What Is the Greek Underworld?

When the three brothers divided the world, Hades received the underworld. He is not a devil figure. In Greek mythology Hades is a stern but fair ruler who rarely leaves his kingdom and is mostly concerned with keeping the dead where they belong.

The Greeks were nervous enough about naming him that they often used titles instead, such as the rich one, because the earth holds both the dead and the crops. That nervousness is about the finality of death rather than about evil.

Reaching the Greek underworld involved crossing water. Charon the ferryman carried the dead across, and the Greeks buried their dead with a coin so the fare could be paid. Those left unburied were said to wait on the near bank.

On the far side stood Cerberus, the three-headed dog who let souls in and stopped them leaving. Several rivers ran through the underworld, including Lethe, whose water brought forgetting, and Styx, by which even the gods swore their most binding oaths.

Most of the dead went to the asphodel meadows, a grey and quiet place where existence continued without much joy or pain. Greek mythology divides the underworld roughly like this:

• •Elysium, a genuinely pleasant place for heroes and the exceptionally good
• •The asphodel meadows, where most ordinary people ended up
• •Tartarus, deep below, for those who offended the gods directly

Several heroes entered the Greek underworld alive, and these journeys are among the best known myths. Orpheus went to bring back his wife with music and lost her by looking back. Heracles went to fetch Cerberus. Odysseus went to speak with the dead and learn his route home.

These stories work because the underworld is so final. Going down and returning is the ultimate test, and Greek mythology never lets it be easy or free of cost.

Hades did not rule alone. He carried off Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter, and made her queen of the underworld. Demeter's grief caused the earth to stop producing, and a compromise was reached.

Because Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld, she was bound to return there for part of each year. Her descent and return became the Greek explanation for the seasons. It is one of the clearest examples of a myth doing double duty, giving both a story about the underworld and an account of why crops fail in winter.

Greek ideas about the dead were not written down in one official book, and they changed over time. One of the oldest detailed sources is Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus summons the spirits of the dead. They appear as faint shadows who must drink sacrificial blood before they can speak clearly. The ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus he would rather be a poor labourer among the living than rule over all the dead, a bleak picture of the afterlife.

Later evidence shows some Greeks hoping for more. Mystery cults, such as the rites held at Eleusis near Athens, promised initiates a better lot after death, although their secrets were well kept. Thin gold tablets found in certain graves give the dead instructions, such as avoiding one spring in the underworld and drinking instead from the water of Memory. Archaeology also shows that coins were placed with some burials, but not all, so the ferry fare was a widespread custom rather than a universal rule.

Later Greek writers described a system of judgement in the underworld. Three judges, usually named as Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, decided where each soul belonged. All three had been known in life for justice, and Minos and Rhadamanthus were said to be sons of Zeus. This idea is stronger in later sources, such as the philosopher Plato, than in Homer, where the dead mostly share the same grey existence. It shows Greek thinking gradually connecting the afterlife with how a person had lived.

The few who suffered famous punishments had usually insulted the gods personally. Sisyphus, who had cheated death, was condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down. Tantalus, who had abused the hospitality of the gods, stood in water beneath fruit trees, but the water drained away whenever he bent to drink and the branches lifted out of reach. Their stories survive in everyday English. A hopeless, endless task is called Sisyphean, and to tantalise someone is to keep something they want just out of reach.

A common mix-up treats Hades as the god of death, but in Greek myth that role belongs to someone else. Death in person was Thanatos, a winged figure usually described as the twin brother of Hypnos, the god of sleep. Thanatos ended lives, while Hades ruled the dead once they had arrived, and the two are separate beings. The journey in between belonged to Hermes, who in his role as guide of souls led the newly dead down towards the river. Greek vase paintings sometimes show Sleep and Death together, gently carrying a fallen warrior's body away from the battlefield.

The name causes a second confusion, because Hades can mean both the god and his realm. In Homer the dead go to the house of Hades, and over time the phrase shortened until the place itself was called Hades. That double use travelled a long way. When Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, they used Hades for Sheol, the shadowy place of the dead, and the New Testament kept the word. So a Greek name for a quiet, grey underworld ended up in Christian texts, where later English translators sometimes rendered it simply as hell.

The Greeks did not imagine the underworld only as a distant realm. They pointed to real places where it seemed close. Caves, deep gorges and springs giving off strange vapours were treated as entrances. Cape Taenarum, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, was said to be where Heracles dragged Cerberus up into daylight. In north-west Greece, the River Acheron shared its name with one of the underworld's rivers, and an oracle of the dead nearby was consulted by people hoping to question departed spirits, as the historian Herodotus records in one of his stories.

One such site has been explained by modern science. At Hierapolis, in what is now south-western Turkey, ancient writers described a Ploutonion, a gateway named after Plouton, the title of Hades meaning the rich one. Animals led into the opening died, while certain priests could enter unharmed. Archaeologists rediscovered the site in the early 2010s, and researchers measuring the air found that carbon dioxide seeping from the ground collects in a dense layer near the floor, especially overnight and at dawn. Animals with their heads low would breathe the deadly layer, while a standing person could stay above it, which helps explain how the ancient spectacle worked.

The Greek underworld is a quiet, orderly realm ruled by Hades rather than a place of fire and torment, and understanding it changes how you read many of the most famous Greek myths.