Thanatos

Thanatos is death itself given a face, not the manner of dying but the fact of it. In Hesiod's Theogony he is a child of Nyx, Night, born without a father, and the twin brother of Hypnos, Sleep; the pairing is exact, for the Greeks felt death and sleep to be near neighbours. Homer shows the two brothers together in the Iliad, where at Zeus's command Sleep and Death lift the body of the fallen hero Sarpedon and carry it gently home to Lycia for burial. That gentleness distinguishes Thanatos from the Keres, the fierce spirits of violent slaughter on the battlefield: he is the quiet, inevitable close rather than the bloody one. In folktale he could even be cheated for a time, the cunning Sisyphus was said to have bound him, so that no one could die until he was released, but such stories only underline that death, in the end, is not to be evaded.

Thanatos receives his fullest treatment on the Greek stage in Euripides' Alcestis (438 BCE), where he appears as a speaking character who comes to claim the queen Alcestis after she has agreed to die in her husband's place; the hero Heracles, arriving as a guest at the house of mourning, ambushes Thanatos at the tomb and physically wrestles Alcestis back from him by force, one of the few surviving Greek tragedies in which Death himself is a character on stage, and the only one in which he is bested by main strength rather than persuasion or trickery.

Thanatos has a second life inside modern psychology that most people encounter before they ever meet the Greek personification directly, and it rests on a widely repeated claim that does not entirely hold up. Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), proposed a death drive, Todestrieb, standing opposite the life preserving drives he grouped under Eros, and popular summaries ever since have paired the two as Eros and Thanatos, as though Freud himself had chosen the Greek god's name for his own concept. Historians of psychoanalysis note that Freud's own German texts make only sparing, inconsistent use of the actual word Thanatos, and that the tidy pairing with Eros was cemented mainly by his followers and by later popularizers rather than fixed by Freud in his founding papers, a gap between the coinage's popular attribution and its documented textual history that specialists still point out when the phrase is used as though it were a direct Freudian quotation.

The related word thanatology, the systematic study of death, dying, and grief, belongs to a separate and better documented history, usually traced to the early twentieth century biologist Elie Metchnikoff, who wrote on aging and mortality as part of his broader project of orthobiosis, the science of a properly lived and ended life. The field grew substantially in the later twentieth century into a recognized area of medical and psychological research, carrying the old god's name into hospital ethics committees and palliative care literature, a destination considerably removed from Sarpedon's battlefield or the stage of Euripides.