Eventually, Hades and his siblings were rescued by Zeus, the youngest child of Cronus and Rhea, who forced Cronus to regurgitate the children he had swallowed and took the mantle of “ruler of the universe” for himself. Like his first four brothers and sisters- Hestia, Demeter, Hera, and Poseidon-Hades was swallowed shortly after his birth by Cronus, the lord of the universe, who had received a prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him. FamilyĪccording to the poet Hesiod, Hades was the first male child of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Hades could also be symbolized by a number of animals, such as snakes, roosters, or screech owls, as well as certain plants, such as the cypress, mint, and asphodel. He is often seated on a throne with Cerberus, the three-headed dog, crouched menacingly at his side. In the artistic representations we do encounter, Hades appears as either a young man or with a dark beard. Hades was so terrifying to the Greeks that he was almost never depicted in ancient art. 1st century CE Roman copy of Greek original. Statuette of Pluto (Roman Hades) holding a cornucopia. Among the other attributes of Hades were a scepter, the keys to the Underworld, a cornucopia, and Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the dead. Hades was often represented riding a chariot driven by pitch-black horses. In one famous myth, he let the hero Perseus borrow this helmet so that he could sneak up on and kill Medusa. Perhaps as an extension of his name, usually thought to mean “the unseen one,” Hades was said to possess a helmet of invisibility. Hades was regarded as a dark, merciless god. But Hades was also a god of wealth and fertility since good things like crops and precious metals came to mortals from his underground realm. Hades was, first and foremost, the god of death: it was he who ruled the Underworld, and indeed, his name was synonymous with the Underworld. Hades was known by several epithets, including agēsandros and agesilaos (meaning “he who leads people away”), polysēmantōr and polydegmōn (“ruler of many” or “host of many”), klymenos (“the notorious”), and eubuleus (“giver of good advice”). The name Plouton was inherited by the Romans, whose god Pluto possessed the same characteristics as Hades. 490–323 BCE), the god’s name had evolved into Hades.įearful of speaking the name of the god of death, the Greeks took to calling Hades by the alternative euphemistic name Plouton, meaning “wealthy.” This other name presumably reflected the fact that the Greeks’ riches, such as crops and precious metals, came from below the earth. Another common poetic alternative was Aidoneus. The earliest attested form of the name, used in Homeric and Ionic Greek, was Aïdēs. In antiquity, Hades’ name was generally interpreted as meaning “the unseen” or “the invisible one.” This is a rare case where the original, folk etymology seems to have been correct: modern scholars have traced the name “Hades” to the Proto-Indo-European word * ṇ-uid-, meaning “unseen.” Pronunciation
The name had evolved into its more familiar form, Hades (Ἅιδης), by the Classical period (ca. The earliest documented version of the name “Hades” was Aïdēs (Ἀΐδης), used in the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey (eighth century BCE).
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