The Ploutonion at Eleusis

Two caves inside the sanctuary

The Ploutonion was a small walled area sacred to Pluto, the ruler of the underworld, inside the sanctuary at Eleusis. A sanctuary is a holy place set apart for the gods. The Eleusis sanctuary belonged to the goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone.

The Ploutonion sits in an exact corner of the site. It lies west of the Lesser Propylaea, a gateway into the sanctuary, at the northeast foot of the acropolis, the sanctuary hill. Two shallow caves open there, one after the other. They do not form a tunnel running away under Attica, the land around Athens. No passage into Hades, the underworld, has been found.

Steps, pits and silence

The smaller cave has an opening in its north wall. Outside it, six steps cut into the rock go down beyond the wall of the precinct, the walled sacred area. They lead towards a lower area with a deep pit like a well. A separate round pit lies inside the wall.

These cuttings gave room for ritual at several levels. But the fact that they survive does not tell us what was done at them.

This caution matters at Eleusis. The sanctuary was built around rites whose initiates, the people admitted to them, kept what they knew from public description. Archaeology can show caves, steps, pits and walls. On its own it cannot bring back a ceremony that no source explains.

Two temples on the same small ground

In front of the larger cave lie the foundations of a temple to Pluto, built of poros, a kind of limestone. The later building dates to the fourth century BC. It measured about 5.12 by 6.80 metres and was a single rectangular room, or cella, with pilasters, flat columns set into the walls. It took in the remains of a smaller temple from the sixth century BC.

So the shrine was rebuilt in the later Classical period rather than newly invented then. In the fourth century BC the area also gained a triangular retaining wall of poros blocks, with a small porch at its southeast end. That wall marked Pluto’s precinct off from the rest of the sanctuary.

So the Ploutonion was set apart by its buildings as well as by myth. A visitor inside the larger sanctuary met a separate sacred boundary around the caves and temple. Unlike the Alkyonian Lake, whose surface has no building on it, the Ploutonion made the separation visible in stone.

The reliefs give the place its name

Two votive reliefs found in the area show Pluto and Persephone. A votive relief is a carved stone panel offered to a god. They are the evidence that the temple and its wall were the Ploutonion. The identification rests on objects found in the precinct and on its buildings. It does not rest only on a cave looking like an imagined entrance to the underworld.

The name also keeps the place smaller than the whole story of Eleusis. Demeter and Persephone ruled the sanctuary and its Mysteries, the secret rites held there. Pluto’s precinct was one walled part of it. Its temples and offered images show worship of the ruler of the underworld within that larger sacred ground.

The Eleusinian Mysteries cover the initiation, its road from Athens and the ancient refusal to tell what happened inside the sanctuary wall. The Ploutonion is narrower. It is what excavation can securely identify in one corner of the site.

Persephone’s return remains a possibility

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is an early Greek poem in praise of the goddess. In it, the god Hermes leads Persephone up from beneath the earth and returns her to her mother. The poem does not name the Ploutonion at Eleusis as the opening she used. The ancient writer Pausanias reaches Eleusis and names the buildings and land outside the wall. Then he says a dream forbade him to describe what was within.

Modern scholars suggest that the shape of the caves might have suited a sacred drama of Persephone’s yearly return from Hades. That use is uncertain. The steps and the pits do not turn the suggestion into a recovered script.

What is firm is this: shallow caves chosen for a precinct, two temples of Pluto built one after the other, a wall, pits, and reliefs of Pluto and Persephone. No ancient account from Eleusis tells us how these parts worked together. Its stones show the Ploutonion as an entrance set apart within the sanctuary. What was done there lies outside the surviving record.