Most people who know about Greek myth think that Hades is the ruler of the underworld. This is not wrong per se; early Greek poems do describe Hades as “ruler of those beneath the earth.” But, for the ancient Greeks, Hades was surprisingly not very important. Instead, across ritual, mythic, literary, and artistic contexts, Persephone, the queen of the underworld, occupies a far more prominent and authoritative position than her husband. She is the one who sends up the shades of the dead to speak to Odysseus in Book 11 of the Odyssey, the one whom Greeks honored through rituals and holidays, the one who was central to the Eleusinian mysteries, and the one who Orphic initiates believed would intercede for them in the afterlife.
By contrast, Hades was never a very developed figure for the ancient Greeks. Early poems mostly use his name as a metonym for the underworld itself and say very little about him as a personal god. He had very little significance in Greek ritual, and the only early myth in which he appears as a real character with his own agency and desires is that of his abduction of Persephone. Hades is vastly more prominent in contemporary retellings and adaptations of Greek myth than he ever was in the actual ancient sources.
I originally started writing a blog post on this topic around 2021, but I never finished it. Recently, the discussion around the depiction of the underworld in Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, which I posted a review of last week, reminded me of it, so I decided to return to the topic. In this post, I will explore in depth the evidence for Persephone and Hades’s relative importance in early Greek religion and myth, as well as their possible origins.
Continue reading “Is Persephone the Main Ruler of the Underworld in Greek Myth?”
