Hades, Orcus, Dis
"Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, was lord of the subterrane region, the abode of the dead. He is described as being inexorable and deaf to supplication,—for from his…
From: Unknown To: 1838 C.E.
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“Hades,” from The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy by Thomas Keightley, 1838.
Chapter VI
The Kronids:—Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia
The Kronids, or children of Kronos and Rhea, were Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Hera, and Demeter. The four first we shall place here: the two last, as wives of Zeus, will find their more appropriate situation along with their children.
Hades, Orcus, Dis.
Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, was lord of the subterrane region, the abode of the dead. He is described as being inexorable and deaf to supplication,—for from his realms there is no return,—and an object of aversion and hatred both to gods and men. All the latter were sure to be sooner or later collected into his kingdom. His name appears to denote invisibility, significatory of the nature of the realm over which he ruled. At a later period he received the appellation of Pluton, as mines within the earth are the producers of the precious metals. This notion, Voss thinks, began to prevail when the Greeks first visited Spain, the country most abundant in gold.
The adventures of this god were few, for the gloomy nature of himself and his realm did not offer much field for such legends of the gods as Grecian fancy delighted in; yet he too had his love-adventures. The tale of his carrying off Persephone (which we shall relate at length in the sequel)is one of the most celebrated in antiquity. He loved, we are told, and carried off to Erebos the Oceanis Leuce; and when she died, he caused a tree, named from her, (white poplar,)to spring up in the Elysian Fields. Another of his loves was the nymph Mentha, whom Persephone out of jealousy turned into the plant which bears her name.
Hades, Homer tells us, was once wounded in the shoulder by the arrows of Heracles; but from the ambiguity of the phrase used by the poet it is difficult to determine the scene of the conflict. Some say it was at the gate of the nether world, when the hero was sent to drag the dog of Hades to the realms of day; others that it was in Pylos, where the god was aiding his worshipers against the son of Zeus.
The region over which Hades presides is represented in the Ilias and in the Theogony as being within the earth: in the Odyssey it is placed in the dark region beyond the stream of Ocean. Its name is Erebos; the poets everywhere describe it as dreary, dark, and cheerless. The dead, without distinction of good or evil, age or rank, wander about there, conversing of their former state on earth: they are unhappy, and they feel their wretched state acutely. Achilles, the son of a goddess, declares to Odysseus that he would rather be a day-labourer to the poorest cultivator on earth than a king in those regions. They have no strength or power of mind or body.
Some few, enemies of the gods, such as Sisyphos, Tityos, Tantalos, are punished for their crimes, but not apart from the rest of the dead. Nothing can be more gloomy and comfortless than the whole aspect of the realm of Hades as pictured in the Odyssey. It is in fact surprising, that men who had such a dreary prospect before them should not have been more attached to life, and more averse from war and everything that might abridge its period, than the ancient Greeks were.
In process of time, when communication with Egypt and Asia had enlarged the sphere of the ideas of the Greeks, the nether-world underwent a total change. It was now divided into two separate regions: Tartaros, which in the time of Homer and Hesiod was thought to lie far beneath it, and to be the prison of the Titans, became one of these regions, and the place of punishment for wicked men; and Elysion, which lay on the shore of the stream of Ocean, the retreat of the children and relatives of the king of the gods, was moved down thither to form the place of reward for good men.
A stream encompassed the domains of Hades, over which the dead, on paying their passage-money, were ferried by Charon; the three-headed dog Cerberos guarded the entrance; and the three judges, Minos, Æacos, and Rhadamanthys, allotted his place of bliss or of pain to each of the dead who was brought before their tribunal. The river of Oblivion was added to those of Homer's trans-Oceanic region, of whose waters the dead were led to drink previous to their returning to animate other bodies on earth.
In the sixth book of Virgil's Æneis will be found the richest and fullest description of the new-modified under-world, and for those who love to trace the progress and change of ideas, it will not be an uninteresting employment to compare it with that in the eleventh book of Homer's Odyssey. The poet Claudian too has, with his usual elegance, drawn a luxuriant description of the blissful scenes which the under-world would present, to console and reconcile its future mistress.
