[citation needed] The Greek poet Hesiod established in his Theogony that Thánatos has no father, but is the son of Nyx (Night) and brother of Hypnos (Sleep).

[6] Homer earlier described Hypnos and Thanatos as twin brothers in his epic poem, the Iliad, where they were charged by Zeus via Apollo with the swift delivery of the slain hero Sarpedon to his homeland of Lycia.

Then [Apollon] gave him (Sarpedon) into the charge of swift messengers to carry him, of Hypnos and Thanatos, who are twin brothers, and these two presently laid him down within the rich countryside of broad Lycia.

[7]Counted among Thanatos' siblings were other negative personifications such as Geras (Old Age), Oizys (Suffering), Moros (Doom), Apate (Deception), Momus (Blame), Eris (Strife), and Nemesis (Retribution).

Sisyphus would evade Death a second time by convincing Persephone to allow him to return to his wife stating that she never gave him a proper funeral.

[8][9][10] A fragment of Alcaeus, a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BC, refers to this episode: King Sisyphos, son of Aiolos, wisest of men, supposed that he was master of Thanatos; but despite his cunning he crossed eddying Akheron twice at fate's command.

[11]As the son of Aeolus (and thus a descendant of the Titan Prometheus), Sisyphus was a more-than-mortal figure: when it came to ordinary humans, Thanatos was usually thought of as inexorable.

Heracles was an honored guest in the House of Admetos at the time and offered to repay the king's hospitality by contending with Death itself for Alkestis' life.

Many Roman sarcophagi depict him as a winged boy, very much akin to Cupid: "Eros with crossed legs and torch reversed became the commonest of all symbols for Death", observes Arthur Bernard Cook.

[15] Thanatos has also been portrayed as a slumbering infant in the arms of his mother Nyx, or as a youth carrying a butterfly (the ancient Greek word "ψυχή" can mean soul or butterfly, or life, amongst other things) or a wreath of poppies (poppies were associated with Hypnos and Thanatos because of their hypnogogic traits and the eventual death engendered by overexposure to them).

According to them, the behaviors Freud studied can be explained by simpler, known processes, such as salience biases (e.g., a person abuses drugs because the promise of immediate pleasure is more compelling than the intellectual knowledge of harm sometime in the future) and risk calculations (e.g., a person drives recklessly or plays dangerous sports because the increases in status and reproductive success outweigh the risk of injury or death).

It is primarily an interdisciplinary study, frequently undertaken by professionals in nursing, psychology, sociology, psychiatry, social work and veterinary science.

Euthanasia, "good death" in Greek, is the act or practice of ending the life of an individual who would otherwise experience severe, incurable suffering or disability.