Oizys

Q: Who was Oizys?

Oizys is the Greek personification of misery and distress, a daughter of Night (Nyx) in Hesiod’s Theogony. She is named beside her brother Momus (Blame) among the dark offspring of Night, and Hesiod tells no story about her.

Oizys is the Greek personification of misery and distress, a daughter of Night (Nyx) in Hesiod’s Theogony. She is named beside her brother Momus (Blame) among the dark offspring of Night, and Hesiod tells no story about her. Her Latin equivalent is Miseria.

Family

Hesiod lists Oizys among the children of Night. Night bore hateful Moros (Doom), black Ker (Fate of death), Thanatos (Death), Hypnos (Sleep) and the tribe of Oneiroi (Dreams), and Hesiod says that she bore these without lying with any god. Next she bore Momus (Blame) and painful Oizys (Distress) (Hesiod, Theogony 211–214). Hesiod names her beside Momus; he does not call them twins. In the same list Night then bears the Hesperides, the Moirai and the Keres, Nemesis, Apate (Deceit), Philotes (Affection), Geras (Old Age) and Eris (Strife) (Hesiod, Theogony 215–225).

Hesiod names no father for Oizys. Other writers make Erebus, the god of darkness, the father of Night’s children. In Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, Cotta repeats an argument of Carneades that lists the brothers and sisters whom the old genealogists name, all said to be born of Erebus and Night: Love, Guile, Toil, Envy, Fate, Old Age, Death, Darkness, Miseria, Complaint, Favour, Fraud, Obstinacy, the Parcae, the Hesperides and Dreams (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 3.44). Miseria, “misery,” is the name in this Latin list that corresponds to Oizys.

Family of Oizys

Parents: Nyx, Erebus (versions differ)
Siblings: Apate, Eris, Momus, Thanatos

See the full family tree

The Name

Oizys is the Greek word for distress, grief and misery, and it is an ordinary word in Homer. In the Odyssey, for example, the disguised Odysseus tells Eumaeus that he has ended his wandering and his “grim distress” (Homer, Odyssey 15.342). Hesiod calls the goddess “painful” (algynoessa), and in his lists she stands with such figures as Death, Sleep, Blame and Old Age.

Siblings in Hesiod

In Hesiod’s catalogue the first group concerns death and sleep (Moros, Ker, Thanatos, Hypnos, the Oneiroi); Momus and Oizys follow, and then the Hesperides, the Moirai, the Keres and Nemesis. Apate, Philotes, Geras and Eris close the list (Theogony 211–225). Eris in turn bears Toil, Forgetfulness, Famine, Pains and other afflictions (Theogony 226–232); these are Oizys’ nieces and nephews, such as Dysnomia.