EREBUS. This word, which denotes darkness, comes probably from the same source as the Greek εpeφω, to cover, and οροφή, a roof, and has by some been connected also with the Hebrew Ereb, night, which reappears in Algarve. In the Hesiodic Theogony, 123, Erebus is, with Nyx, the night, the offspring of Chaos; and Erebus and Nyx become the parents of Aetlier and Hemera, the pure air and the day. In the Odyssey Erebus becomes the abode of all the dead, without reference to the character of their past lives; and from the Iliad it would follow that this abode was within the earth. It is a dreary and cheerless land, the inhabitants of which have no strength either of mind or of body , and thus the idea of Erebus is distinguished from the notion which assigned the righteous dead to Elysium and the wicked to Tartarus. Achilles, who in Elysium inherits a tearless life, declares in Erebus that he would rather toil as a peasant on the earth than be a king in that gloomy abode of departed shades (f)dys. xi. 489).

ERECHTHEUS, in Greek legend, apparently the same as Erichthonius, was a local hero of Attica, with whom was associated the belief of the Athenians in their ancestors having sprung from the soil (see Autochthones). But the story of his birth is told generally under the name of Erichthonius, who, in the form of a serpent, was the offspring of Athena and Hephaestus, and was by the former handed over in a closed basket to the three daughters of Cecrops, Aglaurus, Herse, and Pandrosus, with a command not to open it. When two of them, Aglaurusund Herse, opened it, they became frantic and threw themselves from the Acropolis of Athens. The scene of the opening of the basket is represented on a Greek vase in the British Museum, from which it is seen that the figure within it is not altogether of the form of a serpent ( = Erichthonius), but has the head and body of a boy, such as were ascribed to Erechtheus. Radically the names of both are connected with the earth (χθων). But while Erechtheus came to be looked upon as a first ancestor, and associated with the introduction of agriculture and other public benefits, his double, so to speak, Erichthonius retained as a rule the character of a daemon or semi-divine being.