The name "Hades" means "invisible" or "unseen," which is a pretty good description of Hades' place in the mythological record. Except for the story of his marriage, he doesn't have an active role in any myths because usually he's too busy to leave his kingdom. The only story that centers around him as an active participant was the occasion on which he claimed his bride, Persephone, who is his partner in everything. Even in sculptures and paintings you almost never see him without Persephone at his side, as in the bas relief sculpture to the left.

Notice the rooster underneath Persephone's throne. This was a common sacrifice to the gods of the underworld or to the gods of healing. The connection between medicine and death was very close in the ancient world, as indicated by the two separate vials of blood from a slain monster, the Gorgon Medusa, that Athene presented to Apollo's son Asclepius. The blood from one side was poisonous, and the blood from the other side could be used to heal. For an interesting modern application of this story, check out this excerpt from Bill Hayes' "Personal and Natural History of Blood," Five Quarts. You have to move through a few paragraphs and scroll down the page a bit before you get to the bit about Asclepius.

This close connection between death and healing might be why the famous philosopher Socrates' very last words after he drank his potion of the poison hemlock were to remind his friend Crito to offer up to Asclepius the rooster that would no longer be needed to awaken him in the morning: "Crito, we owe Asclepius a cock, pay it and do not neglect it." It's almost as if he found death a welcome end to a painful disease--in his case, not a physical disease but the mental anguish of watching his beloved Athens fall into chaotic decline in the wake of the disastrous Peloponnesian War. The Greek word for medicine or drug, pharmakos, was also the word for poison.

Hades' wife is far more active than he. Even in Homer's Odyssey, when the hero Odysseus descends to the underworld and has some unpleasant experiences there, he claims repeatedly that it's Persephone, not Hades, who is tormenting him. Hades himself is just a little too scary to be mentioned out loud (note that Jim Henson picked up on this in Hades' creepy speech in the Orpheus video shown in class on September 9). Therefore a number of euphemisms have sprung up around his name, such as Polydegmôn ("receiver of many") and Polyxenos ("host to many," as he is repeatedly called in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter). Sometimes Hades was called Zeus Katachthonius, or "the underground Zeus."
 

Here's another common misunderstanding: in fact, Hades' realm does not have exactly the same name as its ruler in the original Greek, though it's frequently translated that way. Greek is an inflected language, which means a word takes on different endings to indicate its grammatical function. When his name is used to refer to the underworld, it is invariably used in the possessive--Hades' or of Hades. So the phrase Go to Hades' would have the same grammatical structure as Eat at Joe's. The underworld is named after its ruler in the same way that Joe's is named after its owner. You don't call the restaurant Joe, and an ancient Greek didn't call the underworld Hades.

Contrary to what Chapter 9 in our textbook might seem to imply, the Lord of the Underworld wasn't all bad or scary. As Pluton, Hades is the god of wealth--and indeed, the materialistic Romans took "Pluto" as his given name. This is because of his underground home, the source of mineral wealth in the form of gold and gems and agricultural wealth in the form of crops (which explains his relationship with Persephone).

This is not an indicator of the belief that "you can take it with you." It's quite the opposite. There is a significant difference between the gloomy classical idea of the afterlife and that of their more optimistic neighbors, the Egyptians, who enjoyed their time on earth so much they couldn't conceive of an eternity that wouldn't be similar to their everyday lives. Egyptian tombs were packed full of grave goods because they believed that their dearly departed might need them in the next world. Greek and Roman tombs were packed with the same to keep a jealous ghost from haunting the survivors.

For the same reason, noisy and extravagant mourning was considered appropriate. If you were worried that your own family wouldn't be able to put on a noisy enough show, you could always hire professional mourners who were guaranteed to scare off any errant ghosts who hadn't yet found their way to their final destination. Given the pessimistic view of the afterlife that prevailed in the classical world, it's no surprise that they weren't in a particular hurry to get there.
 

Lemur from Madagascar

The Romans also had a name for ghosts, lemures. I know that sounds funny today--we can't help thinking of those odd little creatures from Madagascar--but the Roman name came first. The animals were given the name by classically-educated explorers because of their nocturnal habits, eerie silence, and bug-eyed appearance... not to mention the fact that the local folk tradition claimed that they housed the souls of the dead.

One way of keeping a ghost from walking was to pin its feet together, as was sometimes done with abandoned infants. Oedipus, the hero of Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, suffered this fate as a baby and was maimed for life as a result. The name "Oedipus" is a pun that reflects on Oedipus's nature ("know-it-all") and on his physical characteristics ("twisted foot").

Accounts vary about where Hades' kingdom is located. In some cases it's under the earth, and in others, such as in the Odyssey, it's at the western edge of the world, in the land of the Cimmerians. The Cimmerians were a real people who lived near the Black Sea--north of Medea's home in Colchis. If you don't know who Medea is, you will by the time you're done with this class. It's not Medea herself, but her aunt, the witch Circe, who gives Odysseus directions on how to get to the underworld. Both Medea and Circe are described repeatedly in mythology as devotees of Hecatê, sort of in the same way that aggressive, independent women were often branded as witches in colonial America. For more information on this subject, listen to Vandiver's Lecture 21.

