Apate was Deceit personified, daughter of Nyx, sister of Strife and the other dark powers of Night's brood. She had no cult and no extended narrative; she was a poetic personification, a name for the principle of false-dealing in human and divine affairs. Hesiod lists her in his catalogue of Night's children alongside Friendship, Old Age, Strife, and the rest of the abstract personifications; her place there is conventional rather than mythologically substantial.
Before thisPhilotes
Next on the wallDolos
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 224. Apate appears as a literary personification in tragedy and in late mythographic sources, but never had cult.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Child ofNyxApate was Deceit personified, daughter of Nyx, sister of Strife and the other dark powers of Night's brood
Sibling ofErisApate was Deceit personified, daughter of Nyx, sister of Strife and the other dark powers of Night's brood
Sibling ofGerasalongside Friendship, Old Age, Strife, and the rest of the abstract personifications
- Sibling ofDolos
often paired with his sister Apate (Deceit) in the catalogue of dark personifications
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Primordial Powers. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 1600–1100 BCE
- Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
- c. 1100–800 BCE
- Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
- late 8th–7th centuries BCE
- The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
- 7th–6th centuries BCE
- Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
- 6th–5th centuries BCE
- Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
- 5th century BCE
- Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
- 4th century BCE
- Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
- 323–31 BCE
- Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.