Hades

Nothing grew where he ruled and nothing rotted either. The air in his kingdom held no weather, only a still grey cool that never lifted, and the rivers ran black and slow between banks no living foot had pressed. Somewhere in that quiet a three-headed dog kept the only door, and on a throne of dark stone sat a king who almost never came up into the light. The Greeks did not like to say his name. They called him the Rich One instead, or the Host of Many, and they turned their faces aside when they poured his offerings into the ground.

He was among the eldest children of Cronus and Rhea, and like his brothers and sisters he began life inside his own father. Cronus, warned that a child of his would one day unseat him, swallowed each one at birth, so Hades spent his first years in the dark of the Titan’s belly alongside Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia. Zeus, hidden away and raised in secret, forced the old god to bring them all back up. The war that followed ran for ten years. The three brothers freed the Cyclopes from their prison under the earth, and the grateful smiths forged a weapon for each of them: the thunderbolt for Zeus, the trident for Poseidon, and for Hades a helm that made its wearer vanish from sight. He put it on, moved unseen through the Titan lines, and the war began to turn.

When the Titans were beaten and chained in Tartarus, the victors divided the world by drawing lots. Zeus took the wide sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades drew the country beneath the ground. Earth and Olympus they left common to all three. It was not a punishment and not a defeat, only a share, but it was the share no one else would have wanted, and it fixed him forever in a place the sun never reached.

The vase-painters who dared to show him gave him a heavy dark beard and long hair falling across his brow, a mature man on an ebony throne with a scepter in his fist. Sometimes a horn tips over in his grip, not a weapon but a sign of the wealth that rises out of the ground, the grain and the buried metal that made men call him Plouton, the wealthy one. The forked bident that later imagination puts in his hand has no certain ancient image behind it; the ornamented tip of his staff was probably mistaken for one. Beside the throne, more often than not, crouches the dog.

Day to day he did little that a king above would recognize as work. The dead came to him in an endless grey column, ferried across the water, judged and sorted and settled into their places, and he presided over all of it without raising his voice. He kept what was his.

The one story everyone tells about him is the one where he takes a wife. Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, was gathering flowers in a meadow when the ground split and Hades came up through it in his chariot, seized her, and carried her down before she could cry out. He had asked Zeus for her first, and Zeus had given a quiet, deniable consent, knowing Demeter would never agree. When Demeter understood what had happened, she let everything green wither. Nothing grew. People began to starve and the gods went hungry for offerings, until at last Zeus sent to fetch the girl back. But she had eaten in the underworld, a few seeds of a pomegranate pressed on her before she left, and anyone who tastes the food of the dead belongs to it. So the bargain was struck. She would spend part of each year below with her husband and part above with her mother, and the world would go cold and bare in the months of her absence and warm again at her return.

He was, by the standards of his family, remarkably faithful and remarkably even-handed. What roused him was theft, and cheating the order he kept. When the trickster king Sisyphus chained up Death himself and talked his way back among the living twice over, he ended beneath a boulder that will never crest its hill. When the healer Asclepius grew skilled enough to raise the dead and the flow of souls began to thin, Hades carried his complaint to Zeus, and Zeus struck the healer down with a thunderbolt. The one time he was truly outwitted, he took it gracefully. Orpheus came down with a lyre to beg for his dead wife, and the music was so beautiful that Hades and Persephone agreed to release her, on the single condition that Orpheus not look back at her until both stood again in the light. He looked back. That was not the god’s failure.

Twice, living men came to take something from him by force. Theseus and Pirithous walked into the underworld meaning to carry off Persephone herself, and Hades, courteous to a fault, invited them to sit. The chairs held them fast and their memories drained away; Heracles later tore Theseus loose but left Pirithous rooted there for good. Heracles came on an errand of his own too, the last of his labors, and asked leave to bring Cerberus up into the daylight. Hades gave it, on the condition that the hero master the dog with his bare hands and do it no harm. He did.

His powers were the powers of his office. He held every soul that had ever died and every soul that ever would, an authority no other god could overrule, and the helm that made him wholly invisible suited a god whose very name was bound up with the unseen. The riches of the deep earth were his to hand out. What he could not do was leave. His brothers moved freely between sky and sea and the green middle world; Hades belonged to his kingdom the way the dead belonged to it, and the myths bring him up into the light only twice, once to seize a bride and once, in some tellings, to be wounded and driven back to his own halls. He ruled everything and was welcome nowhere. The Greeks would not meet his gaze, would not speak his name, and looked away when they gave him what was owed. He was owed everything and loved by almost no one, and he seems to have made his peace with that a long time ago.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hades in Greek mythology?

Hades is the Greek god of the underworld and ruler of the dead, one of the six children of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. After the gods overthrew the Titans, Hades drew the underworld as his realm by lot while his brothers Zeus and Poseidon took the sky and the sea.

Is Hades the god of death?

Not exactly. Hades rules the underworld and governs souls once they arrive, but the act of dying itself belonged to Thanatos. Hades is better understood as the king of the realm of the dead than as the force that causes death, and he was also a god of the hidden wealth of the earth, which earned him the name Plouton, “the rich one.”

Why did Hades abduct Persephone?

Hades wanted Persephone as his wife and queen of the underworld, and Zeus quietly allowed the abduction, knowing her mother Demeter would never consent. Because Persephone ate pomegranate seeds while below, she was bound to spend part of every year with Hades and part with Demeter, which the Greeks explained as the origin of the seasons.

Was Hades evil?

No. Despite his grim domain, Hades was regarded as stern and just rather than wicked, and he was one of the more faithful and even-handed of the Greek gods. He punished those who cheated death or broke the order of the underworld, such as Sisyphus, but he was not the villain that later popular culture often makes of him.

What was Hades’ helmet?

Hades owned the Cap of Invisibility, a helm forged for him by the Cyclopes that made its wearer completely unseen. He used it to move undetected against the Titans during the war for the cosmos, and it fit a god whose name was itself associated with being invisible.

Related Entries

Persephone, Demeter, Zeus, Poseidon, Cronus, Rhea, Hera, Hestia, Cerberus, Charon, Tartarus, Thanatos, Hecate, Orpheus, Sisyphus, Erinyes (Furies)