grim depictions of such beings found in other ancient cultures, the Hellenes recognized Sleep and Death as youthful epheboi (adolescents) with feathered wings, resembling the cherubic god of love, Eros. A daimon could be thought of as an intermediary being between gods and mortals, although many daimones had power over the gods as well, for even the immortals were subject to the rulings of the Fates. Unlike the theoi (gods) who merely governed certain principles of the universe, daimones fully personified what they represented. Nor either were they beyond the rulings of the Moirai, or Fates, who govern the destinies of all creatures mortal and divine.ĭaimones (or daemons in the anglicized form) are the spirit-deities of Ancient Greek mythology, responsible for natural phenomena or aspects of human nature. Still, they were subject to the authority of Zeus as the king of the gods, and could not disobey his laws. Therefore they were counted among the Theoi Khthonioi, the gods who dwelled beneath the earth. Their home was in the gloomy depths of the underworld, where they owed fealty to grim Hades and maidenly Persephone, the rulers of the dead. Though divine in their own right, Hypnos and Thanatos were not part of the Olympian pantheon. While the Titans and the Olympians cultivated the worship of mortal playthings, the children of Night stood at the fringes of the cosmos, impersonal and abstract, coveting nothing but the fulfilment of their natures. Their various siblings were personifications of such abstract concepts as strife, vengeance, madness, old age, affection, mercy and dreams. The twins were the eldest in their shadowy brood of brothers and sisters, each of whom embodied various forces of nature and the human condition. Nyx and Erebos were counted among the host of the Protogenoi primordial deities who emerged from the nothingness of Khaos at the dawn of time. Sleep and Death were the elder offspring of Nyx, the goddess of night, and Erebos, the god of darkness. The brief repose of sleep so closely resembled the eternal rest of death, so Hypnos and Thanatos resembled one another as near-identical twins although Death was said to be the firstborn twin, and Sleep the younger. In Classical mythology, Hypnos and Thanatos were the gods of sleep and death, depicted by the Ancient Greeks and Romans as childlike twin brothers.
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