Hemera was the day, the brightness that succeeded the night, daughter of Erebus and Nyx, sister of Aether. She lived with her mother in the great house at the edge of the world; each morning she emerged from it as Nyx descended into it; each evening they passed each other again at the threshold. Her chariot was the day's progress across the sky — though, in the developed mythology, the actual driving of the day's chariot was given to Helios the sun-god, and Hemera became, like her brother Aether, more of a cosmographic abstraction than a personified power.
Before thisAether
Next on the wallPontus
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 124–125, 748–757, gives Hemera as daughter of Erebus and Nyx and describes her shared house with her mother. In some later traditions she was conflated with Eos the dawn (a different Titan-generation figure, treated in her own entry), but the more careful mythographers preserved the distinction.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Child ofErebusdaughter of Erebus and Nyx, sister of Aether
Child ofNyxdaughter of Erebus and Nyx, sister of Aether
- Sibling ofAether
daughter of Erebus and Nyx, sister of Aether
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.