Realms

Tartarus

Underworlds

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Tartarus." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/realms/tartarus.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Tartarus. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/realms/tartarus

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-tartarus,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Tartarus},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/realms/tartarus},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The deep abyss of Greek cosmology, a place of torment lying as far below Hades as the earth lies below the sky. It served as the prison of the defeated Titans and of the greatest sinners condemned to eternal punishment. It embodies the lowest and most dreadful region of the cosmos.

Facts

Structure

As far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth 1

Structure

Hesiod: the distance is a bronze anvil falling nine days 1

Structure

Hesiod's Theogony describes a bronze wall built around Tartarus by Poseidon, with bronze gates that Night and Day pass through in turn as each ends her portion of duty, giving the abyss its own bounded architecture within the wider cosmos. 1

Status

Status Within the Tradition

Attested 1

Disputed

Origin of the Name

The origin of the Greek name Tartaros is uncertain and may be pre-Greek, with no accepted derivation from known Indo-European roots. 1

Ancient sources make no attempt to explain the name, and modern philologists have proposed no derivation that has won general acceptance; many regard it, like several other early Greek place and underworld names, as likely inherited from a pre-Greek substrate language rather than coined from Greek roots.

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

In Hesiod, a prison as far below Hades as earth is below heaven 1Archaic Greek epic (Homer and Hesiod)

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Its inmates are the Titans 1Archaic Greek epic (Homer and Hesiod)

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Not the ordinary destination of wicked human beings until much later 1Archaic Greek epic (Homer and Hesiod)

Origins

Held By

Guarded by the hundred handed Hecatoncheires, set there by Zeus after the Titanomachy to keep watch over the imprisoned Titans. 1

Language

Ancient Greek 1

Learn More

The Abyss Beneath the Abyss

Tartarus is the deepest region of the Greek cosmos, a pit lying as far beneath Hades as the earth lies beneath the sky, Hesiod famously measures the distance by imagining a bronze anvil falling for nine days from heaven to earth, and nine more from earth to Tartarus. It is both a primordial entity, one of the first beings to emerge at the origin of things (and, with Gaia, a parent of the monster Typhon), and a place: the ultimate prison of the cosmos.

Into it Zeus casts the defeated enemies of the Olympian order, the Titans, after their overthrow, sealed behind bronze gates and guarded by the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires, and there too suffer the archetypal sinners whose punishments became proverbial: Tantalus, forever reaching for food and water that recede from him; Sisyphus, endlessly rolling his boulder uphill only to watch it roll down; Ixion bound to a burning wheel; the daughters of Danaus filling a leaking jar without end. Tartarus is thus the Greek imagination's image of ultimate confinement and eternal, fitting punishment, the place where cosmic rebellion and the gravest human crimes are put away below everything else. It supplied later Western thought (and, through the Septuagint's use of the word, some New Testament imagery) with a vocabulary for the lowest hell.

A Prison First, a Punishment Afterwards

Hesiod's Tartarus is a measurement. A bronze anvil would fall nine days from heaven to reach the earth, and nine more from the earth to reach Tartarus, and it is bounded by a bronze wall and by night poured round its neck. It is not described as a place of torment. It is a container, built to hold the Titans after the gods defeated them, with Hundred-Handers set as guards.

The punishment came with the named prisoners, and they became a canon: Tantalus with the water and the fruit that withdraw, Sisyphus and the stone, Ixion on the wheel, Tityos and the vultures, the daughters of Danaus filling a jar that will not hold water. What the list has in common is that every punishment is a task that cannot be completed. That is a specific idea about what the worst possible sentence is, and it is a more interesting one than fire.

Later writers, especially Virgil, gave Tartarus a judge, a gate, a road and a population of ordinary sinners, and Christian writing found the structure ready to use. The New Testament uses a verb formed from the name once. What began as a sealed vault for defeated gods had become, within a few centuries, a place where individuals are sent for what they did.

The word also became a verb of sorts in later usage, and the English adjective derived from it now means a state of misery rather than a place. That is the usual fate of these names: Hades, Gehenna and Tartarus all began as somewhere and ended as a condition.

Sources AeneidVirgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) with The New Testament, 2 PeterTraditionally attributed to Peter the Apostle

Cross-Tradition Connections