Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Styx.
The gallery
The River Nymph Styx (Nymphae Stygis)
Philips Galle, 1587
A rare direct portrait of Styx herself rather than her waters. This 1587 engraving by the Antwerp printmaker Philips Galle, made after his own design, is the seventeenth and final plate in his numbered series of river and water nymphs and goddesses (New Hollstein, Galle 447). The eldest Oceanid sits on a block of stone in the foreground while the flames of the underworld flicker behind her, marking her as the personified river of the dead by whose name even the Olympian gods swore their most binding oath. The print survives in the Voorhelm Schneevoogt collection of the Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem.
Thetis Dipping the Infant Achilles into the River Styx
Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1630–1635
Designed by Rubens as a modello for his tapestry cycle on the life of Achilles, this oil sketch turns the Styx into the agent of a mother's desperate gamble. The sea-goddess Thetis grips her newborn son by the heel and plunges him into the black, sacred waters of the underworld river to make him immortal; the three-headed Cerberus and the gloom of Hades surround the pair. The single spot the water never touched — the heel by which she held him — would become the hero's one mortal weakness, so the very waters of the Styx both protect and doom Achilles in the same gesture.
Thetis Immerses Her Son Achilles in the Water of the River Styx
Antoine Borel, 1788
The French painter and printmaker Antoine Borel (1743–1810) returns to the same myth in a Neoclassical key. Thetis is shown lowering the infant Achilles into the dark current of the Styx in the hope of rendering him invulnerable, the river's underworld setting evoked around her. As in every telling, the heel she clasps remains untouched by the water, so the scene quietly fixes the boundary of the Styx's power and the origin of the hero's fatal vulnerability.