Cocytus
conceptThe river of lamentation in the Greek underworld, fed by the tears of the damned.
The Myth
Cocytus was the river of wailing, its name drawn from the Greek kokytein — to shriek, to lament. It flowed through the deepest regions of Hades as a frozen or sluggish stream of grief, and its banks were the gathering place for unburied souls who could not cross into the realm of the dead. Homer names it in the Odyssey as a branch of the Styx that flows into the Acheron at the point where Odysseus summons the dead. Pausanias recorded that a real river in Thesprotia bore the name Cocytus, a dark and gloomy stream near the Necromanteion oracle where the living went to speak with the dead. Plato describes the Cocytus in the Phaedo as the river where those who sinned against their parents are cast, crying out to their victims until they receive pardon. Virgil places the river in the Aeneid as a boundary of Tartarus, its wailing audible from a distance. Dante transformed it most dramatically — in his Inferno, Cocytus becomes a frozen lake at the bottom of Hell, where traitors are locked in ice, their tears freezing on their faces.
Parents
Symbols
Fun Fact
Dante turned the weeping river into a frozen lake — the idea that the deepest treachery produces not heat but absolute cold.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth:
Explore Further
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Acheron
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Hades
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Hades (God)
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placeThe great river that formed the boundary between the world of the living and the realm of the dead....
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