Hypnos & Thanatos, Sleep & Death

Author: * Sin UtNapishtim - 14 Posts on this thread out of 23 Posts sitewide.
Date: Oct 21, 2004 - 23:05

Already stiffened by death (rigor mortis), this dead hero looks like a fellow you can really get a handle on -- then pull him up to lift the lid beneath him and get into the cista, the jewel box below (long lost, alas).

He's even stiffer, stiff as a board, really, on other bronze vessels, such as cinerary urns or ash pots that held the ashes of the dead. In a similar bronze group in Shirley Lubbock's The Art of the Etruscans, all three figures are ramrod stiff, even the two spear-holding, helmeted warriors holding up their dead comrade. So far as I know, only in this beautiful bronze version, now in the Cleveland Museum, is the corpse still somewhat limp, and his two bearers really bending as they gently lift and bear him from the dusty field of battle.

This scene was a favorite on vases, too, both Greek and Etruscan. When the two corpse-bearers are winged, as well as helmeted, as they are in this Etruscan bronze, one knows they are not mortals. They're immortals: Sleep and Death -- in Greek, Hypnos (as in hypnosis) and Thanatos. (Though Hypnos here, on the left, has lost much of his wings.)

So who's the dead man, the fallen warrior? Beneath his bleeding, dusty body, on the most famous of the vases, a Greek calyx krater in the Metropolitan Museum, painted by Euphronios (c 515 BC), one can read the name SARPEDON. So this is a scene from the Trojan War. In the Iliad Homer tells how Sarpedon, a son of Zeus and leader of the Trojans' allies, was slain by Patroklos. Zeus orders Apollo to wash and perfume his bloody, dusty body, and summons Hypnos and Thanatos, winged messengers (angeloi) and twin sons of Night who live in a cave by the river Lethe, to carry the huge hero to his homeland for a hero's burial.

Or is it Sarpedon? He's rather skinny in this Etruscan bronze, unlike the huge hero of the Greek texts and vases. Maybe he's another Trojan, Memnon, killed by Achilles. No matter. The scene is really a generic, like those sold by funeral homes to reassure us that the angels of the Lord will bear our loved ones, and especially those fallen in battle, to a blessed resting place in the world beyond.

None believed this more than the Etruscans -- even more than the Greeks. That's why so many of the vases and bronzes of this scene -- even the Greek ones -- wound up in Etruscan tombs. Cornetri, Cervetri (Lubbock's spear-carrying bearers); the vase from Vulci in the British Museum; the list goes on and on.

One final note: I returned to these images of Hypnos and Thanatos as winged messengers or angels of death after discovering and writing about their Etruscan counterparts, Charun and Vanth, the winged guides we encounter painted on their tomb walls and carved on their funerary urns. Not only are Charun and Vanth placed on either side of the deceased, like Hypnos and Thanatos. They also seem to serve similar roles: Vanth, like Hypnos, giving surcease and ease from pain and sorrow; and Charun, like Thanatos, delivering the fatal, fainal blow of death. Which is why, perhaps, in the Greek views, the pair bear the dead or dying away to the right, to Death.

To see them, go to my recent articles in Etruria on Vanth & Charun.