Hades in Ancient Greece

Hades is the name both of the Greek god of the underworld and of the underworld itself. However, this article concentrates mainly on the latter.

Much of Greek mythology derives from what the people of ancient Greece saw in their world, and the stories they told each other to explain how that world came to be as it was. The Greek mainland consists largely of a mass of limestone that has been broken up by frequent violent earthquakes into a succession of steep mountains and deep valleys. It is common for rivers to disappear underground into inaccessible caverns, and so it was natural for people to imagine that that was where the souls of the dead must go, borne along a river into the underworld.

Although the Greeks did have a concept of Heaven, it had nothing to do with the hereafter of righteous souls; not even the Gods lived there, as their abode was the top of cloud-wreathed Mount Olympus.

Hades was therefore where all dead people went, whatever they had done in their lifetimes. Also, the dead were seen as retaining most or all of their bodily functions, as opposed to being merely disembodied souls.

The concept of Hades changed somewhat down the centuries. Homer describes Odysseus visiting Hades in the Odyssey. Its entrance is in a grove of black poplars beyond the stream of Ocean. It is a dark sunless abode, populated by ghosts and the dim figures of dead heroes, who have only a shadowy existence. The god Hades and his wife Persephone live in a region called Erebus.

Later authors developed Hades into a much more substantial place, where the life of the upper world and its amusements can be repeated. There are many entrances, protected by rivers as mentioned above, in particular the Styx, Cocytus and Acheron. Indeed, these are real rivers, to which mythical attributes were then attached.

The dead must be ferried across by the boatman Charon, and the Greeks placed a coin in the mouth of a dead person before burial, to pay Charon for the journey.

The landing place, and thus the actual entry to Hades, was guarded by Cerberus, the “hound of hell”. Greek people were used to seeing dogs guarding properties in the real world, so it was natural to assume that Hades would have its own terrible guardian, which, according to some myths, had a hundred heads, but later writers only ascribe three heads to him, plus a serpent’s tail and serpents round his neck.

The notion of Hades as a place of judgment and retribution also developed down the centuries. The stories of Tantalus and Sisyphus, for example, appear in Homer but were probably later additions. The stories have many variations on the theme, but the punishments consist of something always being out of reach, in the case of Tantalus; or a task having to be constantly repeated, as with Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill only for it to roll back down again.

Judgment was not conducted by Hades the god, but by Rhadamanthus (for Asiatics) or Aeacus (for Europeans), with Minos acting as referee in cases of doubt.

Homer, and later writers, introduced the concept of Hades being divided into different regions, such as Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, which was set apart by the flaming river Pyriphlegethon. Those who deserved neither reward nor punishment dwelt in the asphodel meadows.

For Homer, Elysium was not part of Hades, but a separate world to which heroes went without dying and enjoyed a pleasant eternity. However, some later writers placed the “Elysian Fields” firmly within the realm of Hades.

These “departments” of Hades saw their greatest development many centuries later as Dante’s seven circles of Hell.

The role of Hades the god, as ruler of the underworld, is not well defined in the ancient myths, and it was left to later Roman writers to develop his character as “Pluto”, who is also regarded as the god of the earth and all that it gives.

The best developed myth involving Hades is that of the abduction of Persephone, the corn goddess who is buried underground for much of the year but is allowed to emerge briefly in the springtime so that the corn can grow.

It is not surprising that, given the oral nature of storytelling in ancient Greece, and the centuries over which the stories were refined and developed, there are many various and conflicting versions of what Hades meant to the Greeks, and indeed to the Romans, who subsumed much of the Greek culture into their own. This short account, however, summarises what can be taken as the accepted version of Hades in the bulk of the writings that have come down to us.

© John Welford