Who Was Hades? The God of the Dead Who Was Not the Devil

Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, swallowed at birth like his sisters by a father who had heard he would be overthrown by his own son. Zeus, the youngest, hidden from Cronus and raised in secret, freed his siblings from their father's stomach, and the six of them fought the Titans for ten years. The Cyclopes gave each of the brothers a weapon: Zeus the thunderbolt, Poseidon the trident, and Hades a helmet that made its wearer invisible, which he lent out on occasion to Perseus and to Athena. After the victory came the lots, and the underworld fell to him.

He rarely left it. Unlike his brothers, who meddle in every myth, Hades appears in few stories, and the Greeks seldom said his name, calling him instead the Unseen One, the Host of Many, the Rich One, Plouton, since everything buried in the earth, from the dead to the silver in the mines, was his. That last title passed into Latin as Pluto, and by way of a joke about a cold, dark, distant world it became the name of a planet in 1930.

The underworld was not hell. It was where everyone went, good and bad alike, a grey country of shadows where the dead existed as thin, witless ghosts unless given blood to drink, and its geography was worked out in detail over the centuries:

• •The rivers: the Styx, by which the gods swore their unbreakable oaths; the Acheron, which the dead crossed; the Lethe, whose water brought forgetfulness; the Phlegethon of fire and the Cocytus of lamentation
• •Charon, the ferryman, who took the dead across for a coin placed in the mouth of the corpse, and left the unburied wandering on the bank for a hundred years
• •Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the gate, who fawned on those entering and devoured any who tried to leave
• •The judges, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, who sorted the dead: most to the Asphodel Meadows, the heroic and virtuous to the Elysian Fields, and the worst offenders against the gods to Tartarus
• •Tartarus, the pit below, where Sisyphus rolled his stone, Tantalus reached for fruit that drew back, and the Titans lay chained

The one story in which Hades acts is the one that gave the Greeks their seasons. He saw Persephone, daughter of Demeter, the goddess of grain, gathering flowers in a meadow, and with Zeus's permission but not her mother's he opened the earth and carried her down in his chariot. Demeter searched the world for her and in her grief let nothing grow, until Zeus, faced with a starving humanity that could offer no sacrifices, ordered his brother to give the girl back. Hades agreed, but first gave her pomegranate seeds to eat, and having eaten in the underworld she was bound to it; the compromise was that she spent a third of the year below as its queen and the rest above with her mother, and the earth mourns while she is gone.

The Greeks called it a marriage and told it as one, and Persephone in the underworld is no captive: she is the dread queen whom Odysseus fears, who judges alongside her husband and who is moved by Orpheus's song when Hades is not. The abduction, in a culture where marriage meant a daughter leaving her mother's house for a stranger's, was read as the pattern of every wedding, and Persephone's return as the pattern of every spring.

Two things separate Hades from the Christian devil with whom he was later confused. He is not evil: he does not tempt, deceive or rebel, and he keeps his word, releasing Persephone when ordered and Eurydice when sung to. And his realm is not a place of punishment for the wicked but the common destination of the dead, with reward and punishment reserved for a few extraordinary cases. The Greeks feared him as they feared death, and they did not much worship him, since a god who took everyone in the end had no need to be persuaded. He had almost no temples; one, at Elis, opened once a year. When the New Testament was written in Greek, the word chosen for the abode of the dead was Hades, and the translators of later centuries rendered it as hell, which fixed the confusion in place.

The living who visited him are the exceptions that define the rule. Heracles came to borrow Cerberus for his final labour and was allowed to, so long as he used no weapons. Orpheus came for Eurydice and was granted her on a condition he failed. Odysseus did not descend but called the dead up to him at the edge of the world, and Aeneas, in Virgil, walked through the whole kingdom with a golden bough for a passport. Theseus and Pirithous came to steal Persephone herself, and Hades invited them to sit, and the chairs held them fast; Heracles pulled Theseus free and left Pirithous there. In every story the underworld is the place from which return is the miracle, and Hades the host who does not want guests.

Myths tell you what poets imagined about the underworld, but graves show what ordinary people did. Archaeologists have found coins placed in or near the mouths of the dead in many Greek burials, the fare for Charon, though the custom was never universal and varied by region and period. Families brought offerings of food, drink and oil to tombs, and a person left unburied was thought to suffer, which is why the duty to bury the dead drives the plot of Sophocles' Antigone. Care for the dead was a family obligation rather than a matter of worshipping Hades himself.

Some Greeks hoped for more than the grey Asphodel Meadows. The Eleusinian Mysteries, secret rites held near Athens in honour of Demeter and Persephone, promised initiates a happier lot after death, and people came from across the Greek world to be initiated. Other groups, linked to the legendary singer Orpheus, buried their dead with small gold tablets inscribed with instructions for the journey below: which spring to avoid, which to drink from, and what to say to the guardians, including the claim to be a child of Earth and starry Sky. These tablets show that many Greeks thought the afterlife could be prepared for.

Greek artists had a problem with Hades: he looks much like his brothers. On painted vases he is a mature, bearded man, often enthroned, and he is usually identified by what he holds rather than by his face. A sceptre marks him as a king, a key marks him as the one who locks the gates of the dead, and a horn of plenty, overflowing with fruit, shows him as Plouton, the giver of the wealth that comes out of the ground. Sometimes Cerberus sits at his feet, or Persephone sits beside him, the pair shown calmly as a royal married couple.

The most striking ancient image of him was found in 1977, when the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos excavated the royal tombs at Vergina in northern Greece. A wall painting of the fourth century BC in one of the tombs shows Hades in his chariot seizing Persephone, her arms flung out towards help that will not come, with a speed and confidence rare among surviving Greek wall paintings. The Romans called him Pluto or Dis Pater, and later artists returned to the scene again and again, most famously Bernini, whose marble abduction of the 1620s shows the god's fingers pressing into the goddess's thigh as if the stone were flesh.

The god of the underworld has found a new audience through games. Hades, released by Supergiant Games in 2020, casts the player as Zagreus, a son of Hades, trying to fight his way out of the underworld to reach the surface, dying repeatedly and returning home each time to try again. Along the way he meets figures such as Persephone, Sisyphus, Achilles and Orpheus.

The game draws on Greek myth closely enough that many players went on to read the original stories, and it won numerous awards. Its version of Hades is a stern, overworked ruler and father rather than a villain, which is closer to the ancient Greek picture than the fiery devil-like Hades of many films. Myths have always been retold in the media of their time, and games are now one of them.

Hades was the eldest son of Cronus, who took the underworld when he and his brothers divided the world, and ruled it as the grim but honest keeper of all the dead, not as a tempter or a punisher. His kingdom, which took his name, was the common destination of everyone, with Elysium and Tartarus for the few; his one story is the abduction of Persephone that explains the seasons; and the later identification with the devil came from translators, not from the Greeks.