Hades: Not Such a Bad Guy After All

There is an interesting trope common in films based on Greek mythology in which Hades, the ruler of the Underworld, always seems to be the villain. It is a trope seen in films such as Walt Disney Pictures’ Hercules (1997), Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010), and Wrath of the Titans (2012). It seems that every movie that includes Hades always seems to uniformly portray him as a maniacal, conniving scoundrel, constantly seeking to overthrow Zeus and claim supreme power for himself. The problem with this picture is that it really does not come from the myths themselves.

In ancient times, the Greeks did not think of Hades as being evil. He was neither regarded as some sinister, fast-talking, flamy-haired cartoon villain, nor a fifteen-foot winged fire demon. They did not consider him decidedly malevolent, but rather merely reclusive, coldhearted, and somewhat aloof to the misery of the people residing in his kingdom.

Hades the Rebel?

One thing the films all seem to agree on is that Hades wants to overthrow Zeus. In Hercules, Hades unleashes the Titans, who climb Mount Olympos and take the gods as captives. In Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, after Luke, the son of Hermes, tricks Percy and his friends into delivering Hades Zeus’s masterbolt, Hades declares that he plans to use it to overthrow Zeus. In Wrath of the Titans, Hades and Ares betray Zeus, steal his thunderbolt, capture him, and make plans to drain his powers to revive Kronos in exchange for being allowed to remain immortal.

ABOVE: Image of the villainous animated cartoon version of Hades from the 1997 Walt Disney Pictures feature film Hercules

ABOVE: Scene from the movie Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief showing Hades (played by Steve Coogan) holding Zeus’s stolen masterbolt

The irony is that there is not a single ancient Greek narrative which ever mentions anything at all about Hades having ever tried to overthrow Zeus—not even one! In fact, there is actually a myth recorded in Book One, lines 397 through 406, of the Iliad which reports that several gods once actually did plot to overthrow Zeus—but Hades was not one of them.

The story is recounted by the hero Achilleus while speaking to his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, trying to persuade her to appeal to Zeus on his behalf. He reminds her that Zeus owes her a favor for having prevented the attempted coup by the other deities. According to Achilleus, the other deities attempted to chain Zeus to his throne and take control of Olympos for themselves, but then Thetis went and warned the hundred-armed giant Briareos, who is described in the passage as the son of Poseidon. Briareos freed Zeus from his bonds and suppressed the coup.

Judging from Hollywood films, this coup certainly sounds a lot like the sort of thing Hades would do, except, as I note above, Hades was not at all involved in the plot. Instead, the deities who attempted to overthrow Zeus were Athena, Hera, and Poseidon. Hades, who is not mentioned in the passage, can be presumed to have remained loyal to Zeus, even when it seemed like Zeus was going to be overthrown. Here is the translation by Robert Fitzgerald:

“…that time when you [i.e. Thetis] alone
of all the gods shielded the son of Kronos
from peril and disgrace—when the other gods,
Pallas Athena, Hera, and Poseidon,
wished him in irons, wished to keep him bound,
you had the will to free him of that bondage,
and called up to Olympos in all haste
Aigaion, whom the gods call Briareus,
the giant with a hundred arms, more powerful
than the sea-god, his father. Down he sat
by the son of Kronos, glorying in that place.
For fear of him the blissful gods forbore
to manacle Zeus.”

Notice that Hades is conspicuously absent from the list of the conspirators.

An even greater irony is that, while films seem obsessed with the idea of Hades unleashing the Titans from Tartaros for them to overthrow Zeus and the other Olympian deities, the makers of these films seem to forget that, according to Theogonia—a long poem written in around the eighth century BC by the Boiotian poet Hesiodos of Askre—Hades was one of the ones who originally defeated the Titans to begin with, in the so-called “Titanomachia.”

Once you have read the Theogonia, the notion that Hades would want to unleash the Titans suddenly seems absolutely, utterly inexplicable. In a hypothetical mythic scenario, if Hades did unleash the Titans, as he is so often portrayed as doing, they would probably kill him first since he played such a pivotal role in their downfall.

ABOVE: The Fall of the Titans, painted between 1588 and 1590 by the Dutch Golden Age painter Cornelis van Haarlem, showing the fall of the Titans, which Hades was partially responsible for

A Reasonable God

In fact, generally speaking, the Greeks actually viewed Hades as one of the more reasonable deities. This is shown by how, in the comedy The Frogs by Aristophanes, Hades serves as the judge of a poetry competition between Aischylos and Euripides. The reason he is selected to judge the competition is because everyone knows that he will judge fairly.