Archaeological evidence seems to point to a possible connection between the entrance used by Odysseus and a subterranean temple complex perched above the Acheron River in northwestern Greece. Yes, the Acheron is a real river. It's the one that is usually seen as the outside boundary of the underworld. Its name means "sorrowful." The other three rivers associated with Hades' kingdom, the Styx ("hateful"), Pyriphlegathon ("flaming with fire"), and Lethe (river of forgetfulness, from which our word "lethal" is derived), are wholly mythical.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Styx is so hateful is that awkward fact that it's the river the gods swear by when they need to make a particularly binding oath. Once they've sworn by the Styx, they cannot go back on their word or even use their typical trick of trying to weasel around it. Unlike the unswerving Hades, most of the Greek gods are not scrupulously fair and just: quite the opposite, in fact... which perhaps makes them seem more human and less creepy!

Traditionally, spirits drink from Lethe on their way to the underworld so they will be able to bear the loss of their life above ground, as we saw when the Styx's ferryman, Charon, offered the drink to Eurydice in Jim Henson's Orpheus video. Plato changes this a bit in the "Myth of Er" in his Republic (see page 300 of H&P's Classical Mythology and Vandiver's lecture 8), where he introduces the idea of reincarnation and claims that the souls drink to forget their previous life and begin afresh. Homer, writing some four centuries before Plato, doesn't mention Lethe at all. As our textbook and lecture both emphasize, Homer's view of the afterlife is extremely pessimistic. His gloomy ghosts have to continue in their shadowy existence with full knowledge of what they have lost.

Acheron is not the only boundary. Sometimes Lake Avernus, near Naples, is described as a portal to the underworld. This Italian alternative, of course, is the route that the Roman hero Aeneas takes on his journey to Hades' kingdom. Other accounts say that there is an entrance to the underworld through a bottomless lake at Lerna on the Peloponnese, and that that's how Dionysus, or Bacchus, retrieved his human mother from the land of the dead. According to the 2nd-century traveler Pausanias's description of Lerna 2.36.7, "they say that Pluto, after carrying off, according to the story, Core, the daughter of Demeter, descended here to his fabled kingdom underground." (Note: you will have to scroll nearly all the way down the page or search with "Control F" to get to Lerna, but once you get there you'll find a reference to a large statue of Demeter and a mention of the giant water-snake, the hydra, slain by Heracles--the Greek name for Hercules--on the marsh of Lerna as one of his famous Twelve Labors.)

Sometimes the ancient writers mention a place called Erebus, which is either the final destination of the dead or a place that they pass through. If it's their final destination, Tartarus is depicted as a separate area, circled by the flaming river Pyriphlegathon, where punishment is doled out to those who offended the gods. If Erebus is just a place they pass through, everybody winds up in Tartarus but it's divided up into better and less desirable neighborhoods.

The meadows of asphodel are located either in Erebus or in Tartarus--wherever the spirits wind up. Despite the rather pleasant name, don't confuse the asphodel meadows with the Elysian fields. Asphodel is a ghostly-looking flowering weed (see the photo to the right). The fields of Elysium are a riotous paradise of every pleasant, colorful plant you can think of. The only problem is, nobody knows exactly where these fields are.
 

The Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had a more serious take on the same idea in his poem "Ulysses," which you can find in the back of your textbook in the chapter on "The Persistence of Myth." The aging Ulysses--the Roman name for Odysseus--has grown restless and wants to take one last voyage,

...for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Dante and Virgil in trouble
(Eugene Delacroix, 1822)

To pay the ferryman, a person would be buried with coins under his or her tongue. Without that fare, the spirit would suffer the same fate as those who were improperly buried and would be required to wander aimlessly on the far bank of the river for a hundred years. The idea of the wandering of improperly buried souls is very important to keep in mind if you are to fully understand the significance of Sophocles' famous tragedy Antigone, where the young princess of Thebes, Oedipus's daughter, risks (and ultimately sacrifices) her life for the sake of burying her brother.

According to some sources, Charon's boat is made out of horses' hooves, the only material that can resist destruction in the corrosive waters of the Styx. Horses' hooves are a very light substance, but then an insubstantial spirit doesn't weigh much. In Virgil's Aeneid, the human bodies of Aeneas and his guide nearly sink the boat, and the same thing almost happens again in Dante's Inferno when Dante and Virgil climb on board.

The planet Pluto's solitary moon is named Charon. Even though this satellite wasn't discovered until 1978, and Pluto has now been demoted to the status of "dwarf planet" (mythologically enough, the asteroid Ceres was promoted to the same status at the same time, which gave Pluto's mother-in-law equal status at last), the tradition of giving mythological names to newly discovered orbiting objects continues. Luckily it seems like most of the new moons are discovered around Jupiter, which makes it easier on those doing the naming--seems like no matter how many of them accumulate, there's always one more lover who hasn't been honored with a moon yet!

The most thorough description of Hades' realm is given by Virgil, which is not really surprising. The Aeneid, like Apollonius's Argonautica, is primarily a literary epic that was written by the author rather than an old-fashioned oral epic composed on the fly, like Homer's works. Because of this distinction, such poems tend to be a little more elaborate.

To get a sense of the physical layout of Hades' realm, check out Carlos Parada's map of the underworld, which charts the progress of both Odysseus and Aeneas. Don't miss the text below the map, which is very useful. Parada also offers an exhaustive annotated and illustrated rundown on the underworld and afterlife. If that doesn't answer any lingering questions you might have, I'd be really surprised!