Hades and the Greek Underworld: Styx, Tartarus and Elysium

In Greek myth Hades was both a god, the brother of Zeus who ruled the dead, and the name of the dark realm beneath the earth where the souls of the dead went. The underworld the Greeks imagined was never fixed: Homer describes a grey meadow of shades at the edge of the world, Hesiod a walled prison called Tartarus deep below it, and later poets and philosophers added the ferryman Charon, the rivers Styx and Lethe, the judges of the dead and the blessed fields of Elysium.

Hades the God: Names, Myths and Cult§

Hades was a son of the Titans Kronos and Rhea, swallowed at birth by his father and later released by Zeus. In the Iliad Poseidon recalls how the three brothers drew lots after their victory: Zeus received the wide sky, Poseidon the grey sea, and Hades the murky darkness, while the earth and Olympus remained common to all.

The Greeks often avoided his name. The form Aïdes was popularly understood as "the unseen one", although the etymology is debated. More often he was called Plouton, "the wealthy one", a title that linked the lord of the dead with the riches of the soil and with buried grain; this is the source of the Roman name Pluto. He owned a cap of invisibility, which Athena borrows in the Iliad and Perseus wears against the Gorgons, and he kept the hound Cerberus at his gate, a beast that Hesiod gives fifty heads and later artists usually three.

His one great myth is the abduction of Persephone, told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. With Zeus's consent Hades seized the girl as she picked flowers; Demeter's grief brought famine, and because Persephone had eaten pomegranate seeds below she had to spend part of each year with her husband. The story underlay the Eleusinian Mysteries, discussed in Greek religion and the mysteries.

Hades had very little public cult. Pausanias reports a sanctuary at Elis that was opened once a year and entered only by its priest, and he was honoured as Plouton at Eleusis, but no city made him its patron. He was stern and implacable, but not evil.

The Geography of the Underworld: Rivers, Gates and Entrances§

The oldest Greek picture places the land of the dead not underground but at the far western edge of the world. In Odyssey book 10 the witch Circe sends Odysseus across the river Ocean to the misty land of the Cimmerians and the groves of Persephone, where the Pyriphlegethon ("blazing with fire") and the Cocytus ("wailing"), a branch of the Styx, flow into the Acheron beside a rock. Elsewhere in Homer the dead simply go "beneath the earth".

The Styx ("the hated") was the most solemn of these waters. Hesiod's Theogony makes her the eldest daughter of Ocean, a goddess who sided with Zeus against the Titans and was rewarded by becoming the great oath of the gods. A god who swore falsely by her water lay breathless and voiceless for a year and was then barred from the gods' feasts for nine more. Lethe, "forgetfulness", appears as a plain and river in the Myth of Er at the end of Plato's Republic, where souls about to be reborn drink and forget their former lives; the Orphic gold tablets warn the initiated dead to avoid one spring and drink from the lake of Memory instead.

The Greeks also located real entrances. The river Acheron in Thesprotia in north-west Greece was associated with an oracle of the dead; Cape Taenarum at the southern tip of the Peloponnese held a cave through which Heracles was said to have dragged Cerberus; and in Italy the crater lake of Avernus near Cumae became the gate through which Virgil's Aeneas descends. Their oracles of the dead are discussed in Greek burial, the dead and hero cults.

Hermes, Charon and the Journey of the Dead§

The soul did not find its own way. Hermes, in his role as psychopompos or guide of souls, leads the souls of Penelope's suitors down at the start of Odyssey book 24, and they follow him squeaking like bats in a cave. The ferryman Charon is absent from Homer. He first appears in a lost early epic, the Minyas, which Pausanias quotes, and becomes familiar in fifth-century Athens, where he is painted on white-ground lekythoi, oil flasks made for the grave, as a rough old boatman with a pole. Aristophanes puts him on stage in the Frogs (405 BCE).

That fare gave rise to the custom later called "Charon's obol", a small coin placed in or near the mouth of the dead. Archaeology shows the practice was real but far from universal, and commoner in Hellenistic and Roman times than earlier. The more fundamental requirement was burial itself. The unburied, Homer's Elpenor and Virgil's Palinurus among them, could not cross the river and were left to wander, which is why the rites of burial mattered so much to the living.

Asphodel and the Shades: Homer's Land of the Dead§

Homer's dead are psychai or eidola, images of the living without strength or full awareness. They dwell in the "meadow of asphodel", the pale-flowered plant that grew on poor ground. In the great visit to the dead in Odyssey book 11 the shades crowd round a pit of blood and can speak to Odysseus only after drinking from it.

