In Greek mythology, Styx ( ; Ancient Greek: Στύξ [stýks]; lit. "Shuddering"), also called the River Styx, is a goddess and one of the rivers of the Greek Underworld. Her parents were the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, and she was the wife of the Titan Pallas and the mother of Zelus, Nike, Kratos, and Bia. She sided with Zeus in his war against the Titans, and because of this, to honor her, Zeus decreed that the solemn oaths of the gods be sworn by the water of Styx.
Family According to the usual account, Styx was the eldest of the Oceanids, the many daughters of the Titan Oceanus, the great world-encircling river, 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.
Mythology
Oath of the gods Styx was the oath of the gods. Homer calls Styx the "dread river of oath". In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is said that swearing by the water of Styx is "the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods". Homer has Hera (in the Iliad) say this when she swears by Styx to Zeus, that she is not to blame for Poseidon's intervention on the side of the Greeks in the Trojan War, and he has Calypso (in the Odyssey) use the same words when she swears by Styx to Odysseus that she will cease to plot against him. Also Hypnos (in the Iliad) makes Hera swear to him "by the inviolable water of Styx". Examples of oaths sworn by Styx also occur in the Homeric Hymns. Demeter asks the "implacable" water of Styx to be her witness, as she swears to Metaneira, Leto swears to the personified Delos by the water of Styx, calling it the "most powerful and dreadful oath that the blessed gods can swear", while Apollo asks Hermes to swear to him on the "dread" water of Styx. Hesiod, in the Theogony, gives an account of how this role for Styx came about. He says that, during the Titanomachy, the great war of Zeus and his fellow Olympians against Cronus and his fellow Titans, Zeus summoned "all the deathless gods to great Olympus" and promised, to whosoever would join him against the Titans, that he would preserve whatever rights and offices each had, or if they had none under Cronus, they would be given both under his rule. Styx, upon the advice of her father Oceanus, was the first to side with Zeus, bringing her children by Pallas along with her. And so in return Zeus appointed Styx to be "the great oath of the gods, and her children to live with him always." According to Hesiod, Styx lived at the entrance to Hades, in a cave "propped up to heaven all round with silver pillars". Hesiod also tells us that Zeus would send Iris, the messenger of the gods, to fetch the "famous cold water" of Styx for the gods to swear by, and describes the punishments which would follow the breaking of such an oath:
For whoever of the deathless gods that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water and is forsworn, must lie breathless until a full year is completed, and never come near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lie spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, another penance more hard follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of Olympus. The Roman poet Ovid has Jove (the Roman equivalent of Zeus) swear by the waters of Styx when he promises Semele:
and was then obliged to follow through even though he realized to his horror that Semele's request would lead to her death. Similarly Sol (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Helios) promised his son Phaethon whatever he desired, which also resulted in the boy's death after he asked to drive his father's chariot for a day.
River The goddess Styx, like her father Oceanus, and his sons the river gods, was also a river, in her case, a river of the Underworld. According to Hesiod, Styx was given one-tenth of her father's water, which flowed far underground, and came up to the surface to pour out from a high rock:
the famous cold water ... trickles down from a high and beetling rock. Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her. In the Iliad the river Styx forms a boundary of Hades, the abode of the dead, in the Underworld. 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 (/ˈstɪdʒiən/) came to refer to anything unpleasantly dark, gloomy, or forbidding.
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