Tartarus

Not to be confused with Tartaria.

TARTAROS (Tartarus) was the great pit beneath the earth in the oldest of the Greek cosmogonies. The universe was envisaged as great sphere--or egg-shaped ovoid--with the solid dome of the sky forming the upper half and the inverse dome of the pit of Tartaros the lower. The flat, horizontal disc of the earth divided the interior of the cosmic sphere into two halves--the homes of men and gods above, and the gloomy, storm-wracked prison of the Titanes below.

Haides, was originally quite distinct from the pit of Tartaros. The land of the dead was located either at the very ends of the earth beyond the river Okeanos (Oceanus) and the setting-places of the sun or else in the hollow depths of the earth's belly. Tartaros on the other hand descended as far beneath Haides--i.e. the deepest recesses of the flat earth--as the sky rose above the earth.

Tartaros was secured with a surrounding wall of bronze set with a pair of gates guarded by the hundred-handed Hekatonkheires.

The primordial deity of the Tartarean pit sired a single child by Gaia (Earth) named Typhoeus--a monstrous, serpentine storm-giant who attempted to seize the throne of heaven. Zeus vanquished the creature and cast it back down into the pit of Tartaros where it remained as the cosmic-source of hurricanes and storm winds. The protogenos (primordial deity) Tartaros scarcely figures in myth and was a purely elemental deity, i.e. the pit itself instead of an anthropomorphic god.

Later, classical writers re-imagined Tartaros as a hellish prison-house for the damned conflating it with Homer's Haidean chamber of torments. This realm is described on a separate page--Tartaros, the Dungeon of the Damned.