Mystical systems
Tartarus
Direct answer
Tartarus is the deepest region of the Greek underworld, a pit far below Hades where the defeated Titans are imprisoned and, in later accounts, the worst offenders are punished.
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At a glance
- Also called
- tartaros
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Hades, Elysium, Styx, Gehenna
Tartarus is the deepest region of the Greek underworld, a pit far below Hades where the defeated Titans are imprisoned and, in later accounts, the worst offenders are punished.
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What is Tartarus in Greek mythology?
Tartarus is the lowest place in the Greek picture of the world. Hesiod sets it as far beneath the earth as the sky is above, walled in bronze and wrapped in night, and makes it the prison into which Zeus cast the Titans after his victory over them, with the hundred-handed giants as their guards. In Hesiod it is also one of the first beings to exist, a primal power as well as a place.
Later writers turned the prison of gods into a place of punishment for human beings. There Sisyphus pushes his stone, Tantalus reaches for fruit and water that draw back, and Ixion turns on his wheel. Plato and Virgil both describe judges who send the incurably wicked down to it.
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What sets Tartarus apart
Tartarus began as a prison for gods and only later held human beings. Its first inmates are the Titans, political enemies of Zeus and no sinners in any moral sense. Its defining measure is depth: Hesiod sets it as far below the ground as the sky is above. The famous sufferers, each with a punishment fitted to the offence, were added by later poets and gave the place its moral meaning.
- Earliest account: Hesiod, Theogony, about 700 BCE
- Depth: a bronze anvil falls nine days and nights from earth to reach it
- First prisoners: the Titans, guarded by the hundred-handed giants
- Later inmates: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion and others
- Also: a primal being in Hesiod, among the first to exist
- New Testament: a verb formed from the name, in 2 Peter 2:4
Often mistaken for something else: Gehenna in Jewish and Christian teaching is a place of punishment for human wrongdoers; Tartarus was first a dungeon for defeated gods.
The story behind Tartarus
Hesiod's Theogony, about 700 BCE, gives the earliest full account and says a bronze anvil dropped from earth would fall nine days and nights before reaching it. The Iliad has Zeus threaten to hurl disobedient gods there. Plato uses it in the myths of the Gorgias and the Republic in the fourth century BCE, and Virgil describes it in book six of the Aeneid. The Second Letter of Peter uses a Greek verb formed from the name for the casting down of sinful angels.
Why Tartarus matters
Tartarus is the part of the Greek underworld where the idea of punishment after death took shape, and one source of later pictures of hell.
How to read Tartarus
Students of myth turn to it when a story speaks of imprisonment below, and when tracing how an underworld for all became divided by desert.
Tartarus in practice: an example
A reader of the Aeneid watches the road fork: the right-hand way leads to Elysium and the left to the triple walls of Tartarus, which Aeneas hears described and does not enter.
Where readings of Tartarus go wrong
Tartarus belongs to poetry and philosophical myth, and the Greeks themselves held no single agreed doctrine about it.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- tartarus greek mythology, tartarus meaning, tartaros, pit of tartarus
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is Tartarus in Greek mythology?
It is the abyss beneath Hades, used first as the prison of the Titans and later described as the place where the most serious wrongdoers are punished after death.
Is Tartarus the same as Hades?
No. Hades is the whole realm of the dead and the god who rules it. Tartarus is a separate region far below it, reserved for the enemies of the gods and for great offenders.
Is Tartarus mentioned in the Bible?
Once, indirectly. The Second Letter of Peter, chapter two, uses a Greek verb meaning to cast into Tartarus for the fate of angels who sinned. Many English versions translate it as hell.