In reading the 'portentous lies' (as they have well been termed)of the Egyptian priests on this subject, one is at a loss which most to admire at, their audacity, or the credulity of the Greeks. For the former asserted, and the latter believed, that Orpheus and Homer had both learned wisdom on the banks of the Nile; and that the Erebos of Greece, and all its parts, personages and usages, were but transcripts of the mode of burial in Egypt. Here the corpse was, on payment of an obelos, conveyed by a ferryman (named Charon in the language of Egypt)over the Acherusian lake, after it had received its sentence from the judges appointed for that purpose. Oceanos was but the Egyptian name of the Nile; the Gates of the Sun were merely those of Heliopolis; and Hermes, the conductor of souls, was familiar to the Egyptians; and thus they appropriated all the mythic ideas of Greece.
It may give some idea of their hardihood, to observe that they affirmed, on the authority of their sacred books and temple-archives, that Orpheus, Musaeos, Melampus and Doedalos—not one of whom probably ever existed—had all visited Egypt. But enough of such mendacity: we should not have noticed it, were it not that the fashion of tracing the religion and institutions of Greece to Egypt is not yet extinct.
Before we quit Aidoneus and his realms, we must call attention to the circumstance of mankind agreeing to place the abode of departed souls either beneath the earth, or in the remote regions of the West. The former notion, it is probable, owes its origin to the simple circumstance of the mortal remains of man being deposited by most nations in the bosom of the earth; and the habits of thinking and speaking which thence arose, led to the notion of the soul also being placed in a region within the earth.
The calmness and stillness of evening succeeding the toils of the clay, the majesty of the sun sinking as it were to rest amid the glories of the western sky, exert a powerful influence over the human mind, and lead us almost insensibly to picture the West as a region of bliss and tranquillity. The idea of its being the abode of the departed good, where in calm islands they dwelt ‘from every ill remote,’ was therefore an obvious one. Finally, the analogy of the conclusion of the day and the setting of the sun with the close of life, may have led the Greeks, or it may be the Phoenicians, to place the dwelling of the dead in general in the dark land on the western shore of Ocean.
Hades, we are told by Homer, possessed a helmet which rendered its wearer invisible: it was forged for him by Hephsestos, the later writers say, in the time of the war against the Titans. Pallas Athene, when aiding Diomedes, wore it to conceal her from Ares. When Perseus went on his expedition against the Gorgons, the helm of invisibility covered his brows. This helmet of Hades will find its parallel in tales both of the East and the West, now consigned to the nursery.
By artists, the god of the netherworld was represented similar to his brothers, but he was distinguished from them by his gloomy and rigid mien. He usually bears a two-pronged fork in his hand.
The poets called Hades 1. Subterranean Zeus; 2. People-collecting, 3. Much-receivings 4. Gatekeeping; 5. Laughterless; 6. Horse-renowned; 7. Untamed, or invincible; 8. Strong; 9. Hateful; 10. Cold; etc.
At Hermione in Argolis Hades was worshiped under the name of Illustrious, and Persephone under that of Subterrane. The former would seem to have been placatory, like Eumenides that of the Erinnyes.
The epithet People-collecting, or driving, seems to refer to an office of Hades, which was afterwards transferred to Hermes. In the original conception of the god of the under-world, he was probably supposed to be himself the agent in removing from the realms of day those who were to be his subjects.
Pindar speaks of the staff of Hades, with which he drives down the dead along the hollow way to Erebos. It is also not unworthy of notice, that Macrobius, when speaking of Euripides' drama of Alcestis, calls Death, who comes to fetch away the heroine, Orcus, the Latin name of Pluto. In this drama we meet the first mention of a very remarkable notion of the Greeks. The dead seem to have been regarded in the light of victims offered to Hades; and as it was the custom in commencing a sacrifice to pluck some hairs from the forehead of the victim and burn them on the altar, so Death is here represented as coming to cut off a lock of the hair of Alcestis. Of this rite, however, no other mention is, we believe, to be found in Grecian literature. If we may trust to the Latin poets, the duty of performing it belonged to Persephone, a view which seems to contradict all analogy.
Keightley, Thomas. The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. Whittaker, 1838.
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