Hades

Three brothers draw lots

Hades is a son of Cronus and Rhea. His father swallowed him at birth. Later he was set free with his brothers and sisters, and they fought the Titans together.

After the Titans fall, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades divide the world among themselves. In the Iliad, the epic poem of Homer, Poseidon remembers the draw. Zeus received the sky, Poseidon the sea and Hades the murky darkness below. Earth and Olympus, the home of the gods, stay shared by all three.

Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, adds the weapons. First the Cyclopes, allies of Zeus in the war, give Zeus the thunderbolt, Poseidon the trident and Pluto, his name for Hades, a helmet. Then the brothers draw lots for their realms. Hades does not inherit the dead because he is the eldest, and he does not choose them because of his nature. Chance gives him his kingdom.

The lot also keeps him away from Olympus. Zeus rules above, and Poseidon can come up from the sea onto the battlefields of epic. Hades stays bound to a realm that living heroes reach only by rare routes.

The god and the place

In Greek, the word Hades can mean both the god and the place he rules. Apollodorus still keeps them apart: Pluto is the ruler, and Hades is the kingdom he drew. Over time, though, the names came to overlap. The title Plouton is connected with wealth. It points to riches stored below the earth as well as to the dead gathered there.

Other names avoid speaking of him too directly. Aidoneus sounds like Hades. Polydegmon means receiver of many. Ancient writers also tied the name Hades to being unseen or to holding things in, without settling on one certain origin. His realm is known by what goes into it and does not normally come back.

The taking of Persephone

His main story as a character who acts is the taking of Persephone, the daughter of the goddess Demeter. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an early poem in her praise, does not show Hades acting alone. Zeus gives his consent first. Then the earth opens, and his brother drives away with the girl. Later, the god Helios tells her searching mother that Zeus arranged the marriage.

Zeus orders Persephone’s return, but Hades sets the terms of her leaving. He speaks gently to her and promises her power over the dead. In secret, he gives her a pomegranate seed. Because she has eaten in the world below, she must spend part of every year in his kingdom.

How Hades rules

His power belongs to his own territory. Hades rarely seeks influence among the living or argues for a place at the court of Zeus. Once someone crosses into his realm, though, getting them out takes bargaining among the gods, and it leaves a condition behind. Even Persephone, its queen, returns only for part of the year.

This stillness sets him apart from death itself. Hades rules the dead, but he is not the act that kills them. His feared power begins after life has ended. That is why Greek stories can mention “Hades” again and again while the god himself never enters the scene.

A cave beside Poseidon’s sanctuary

Ancient geography connected the world below to openings in real ground. At Cape Tainaron in the Mani, Strabo, author of the Geography, saw a sanctuary, or holy site, of Poseidon and noted a cave nearby. He was careful about whose claim it was. Writers of myth, he says, called the cave the passage through which the hero Heracles brought the hound Cerberus up from Hades.

The difference matters. The temple belonged to Poseidon, and the cave does not prove that Greeks found a physical underworld beneath the cape. A story of return fixed Hades to the headland, because Heracles needed a place where his impossible journey could be seen to end.

Places for the direct worship of Hades are fewer and less prominent. The ancient writer Pausanias described a sacred enclosure at Elis that opened once a year, and even the priest entered only then. At Tainaron, people pointed out the entrance without a temple to its ruler. At Elis, the god’s own enclosure stayed closed for almost the whole year.