Hades was often represented riding a chariot driven by pitch-black horses. In one famous myth, he let the hero Perseus borrow this helmet so that he could sneak up on and kill Medusa. Perhaps as an extension of his name, usually thought to mean “the unseen one,” Hades was said to possess a helmet of invisibility. Hades was regarded as a dark, merciless god. But Hades was also a god of wealth and fertility since good things like crops and precious metals came to mortals from his underground realm. Hades was, first and foremost, the god of death: it was he who ruled the Underworld, and indeed, his name was synonymous with the Underworld. Hades was known by several epithets, including agēsandros and agesilaos (meaning “he who leads people away”), polysēmantōr and polydegmōn (“ruler of many” or “host of many”), klymenos (“the notorious”), and eubuleus (“giver of good advice”). The name Plouton was inherited by the Romans, whose god Pluto possessed the same characteristics as Hades. 490–323 BCE), the god’s name had evolved into Hades.įearful of speaking the name of the god of death, the Greeks took to calling Hades by the alternative euphemistic name Plouton, meaning “wealthy.” This other name presumably reflected the fact that the Greeks’ riches, such as crops and precious metals, came from below the earth. Another common poetic alternative was Aidoneus. The earliest attested form of the name, used in Homeric and Ionic Greek, was Aïdēs. In antiquity, Hades’ name was generally interpreted as meaning “the unseen” or “the invisible one.” This is a rare case where the original, folk etymology seems to have been correct: modern scholars have traced the name “Hades” to the Proto-Indo-European word * ṇ-uid-, meaning “unseen.” Pronunciation The name had evolved into its more familiar form, Hades (Ἅιδης), by the Classical period (ca. The video game series Final Fantasy also features Cerberus in a number of forms, including a creature the heroes can summon to fight, and a boss battle.The earliest documented version of the name “Hades” was Aïdēs (Ἀΐδης), used in the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey (eighth century BCE). In the 2014 film Hercules, Cerberus is represented by three separate but vicious wolves.Īway entirely from the Greek version of the creature, Coronation Street fans know Cerberus as the name of the beloved, but late, pooch of Evelyn Plummer, played by Maureen Lipman. The name Cerberus will be familiar to many outside of mythology too, including variations in several adaptations of Hercules such as the 1997 Disney film and the 1990s TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Orpheus also tricked Cerberus by using music to lull him to sleep.Ĭerberus remains an iconic figure in Greek mythology and continues to inspire artists and writers to this day and was featured in Dante’s Inferno from the 14th-century epic poem ‘Divine Comedy’. In fact, he was subdued by the hero Heracles and bought up to the land of the living as one of his twelve labours before being returned to Hades. In Greek mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog – the Hound of Hades – which guards the gates to the Underworld in order to prevent the dead from leaving (Picture: Getty Images)
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