River Styx

Lore & Background

According to the usual account, Styx was the eldest of the Oceanids, the many daughters of the Titan Oceanus and his sister-wife, the Titaness Tethys. However, according to the Roman mythographer Hyginus, she was the daughter of Nox ("Night", the Roman equivalent of Nyx) and Erebus (Darkness). She married the Titan Pallas and by him gave birth to the personifications Zelus (Glory, Emulation), Nike (Victory), Kratos (Strength, Dominion), and Bia (Force, Violence).

The geographer Pausanias tells us that, according to Epimenides of Crete, Styx was the mother of the monster Echidna, by an otherwise unknown Perias. Although usually Demeter was the mother, by Zeus, of the underworld-goddess Persephone, according to the mythographer Apollodorus, it was Styx. However, when Apollodorus relates the famous story of the abduction of Persephone, and the search for her by her angry and distraught mother, as usual, it is Demeter who conducts the search.

Reader's Guide

The river Styx forms a boundary of Hades, the abode of the dead, in the Underworld. In the Iliad, Athena mentions the "sheer-falling waters of Styx" needing to be crossed when Heracles returned from Hades after capturing Cerberus, and Patroclus's shade begs Achilles to bury his corpse quickly so that he might "pass within the gates of Hades" and join the other dead "beyond the River." So too in Virgil's Aeneid, where the Styx winds nine times around the borders of Hades, and the boatman Charon is in charge of ferrying the dead across it.

More usually, however, Acheron is the river (or lake) which separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. In the Odyssey, Circe says that the Underworld river Cocytus is a branch of the Styx. In Dante's Inferno, Phlegyas ferries Virgil and Dante across the foul waters of the river Styx which is portrayed as a marsh comprising the Hell's Fifth Circle, where the angry and sullen are punished. By metonymy, the adjective stygian came to refer to anything unpleasantly dark, gloomy, or forbidding.

According to the Achilleid, written by the Roman poet Statius in the 1st century AD, when Achilles was born his mother Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx; however, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body by which she held him: his left heel. And so Paris was able to kill Achilles during the Trojan War by shooting an arrow into his heel.

Did You Know?

• According to Hesiod, a god who breaks an oath sworn by Styx must lie breathless for a full year, then be cut off from the other gods for nine more years.
• The Arcadian Styx, a stream and waterfall near Nonacris, was said to be poisonous—Pliny wrote that drinking its water caused immediate death.
• According to the mythographer Apollodorus, Styx was the mother of Persephone, though the more common account names Demeter as Persephone's mother.