In the myth of Orpheus and Eurydike, Hades actually agrees to let Orpheus bring his wife Eurydike back from the dead simply because of his admiration for Orpheus’s tremendous talent as a musician. This is an act of genuine goodwill that we can hardly imagine coming from the villainous Hades we see in modern films.

Ultimately, Orpheus himself ignores Hades’s warning not to look back at Eurydike as he leaves and Eurydike ends up being returned to the Underworld. That is Orpheus’s fault, though, not Hades’s, since Hades did warn him not to look back.

ABOVE: Orpheus and Eurydice, originally painted between 1636 and 1638  by the Dutch Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens

The Abduction of Persephone

Sure, Hades did abduct Persephone without her or her mother’s consent. No one can deny that, by modern moral standards, that is certainly despicable. Nonetheless, we all need to remember that Hades did have Zeus’s permission and, in ancient Greece, the father of the bride’s consent was the only one that mattered. It did not matter what the bride herself thought of the union or even what her mother thought of it, because women were not thought of as people.

When he abducted Persephone, Hades was just doing what any other ancient Greek bridegroom would have done. His actions in the story must be judged according to ancient Greek moral standards, not according to modern, twenty-first century American moral standards.

In fact, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, when the sun-god Helios tells Demeter that Hades has abducted her daughter, he assures her that this situation is not half bad, since Hades is a noble god:

But I urge you, goddess: stop your loud cry of lamentation: you should not
have an anger without bounds, all in vain. It is not unseemly
to have, of all the immortals, such a son-in-law as Hadês, the one who makes many sêmata.
He is the brother [of Zeus], whose seed is from the same place. And as for tîmê,
he has his share, going back to the very beginning, when the three-way division of inheritance was made.
He dwells with those whose king he was destined by lot to be.

This does nothing to reassure Demeter, of course, but it shows that, even in the context of a story involving Hades’s abduction and implied rape of an innocent young woman, the Greeks still saw him, not as a villain, but rather as a noble deity.

ABOVE: The Return of Persephone, originally painted in 1891 by the English Academic painter Frederic Leighton

Hades the Recluse

Generally speaking, the ancient Greeks did not really worship Hades. He was a god who was more feared and respected than venerated. As far as we can tell, though, the Greeks do not really seem to have thought that Hades particularly minded this.

Indeed, while there are tons of stories about deities such as Dionysos, Artemis, Apollon, Aphrodite, etc., exacting horrible, bloody vengeance on mortals for refusing to worship them, we have no such stories about Hades. We do have stories of Hades punishing mortals, but always justly and never in horribly gruesome, violent ways.

For instance, there is a story recorded in the epitome of the lost final portion of the Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodoros, an ancient Greek mythographic composition probably originally written in around the second century AD, about how the mortal heroes Pirithous and Theseus descended to the Underworld to abduct Hades’s wife Persephone so that Pirithous could marry her. Knowing that they had come to his domain to abduct his wife, Hades pretended to offer them hospitality and told them to sit down.

The heroes did as Hades bid, but, as soon as they sat down, serpents immediately coiled around them, binding them permanently to their seats. Theseus was later rescued by Herakles, but Herakles discovered that even he with all his mighty strength could not pull Pirithous up from his seat, because when he tried, the very earth itself shook. Herakles therefore brought Theseus back up to the world of the living, but Pirithous was forced to remain stuck to his seat in the Underworld for all eternity, since he had desired Persephone as his bride.

Compared to, say, Dionysos, who famously caused the women of Thebes to tear his own cousin Pentheus limb from limb as punishment for having merely doubted that he was really the son of Zeus and Semele, Hades seems downright mild-mannered in this story. The heroes had to actually go to Hades’s own domain uninvited with the intention to steal his wife in order to suffer his wrath and, even then, they were not bloodily dismembered, but rather merely stuck to their seats. By Greek mythological standards, that is almost stunningly merciful of Hades.

Indeed, in nearly all the myths, Hades almost always remains in the Underworld and consistently stays out of mortal affairs. For instance, he is one of the few deities who never makes a single appearance in either of the Homeric poems and who does not seem to have sided with either the Greeks or the Trojans.

Hades and the Devil

So how on earth did Hades come to be so ruthlessly maligned in modern media? It is probably mostly because of an unfortunate tendency for people today to equate Hades with Satan. Even though the two figures are actually totally unrelated, many people, especially during the Early Modern Era, have looked back at Hades and, knowing that he was believed to be the ruler of Underworld, falsely assumed that he must have been viewed as some kind of a devil-like figure. This led to rampant misinterpretation of many of the myths involving Hades.

ABOVE: Depiction of Satan from Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation, painted in around 1485 by the German painter Hans Memling