Greek god of the underworld
Hades
Hades is the Greek god of the underworld and, by extension, the name of the realm of the dead itself. Son of Cronus and Rhea, he received the underworld as his share of the cosmos after the Titanomachy. He embodied the inevitability of death, and the Greeks feared him so much that many avoided speaking his name.
The myth
According to Hesiod, Hades was one of the children of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus swallowed his offspring to keep them from overthrowing him, but Zeus escaped thanks to a trick by his mother. Once grown, Zeus forced his father to disgorge his siblings, and together they defeated the Titans in the Titanomachy. For that war the Cyclopes forged a helm of invisibility for Hades.
After the victory, according to a famous passage in the Iliad, the three brothers drew lots to divide the cosmos: Zeus took the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld, while the solid earth and Olympus remained shared. Hesiod, however, says that Zeus, on the advice of Gaia, gave Hades sovereignty over the dead.
In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades appears as a legitimate and powerful ruler, not as an evil deity. With Zeus's complicity he abducted Persephone, daughter of Demeter, while she was gathering flowers, opening a hole in the ground so that her mother would not notice. Helios reminded the grieving Demeter that the lord of the shades was no unworthy son-in-law. Persephone became his queen.
Tradition describes him as unbending rather than cruel. He yielded to no pleas, tears, or bribes, and his task was to keep the boundary between life and death inviolable. When he complained to Zeus that souls were arriving in his realm undeserved, Zeus set up judgment after death, presided over by Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus. Around him were the Erinyes, the Fates, the dog Cerberus, and the ferryman Charon.
Worship and religion
Hades received little open worship. As a chthonic god, his sacrifices were made in a bothros, a pit dug into the earth, rather than on the raised altars of the Olympians. Worshippers struck the ground with their hands to call him, and the Greeks sometimes referred to him as Zeus katachthonios, 'Zeus of the underworld', rather than naming him directly. Although some accounts included him among the twelve gods, he was not an Olympian.
Legacy
The name Hades became a synonym for the underworld itself. The Romans identified Pluto, 'the rich one', with the lord of underground riches, and equated Dis Pater and Orcus with him. The myth of Persephone's abduction became linked to the Eleusinian Mysteries. The word katabasis, or descent into the underworld, used for the journeys of heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas, comes from this tradition.
Ancient sources: Hesiod in the Theogony, Homer in the Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, and Plato in the Cratylus, where he discusses the origin of the god's name.
In art
Music, opera and dance
- Hercules · Alan Menken, 1997
- Hadestown · Anaïs Mitchell, 2016
- Perséphone · Igor Stravinsky, 1934
- Proserpine · Jean-Baptiste Lully, 1680
Literature and theatre
- The Divine Comedy · Dante Alighieri, 1320