Characters
- Artemis — Homeric users of the brothers’ powers (background cross-refs)
- Dreams — related Night-brood
- Hypnos — Night’s son; gentle to mortals; bribed by Hera; carrier of Sarpedon
- Ker — Night’s son; iron-hearted; twin and colleague of Sleep
- Nyx — mother
Places
- House of Sleep and Death near Tartarus — Hesiodic dwelling Helios never sees
- Lycia — Homeric theatres of Hypnos’s and Thanatos’s service
- Night’s generative darkness — Hesiodic birth
Themes
Narrative
In Hesiod, Night bears Thanatos (Death) and Hypnos (Sleep) among her first children, kin to Moros, Ker, and the tribe of Dreams. Later in the *Theogony* the poet places their house at the edge of Tartarus: dread gods whom Helios never looks upon; Hypnos moves gently over land and sea and is kind to men, but Thanatos has a heart of iron, and once he seizes a mortal he holds him. Homer repeatedly treats them as brothers—Hera seeks Hypnos on Lemnos; Zeus bids Apollo have Hypnos and Thanatos carry Sarpedon’s body to Lycia—so epic narrative confirms the Hesiodic kinship.
Catalogue Hypnos and Thanatos as paired children of Night: one soft, one pitiless; both beyond the sun’s path; both available to gods as agents (lulling Zeus; bearing a hero home) without becoming judges of fate like the Moirae or blood-seizers like the Keres.