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Hypnos & Thanatos, Sleep & Death

This scene was a favorite on vases, both Greek and Etruscan. When the two corpse-bearers are winged, as well as helmeted, one knows they are not mortals. They're immortals: Sleep and Death -- in Greek, Hypnos (as in hypnosis) and Thanatos (as in euthanasia, "good death"). Overseeing them is the god Hermes, conductor of the dead into Hades.

So who's the dead man, the fallen warrior? Beneath his bleeding, dusty body, on this most famous of the vases, a Greek calyx krater painted by Euphronios, in the Metropolitan Museum, one can read the name SARPEDON. So this is a scene from the Trojan War. In the Iliad Homer tells how Sarpedon, a son of Zeus and leader of the Trojans' allies, was slain by Patroklos. Zeus orders Apollo to wash and perfume his bloody, dusty body, and summons Hypnos and Thanatos, winged messengers (angeloi) and twin sons of Night who live in a cave by the river Lethe, to carry the huge hero to his homeland for a hero's burial.

Already stiffened by death (rigor mortis), the dead hero on the lid of this Etruscan bronze vessel looks like a fellow you can really get a handle on -- then pull him up to lift the lid beneath him and get into the cista, the jewel box below (long lost, alas).

He's even stiffer, stiff as a board, really, on other bronze vessels, such as cinerary urns or ash pots that held the ashes of the dead. In a similar bronze group in Shirley Lubbock's The Art of the Etruscans, all three figures are ramrod stiff, even the two spear-holding, helmeted warriors holding up their dead comrade. So far as we know, only in this beautiful bronze version, now in the Cleveland Museum, is the corpse still somewhat limp, and his two bearers really bending as they gently lift and bear him from the dusty field of battle.

But is it Sarpedon? He's rather skinny in this Etruscan bronze, unlike the huge hero of the Greek texts and vases. Maybe he's another Trojan, Memnon, killed by Achilles. No matter. The scene is really a generic, like those sold by funeral homes to reassure us that the angels of the Lord will bear our loved ones, and especially those fallen in battle, to a blessed resting place in the world beyond.

None believed this more than the Etruscans -- even more than the Greeks. That's why so many of the vases and bronzes of this scene -- even the Greek ones -- wound up in Etruscan tombs. Cornetri, Cervetri (the Euphronios krater, Lubbock's spear-carrying bearers); the vase from Vulci in the British Museum; the list goes on and on.

I returned to these images of Hypnos and Thanatos as winged messengers or angels of death after discovering and writing about their Etruscan counterparts, Charun and Vanth, the winged guides we encounter painted on their tomb walls and carved on their funerary urns. Not only are Charun and Vanth placed on either side of the deceased, like Hypnos and Thanatos. They also seem to serve similar roles: Vanth, like Hypnos, giving surcease and ease from pain and sorrow; and Charun, like Thanatos, delivering the fatal, final blow of death. Which is why, perhaps, in the Greek views, the pair bear the dead or dying away to the right, to Death.

Thanatos appears at the very moment of death, particularly on the battlefield and at executions, including prisoners of war. He inherited from Hermes, or even from Zeus, who in Homer held the fate of two warriors in the balance, until one weighed more and had to die, the decision of who shall live and who shall die.

THE THANATOS FROM EPHESUS

On one of the enormous pillars from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (325-300 BC) is carved a statue of a large-winged, languid, naked youth. He gazes down thoughtfully, even wistfully and regretfully, at something (now lost) in his left hand. It may have been a dead butterfly, symbol of the fleeting nature of life (rather than, on modern gravestones, immortal life). More likely he held a pair of scales, in which the winged souls of two young warriors were placed; and he watches as one, sinking lower, must be the one to die. Onto the young god's naked body, beside his left hip, and sheathed inside a huge scabbard, is strapped a sword. On his damaged right side and from his damaged right arm one can make out the remains of an upside-down, extinguished torch -- a sure-fire sign of a life snuffed out.

The eternally young and deathless youth in that Hellenistic sculpture is Thanatos, the Greek god of Death. In earlier accounts he was a fierce, bearded, older man. But by Hellenistic times, with Rome gone soft and sybaritic, and dreaming of a lovely afterlife in Elysium, he is portrayed as he was at Ephesus, as a lovely young man.

He looks a LOT younger on Roman coins struck for the Greek provinces in the early third century AD. Here's one such coin, a bronze coin from Hadrianopolis, in Thrace, showing Thanatos snuffing out the torch of life. (A bad omen for Geta, the Roman emperor whose head is on the other side? In 211 AD Geta and thousands of his followers were murdered by his brother Caracalla.) Coins of this type were often minted to commemorate the death of an emperor's young son and heir, which may explain why on several of them the angel of death has become a chubby little baby boy. Collectors go nuts trying to decide which one they've got: a Thanatos or a Cupid?

THANATOS ON THE BOSTON THRONE
Similar questions plague the so-called Boston Throne, where Thanatos also looks younger, svelter, even feminine. Here he weighs the souls of two young men to decide which one must die.

It is the lad on the right, to judge from the grieving woman. And the tipped balance scale. Though its cross-bar is lost, you can see it was not level: just visualize a straight line from the hole on the left through the hole in the middle to the hole on the right. From the two end holes once hung silver chains holding the weigh pans -- also of silver, and also lost or stolen. Below these end holes are carved conical pieces that visually stood on the missing pans, each bearing the tiny nude figure of a young man. The youth on the left one raises his arms overhead, as if tied up like a prisoner (of war?) awaiting execution. So does the youth on the right, though he is standing sideways and his arms are partly broken off.

So boyish is the central figure that some have taken him to be Eros, and the two women as a smiling Aphrodite on the left, and a grieving Persephone on the right -- the winner and the loser in their court battle over who would get to enjoy Adonis the most. And that might explain the smile on the face of Eros, as he judges in his mother's favor. That could also be just an "archaic smile," found even on dying warriors in sculpture of the Archaic period, and still present on some works of the early Classical or "Severe" period (late 5th century BC), -- though not on this piece's supposed partner, the famous Ludovisi Throne in Rome. There's also a pomegranate in the lower right hand corner of this throne -- and that's a fertility symbol for Aphrodite. And why are there two little images or souls of Adonis in the balance, instead of just one?

One final note: As we have seen, as the Angel of Death Thanatos inherited from Zeus his role as a judge of who shall live and who shall die, and he did this by weighing the living on a balance scale. Centuries later Christians would depict St. Michael the Archangel at the Last Judgement wielding a sword in one hand and with the other weighing the souls of the dead in a similar balance scale. But the image is far older. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Anubis engages in the Weighing of the Heart, in which he decides the fate of the dead by balancing on a giant scale his or her heart against a feather -- the feather of Justice, the feather of Maat.

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For an account of the fate of the Met's prized Euphronios vase of Thanatos and Hypnos carrying off the dead Sarpedon, click HERE


For more on the Thanatos from Ephesus, and two large color photos of the figures of Thanatos, Alcestis and Hermes on the column drum there, and how Thanatos was defeated by Herakles, click HERE

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