The most famous verdict on this existence comes from Achilles, the greatest of the heroes, who tells Odysseus not to make light of death:

"I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead." (Odyssey 11, trans. Samuel Butler, 1900)

There is no general judgement in Homer, and no reward for virtue as such. Most souls, good or bad, share the same dim state. Modern handbooks often speak of the "Asphodel Fields" as a neutral zone between Elysium and Tartarus for ordinary souls, but this tidy three-part scheme is a later systematisation; the ancient sources never agreed on a single map.

Tartarus: Prison of the Titans and the Great Sinners§

Tartarus is older and deeper than the realm of Hades. Hesiod places it as far below the earth as the sky is above: a bronze anvil would fall nine days and nights to reach it. It is walled in bronze and guarded by the Hundred-Handers. Into it Zeus cast the defeated Titans and, later, the monster Typhon.

In Odyssey book 11 Odysseus sees a few individual sinners suffering, though not explicitly in Tartarus: the giant Tityos, whose liver two vultures tear for having assaulted Leto; Tantalus, standing in a pool that drains away whenever he stoops to drink, beneath fruit that the wind snatches away; and Sisyphus, forever pushing a stone uphill. Later writers added Ixion, bound to a turning wheel for attempting Hera, and the Danaids, who murdered their husbands and carry water in leaking vessels, a punishment securely attested only in Hellenistic and Roman sources. Through philosophy and the mystery cults Tartarus gradually became the destination of all the incurably wicked.

Elysium, the Isles of the Blessed and the Judges of the Dead§

A brighter fate appears early but for very few. In Odyssey book 4 the sea-god Proteus tells Menelaus that he will not die in Argos but be sent to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where there is no snow or storm, because as husband of Helen he is son-in-law to Zeus. Hesiod's Works and Days similarly sends some heroes of the age of Troy to the Isles of the Blessed beside Ocean. In these early texts Elysium is a privilege of birth and divine favour, not a reward for goodness.

That changed in the fifth century. Pindar's second Olympian Ode (476 BCE) promises a life without toil to the good, and the Isles of the Blessed to those who have kept their souls from wrong through three lives on either side of death, a sign of the influence of Pythagorean and Orphic ideas of rebirth.

The judges of the dead developed along the same lines. Homer shows Minos, the old king of Crete, holding a golden sceptre and giving judgements among the dead, apparently settling disputes as he had in life. Plato's Gorgias turns this into a tribunal: Rhadamanthys judges the souls from Asia, Aeacus those from Europe, and Minos decides doubtful cases, sending each soul from a meadow at a crossroads either to the Isles of the Blessed or to Tartarus. The Myth of Er in the Republic adds rewards and punishments lasting a thousand years and a choice of the next life. The sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid, left unfinished at his death in 19 BCE, gathered all these elements, Charon, Cerberus, the judges, Tartarus, Elysium and Lethe, into the ordered underworld that later readers, including Dante, inherited.

Frequently asked questions§

Was Hades the god of death?§

Not exactly. Hades ruled the dead, but death itself was personified as Thanatos, the twin brother of Sleep (Hypnos). Hades received the dead; he did not kill them.

What is the difference between Hades and Tartarus?§

Hades is the general land of the dead where most souls go, while Tartarus is a deeper pit beneath it. In Hesiod Tartarus is the prison of the Titans; in later writers such as Plato it is also where the incurably wicked are punished.

Who were the judges of the underworld?§

The usual three are Minos, Rhadamanthys and Aeacus, all sons of Zeus famed for justice in life. Homer mentions Minos giving judgements among the dead, but the full tribunal of three first appears clearly in Plato's Gorgias in the fourth century BCE.

Did the Greeks really put a coin in the mouth of the dead?§

Some did. Coins appear in the mouths or hands of the dead in many Greek and Roman graves, but the custom was never universal.

Sources and further reading§

The Odyssey — Homer, c. 700 BCE
Theogony — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
The Homeric Hymns — Apostolos N. Athanassakis, 1976
Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources — Timothy Gantz, 1993
The Greek Way of Death — Robert Garland, 1985
Reading Greek Death: To the End of the Classical Period — Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, 1995
The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife — Jan N. Bremmer, 2002
Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets — Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, 2004
Greek Religion — Walter Burkert, 1985