Source Verification: Nyx

Who are Nyx's parents?

She has none in the usual sense. Hesiod's Theogony names her, along with her brother Erebus, as coming directly from Chaos, making her one of the first beings to exist rather than the child of any prior union.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 116-125

Who did Nyx have children with?

With Erebus, she bore Aether, the bright upper air, and Day. Every child she bore afterward, including Sleep, Death, and Nemesis, is described as hers alone, with no father named, a very different pattern from the Titans' generation that follows.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 116-125

Which of Nyx's children are most important in later myth?

Sleep and Death, twin brothers who appear together carrying the dead from battle in Homer's Iliad, and Nemesis, goddess of retribution against human arrogance, are the three of her children who go on to have real roles of their own in Greek storytelling, far more than most of the abstract siblings Hesiod lists alongside them.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 211-225

Does Zeus outrank Nyx?

Not straightforwardly. Homer's Iliad has Sleep recall fleeing to Night for protection after angering Zeus, and Zeus, despite his fury, held back from punishing Sleep further specifically because he did not want to displease Night - the one moment in the poem where Zeus's anger is shown checked by fear of another god's reaction.

Source: Homer, Iliad 14.249-262

Where does Nyx live, according to Hesiod?

In a remote region near the ends of the earth, close to where Atlas stands holding up the sky and near the gates of Tartarus - a place the sun's light never reaches, where she and Day are said to pass each other at the threshold as one goes out and the other comes in.

Source: Hesiod, Theogony 744-761

• Hesiod, Theogony 116-125
• Hesiod, Theogony 211-225
• Hesiod, Theogony 744-761
• Homer, Iliad 14.249-262

• Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (1993)