Hades, the Greek Underworld

For the early Greeks, the world was a flat disc surrounded by the river Ocean, with the bronze dome of the sky above and the realm of the dead below. The dead went to the “house of Hades”, named after the god who ruled it, and over time the god’s name came to stand for the place itself. Hades was a brother of Zeus and Poseidon; when the three divided the world, Zeus took the sky, Poseidon the sea and Hades the underworld. His queen was Persephone, daughter of Demeter, whom he carried off from a meadow, and whose yearly return to her mother was linked with the growth of the crops.

Beneath the house of Hades lay Tartarus. Hesiod says that a bronze anvil dropped from the sky would fall for nine days to reach the earth, and nine more to reach Tartarus, where Zeus had imprisoned the defeated Titans. At the other extreme were Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed. Homer places the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, a land without snow or storm where Menelaus will be taken instead of dying, and Hesiod sends some of the heroes of Thebes and Troy to the Isles of the Blessed beside Ocean. Only later, and most clearly in Virgil, did Elysium move into the underworld itself. The diagram on this page is therefore partly schematic, setting the realms of bliss above and the places of punishment below.

The oldest detailed picture of the dead comes from Book 11 of the Odyssey. On the advice of the sorceress Circe, Odysseus sails to the edge of the world, digs a pit and pours the blood of sacrificed sheep. The shades gather, thin and twittering, and can speak to him only after drinking the blood. His mother’s shade slips three times through his arms. The great Achilles tells him that he would rather be a hired labourer on earth than king over all the dead. For Homer, death was a loss of strength, warmth and full consciousness, not a passage to reward.

Proper burial mattered deeply. The unburied could not cross into Hades and might haunt the living, which is why Odysseus’ dead companion Elpenor begs him for a funeral and why Sophocles’ Antigone defies the king to bury her brother. Families washed and dressed the body, lamented it, carried it to the grave or pyre and brought offerings to the tomb in the years that followed.

Later sources fill in the road. Hermes, guide of souls, leads the dead down. Charon, a gruff old ferryman who appears in Athenian vase painting from the fifth century BCE and in Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, carries them across the river or marsh, and some Greeks placed a small coin with the dead, which later writers explained as his fare. At the gates waits Cerberus, the monstrous hound who welcomes the dead in but lets none out. Writers name several rivers of the underworld: the Acheron, the Styx, the Cocytus, the fiery Pyriphlegethon and, in later sources especially, the Lethe, the river of forgetting.

Homer already knew of a few great sinners suffering in the underworld. Tityus is tormented for assaulting a goddess; Tantalus stands in water that recedes whenever he stoops to drink, beneath fruit that the wind blows out of reach; Sisyphus pushes a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down. These are offenders against the gods themselves, not ordinary people.

From the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, new ideas spread. The mysteries of Eleusis promised initiates a better lot after death, and groups linked with Orpheus and Dionysus taught that the soul could win release through purity and ritual. Gold tablets placed in graves, the oldest from around 400 BCE, tell the initiate to avoid a spring by a white cypress and to drink instead from the Lake of Memory, saying to its guardians, “I am a child of Earth and starry Sky.”

Plato gave these ideas philosophical form. In the Gorgias, the judges Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus examine the naked souls of the dead. In the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, a soldier who returns from death describes souls rewarded in the sky or punished below for a thousand years, then choosing new lives and drinking from the river of forgetfulness before rebirth. Plato presents these as myths, stories that point to moral truth, rather than as maps.

The Romans identified Hades with their own Pluto, also called Dis Pater, and with Orcus, an old Italian god of death. Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the 20s BCE, gave the underworld its most influential form. Guided by the Sibyl of Cumae, Aeneas passes the ghosts of the unburied waiting on the riverbank, crosses in Charon’s boat, sees the punishments of Tartarus from a distance and reaches Elysium, where his father shows him the souls waiting to be reborn as the future heroes of Rome.

This blend of Homer, the mysteries and Plato became the classical picture of the world beyond. Christian writers drew on its vocabulary, and Dante chose Virgil as his guide through the Inferno, filling it with Charon, Minos, Cerberus and the rivers of the old underworld. Painters from the Renaissance onwards returned again and again to Orpheus’ descent to bring back his wife Eurydice and to the abduction of Persephone. Orpheus’ story, in which the singer charms Hades and Persephone but loses Eurydice by looking back too soon, became one of the first subjects of opera, from Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607 to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice of 1762.

Today Hades is as familiar from films, novels and video games as from ancient poetry, often reshaped in the process. Read in their own terms, the Greek sources show a long conversation rather than a single doctrine: a sober early view of death as shadow, gradually joined by hopes of reward, fears of judgement and the philosophical idea of the soul’s return.