It is only somewhat later that we hear of the old (youth is out of place in the gloomy underworld) ferryman of the dead, Charon, and of Hermes as the guide of the dead.ĭeath was considered to be 'common to all men' ( Iliad 3.236 –238). The picture of the underworld is bleak and somber, as dead Achilles says: 'do not try to make light of death to me I would sooner be bound to the soil in the hire of another man, a man without lot and without much to live on, than be ruler over all the perished dead' ( Odyssey 11.489 –491). The soul can reach this 'mirthless place' ( Odyssey 11.94) only by crossing a river, the Styx. The underworld is situated under the earth, but also in the west -perhaps a sign of a conflation of different ideas about the underworld its deepest part is called the Tartaros. In the Iliad a soul of the dead goes straight to the underworld, whose gates are guarded by the canine Kerberos ( Iliad 5.646). Typically, he is sometimes looking away from the other gods -even they did not like him. His positive side comes to the fore in later representations through his holding the cornucopia. In representations of the kidnapping of Persephone, Hades is sometimes depicted as a young man, but he can equally be mature or even old. He has wings: it's Hades,' but normally Hades was wingless in Greek art. In his Alcestis (259 –262) Euripides lets the homonymous heroine exclaim: 'He stares at me from under his dark-eyed brow. Fear made people euphemistically refer to him as, for example, 'Zeus of the Underworld' ( Iliad 9.457), 'the chthonian god' (Aeschylus, Persians 629), or even 'the god below' (Sophocles, Ajax 571).Įvidently, there was not an authoritative tradition about Hades' appearance. His connection with the underworld made him 'horrible' ( Iliad 8.368) and even an eater of corpses (Sophocles, Electra 542 –543). Hades was indifferent to offerings and not moved by prayer. As Persephone was also associated with love and marriage and an abduction was part of Spartan wedding rites, the myth would originally have been a narrative representation of prenuptial girls' rites, although at some point it had become connected with the Eleusinian mysteries.Ī god like Hades could hardly receive a cult, and Elis seems to have been the only place that worshiped him in a temple, which could be opened only once a year, with only the priest having access to the temple.

Understandably, the Greeks could not imagine them to be with children, as the underworld was imagined to be an infertile place. The couple became worshiped as Plouton and Kore or, as in Eleusis, Theos and Thea. This meant that she had to spend part of the year with Hades in the underworld and part of the year with her mother in the upper world. However, before doing so, he tricked her into eating seeds of the pomegranate.

Her mother, Demeter, went everywhere to search for her daughter, but eventually it was Hermes who persuaded Hades to release Persephone. When Persephone was frolicking with her friends, 'the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean,' on a meadow, picking flowers, Hades carried her off on his golden chariot. The oldest version is related by the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which probably dates from the first half of the sixth century bce. However, the most famous myth of Hades is his abduction of Persephone, which was localized at various spots in the Greek world. There is an obscure allusion in the Iliad (5.395 –397) that Hades was wounded by Heracles 'at Pylos among the dead.' This myth is probably part of Heracles' function as Master of Animals and suggests that the personification of Hades dates back to the Bronze Age. The passage is one more example of the increasingly recognized Oriental influence on early Greek literature, since it ultimately derives from the Akkadian epic Atrahasis. Homer ( Iliad 15.187 –193) mentions that Hades acquired the underworld through a lottery with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon. He has few myths, fewer cults, and is not even represented with certainty on archaic Greek vases. Most likely, Hades first denoted a place name and was personified only later. Appropriately, it is linked to the root *a-wid- (invisible, unseen): Hades' wolf's cap is worn by the goddess Athena in the Iliad and makes her invisible (5.844 –845). The spelling of the name sometimes varies (Aides, Hades, A ïdoneus), but the etymology seems now reasonably clear. HADES is the Greek name for the underworld and its ruler.

Zeus poseidon hades brothers