Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Thanatos.
The gallery
Hypnos and Thanatos Carry Sarpedon (Euphronios Krater)
Euphronios, c. 515 BC
Athenian red-figure calyx-krater painted by Euphronios, one of the most celebrated of all Greek vases. The winged brothers Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) lift the body of the fallen hero Sarpedon from the Trojan battlefield under the direction of Hermes, a scene from Book 16 of the Iliad. Long displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the krater was repatriated to Italy in 2008.
Sleep and His Half-Brother Death
John William Waterhouse, 1874
Early oil painting by John William Waterhouse on the twin brothers of Greek myth, Hypnos and Thanatos. One youth reclines in the lamplight clutching poppies, the emblem of sleep, while his brother lies beyond in shadow — death rendered as sleep's quiet mirror image.
Winged Thanatos (column drum from Ephesus)
Unknown, c. 325–300 BC
Sculpted marble column drum from the fourth-century BC Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, now in the British Museum, London. Among its relief figures stands a winged youth with a sword, commonly identified as Thanatos, beside Hermes and a veiled woman in a scene usually read as a soul's passage to the underworld.
In play
Thanatos
Freud borrowed Thanatos for the death drive — the god of peaceful death turned into modern psychology's name for the pull toward ending.
Thanatology
The academic study of death took the god's name — Thanatos as the root of thanatology, the clinical and cultural talk of dying.
Hades
Supergiant Games
In Supergiant's game Thanatos is a grim, winged reaper who spars with Zagreus — Death as a rival, not only a metaphor.