Characters
- Apate — Deceit
- Ate — Ruin (among Eris’s children)
- Dreams — tribe of Night
- Erebus — partner for some offspring in related Hesiodic lines (background)
- Eris — Strife; mother of further woes
- Geras — Old Age
- Hesperides — guardians of the golden apples
- Horkos — Oath, punisher of false swearers
- Hypnos — Sleep
- Ker — death-spirits / fates of death
- Moirae — Fates who allot mortal portions
- Momos — Blame
- Moros — Doom
- Nemesis — retribution / indignation against mortals
- Nyx — primordial mother of the brood
- Oizys — Distress
- Philotes — Affection / sexual love (as Night’s child)
- Thanatos — Death
- Toil, Forgetfulness, Famine, Sorrows, Battles, Murders, Quarrels, Lies, Lawlessness — Eris’s catalogue children (collective)
Places
- Beyond Ocean — haunt of the Hesperides in the same Hesiodic stretch
- Night’s realm — generative seat of the brood
- World of mortals — field where Moirae, Nemesis, Eris, and Oath operate
Themes
Narrative
After the castration of Uranus and the birth of Aphrodite from the foam, Hesiod turns to Night (Nyx), who without a partner—or, for some offspring, with Erebus—bears a brood that people the dark edges of the cosmos. She first bears Moros (Doom), Ker (black Fate), Thanatos (Death), and Hypnos (Sleep), and the tribe of Dreams. Then Momos (Blame) and painful Oizys (Distress); the Hesperides who guard the golden apples beyond Ocean; the Moirae—Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—who assign mortals their portions of good and evil at birth; and the pitiless Keres who pursue wrongdoers. She bears Nemesis, affliction of mortals; Apate (Deceit), Philotes (Affection/Sex), Geras (Old Age), and hard-hearted Eris (Strife).
From Eris alone spring further pains: Toil, Forgetfulness, Famine, Sorrows, Fightings, Battles, Murders, Manslaughters, Quarrels, Lies, Disputes, Lawlessness, Ruin (Ate), and Oath (Horkos), who most harms those who swear falsely. The catalogue is not a narrative of wars but a mapping of moral and mortal conditions back to Night: death, sleep, destiny, blame, and strife are her children, and strife’s children are the daily wounds of human life. Later poets and cults elaborate single figures; Hesiod’s point is genealogical—Night is the mother of what darkens and measures the world of men.