θάνατος

θάνατος (thanatos, "THAH-nah-toss") is the Greek word for death, and the record gives it 1,221 occurrences across 134 works. The counts skew, though, toward a handful of works. The Iliad carries it most heavily, with 76, the Odyssey 59; then come the Discourses (57), the Histories (53), the Lives of Eminent Philosophers (51), and the Laws (46).

The lexica are brief because the sense is not in doubt. LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) gives simply "death, whether natural or violent," and preserves the form θάνατόνδε (thanatonde, "to death") — death as a direction one is sent, as though it were a place. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it "death" and notes at once the compound the Greeks made by negation: ἀ-θάνατος (a-thanatos, "deathless," "immortal"), the standing epithet of the gods. The immortals are not defined as living but as un-dying; θάνατος is the line drawn under mortal and immortal, and the gods are named for the side of it they escape.

Beekes traces the noun to a verbal root meaning "to die" (reconstructed *dhwenh₂-). Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) files it with θνήσκω (thnēskō, "to die"), the verb, and counts more than twenty compounds built on it. In the New Testament the record's cited surface reaches the vocative: θάνατε (thanate, "O death"), attested at 1 Corinthians 15.55.

If the gods are named only for the death they do not undergo, what does the word measure — an end, or a boundary?