Hades
The Greek god of the dead and king of the underworld, brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Ancient writers give him a helmet that makes its wearer invisible and the many-headed dog Cerberus; Greek vase painters gave him a sceptre and a horn of plenty. The two-pronged bident often drawn in his hand has no secure ancient example.
Meaning
Hades (HAY-deez, as Dictionary.com respells it) is a son of Cronos and Rhea, and his name was also used for the underworld he ruled. In the Iliad his brother Poseidon explains the division: the three sons of Cronos drew lots, and “Hades drew the murky darkness”, Poseidon the sea and Zeus the sky. Greeks feared to name him directly, the translator Hugh Evelyn-White notes. Plato’s Socrates suggests that people heard in “Hades” the word for the invisible and were afraid, so they called him Pluto, the giver of wealth, “because wealth comes up from below out of the earth”; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter calls him Aidoneus, the Host of Many and “He who has many names”. The Romans called him Pluto and also Dis. In films today, Diana Burton of Victoria University of Wellington wrote in 2011, he appears “pallid and miserable, or fiery and vengeful”, but never enjoying himself.
Origin and history
Hades had almost no worship of his own. Pausanias calls the people of Elis the only men he knows who worshipped Hades, and even there his sacred enclosure and temple were opened once a year and only the priest could go in. Burton notes that Pausanias records a few statues and altars elsewhere, mostly in other gods’ sanctuaries, and that the god appears in art far less often than the other Olympians.
The best-known story about him is the abduction of Persephone. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the earth opens on the plain of Nysa while she is picking flowers, and the lord of the dead rises with his immortal horses and carries her away “on his golden car”. In Greek vase painting, Burton finds, he appears mostly in three kinds of scene: the underworld, where Heracles comes to fetch Cerberus; the abduction; and scenes of the mysteries of Eleusis, as Persephone’s husband. He is bearded and long-haired, with black hair or white, and always at least partly robed. On a cup by the Codrus Painter of about 430 to 420 BC in the British Museum, he reclines with Persephone in the centre, labelled Plouton, holding an empty horn of plenty.
What is Hades’s symbol?
He has no single emblem; the poets and the painters gave him different things. In the poems it is his helmet, often called the helm of darkness. In the Iliad, Athena puts on “the helm of Hades” so that Ares cannot see her. Apollodorus says the Cyclopes made it: when Zeus freed them, they gave Zeus the thunderbolt, “and on Pluto they bestowed a helmet and on Poseidon a trident”. Perseus borrowed it to kill Medusa: wearing it, “he saw whom he pleased, but was not seen by others”. Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles calls it the cap of Hades that “had the awful gloom of night”.
On vases it is the sceptre and the horn of plenty. Burton finds that on fifth-century Athenian vases he often carries a sceptre for his power and status, and often a cornucopia, which first appears in his hands in the early fifth century BC on two pots by the Oinokles Painter and one by the Berlin Painter. It is usually large, often half his height, and full of leaves or fruit, and until the fourth century it is mostly his; none of the other Olympians carry one. The horn of plenty, the cornucopia, had long meant agricultural prosperity, Burton notes, and it fits his other name, Plouton, “the rich one”, first an Eleusinian god of the fertile earth.
Cerberus
Hesiod calls Cerberus “the brazen-voiced hound of Hades, fifty-headed, relentless and strong”, a child of Typhaon and Echidna who eats raw flesh. In the Iliad, Athena remembers sending Heracles to fetch “the hound of loathed Hades” up from Erebos. Apollodorus gives the dog three heads, a dragon’s tail and the heads of snakes along its back, and says Pluto let Heracles take him if he could master him without weapons. Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina, carved in 1621 and 1622 and now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, includes Cerberus as the three-headed guardian of the underworld.
The bident
The two-pronged fork often drawn in Hades’s hand today is not securely attested in Greek art. The classicist A. B. Cook examined the evidence in 1925. Zeus had his thunderbolt and Poseidon his trident, he wrote, and it was sometimes argued that Hades had a fork to match, “but neither the existence nor the significance of this attribute is free from serious doubt”. The one vase cited for it, a cup signed by the potter Brygos once read as Plouton pursuing Persephone, shows Poseidon, and a modern restorer had painted out half of his trident. On the coins of Lydia that show the abduction, Plouton “regularly carries a sceptre, not a fork”. Cook concluded: “On Greek soil, then, there is no relevant evidence.” The bident came from later art: Emil Braun pointed out in 1837 that Raphael and other painters gave Pluto a two-pronged fork, and on a statuette of Pluto in the Vatican the fork and the hand holding it are a modern restoration. On Cook’s evidence the bident that sets him apart from Poseidon and his trident is a Renaissance convention, not a Greek one.
Read next
- Next in Greek gods and their symbolsPersephoneDaughter of Demeter, carried off by Hades to be queen of the underworld. Because she ate a pomegranate seed below, she must go back for part of every year. Greek art shows her with torches, ears of wheat and, in southern Italy, a cockerel.
- Burton: the cornucopia first appears in Greek art in Hades’s hands, as Plouton, in the early fifth century BCCornucopiaThe cornucopia, or horn of plenty, is a horn overflowing with fruit, grain and flowers, the ancient sign of abundance. It comes from Greek and Roman myth, where it is either the horn of the goat Amalthea who nursed the infant Zeus or the horn Heracles broke from the river god Achelous; in the United States it is a harvest and Thanksgiving decoration.
See also
Zeus, Hel, Gods of death, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter.
Sources
- Hades (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Hades” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary and The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy), Dictionary.com, entry and pronunciation
- The Iliad of Homer (tr. Lang, Leaf and Myers), Homer, The Iliad, translated by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers (1883), Project Gutenberg eBook #3059, Project Gutenberg, Book XV; Book V; Book VIII
- Plato, Cratylus 403a (tr. H. N. Fowler), Plato, Cratylus 403a, translated by Harold N. Fowler (Loeb, 1921), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Plato, Cratylus 403a
- Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Hesiod, Theogony; Shield of Heracles; The Homeric Hymns, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), Project Gutenberg eBook #348, Project Gutenberg, Homeric Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 1–32, with Evelyn-White’s note; Theogony, ll. 306–332; Shield of Heracles, ll. 216–237
- Apollodorus, Library 1.2.1 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 1.2.1, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 1.2.1
- Apollodorus, Library 2.4.2 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 2.4.2, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 2.4.2
- Apollodorus, Library 2.5.12 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 2.5.12, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 2.5.12
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 6.25.2 (tr. W. H. S. Jones), Pausanias, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod (Loeb, 1918), 6.25.2, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Paus. 6.25.2
- Hades: Cornucopiae, Fertility and Death (Diana Burton, ASCS 32 Proceedings), Diana Burton (Victoria University of Wellington), “Hades: Cornucopiae, Fertility and Death”, ASCS 32 Proceedings (Australasian Society for Classical Studies, 2011), Australasian Society for Classical Studies, pp. 1–6; p. 1, note 1
- Medusa in Ancient Greek Art (Madeleine Glennon, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Madeleine Glennon, “Medusa in Ancient Greek Art”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, essay text
- The Rape of Proserpina, Bernini (Museum With No Frontiers, Discover Baroque Art), Museum With No Frontiers, Discover Baroque Art, “The Rape of Proserpina”, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Galleria Borghese, Museum With No Frontiers, object description
- Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. II part 1 (A. B. Cook), Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, vol. II, part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1925), pp. 798–802, “The thunderbolt of Zeus and the fork of Hades”, Cambridge University Press (Internet Archive scan), pp. 798–802
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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