They contact Zagreus during escape attempts, offering a friendly chat and Boons to aid him in his escape. They believe Zagreus is trying to escape so he can be with them; which is not the case as his objective is actually finding Persephone. For additional information about Zagreus that does not pertain to Hades , see Wikipedia's article: Zagreus.
Hades Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Useful pages. Hades links. Gamepedia support Report a bad ad Help Wiki Contact us. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Edit source History Talk Take one look at him and I think any questions of his parentage are soon resolved.
He never seemed to like it much, there, growing up within Lord Hades' well-appointed house. One day I took him on as a disciple, under orders from Lord Hades; the Master worried that his heir lacked any firm direction in his life. And, indeed, Zagreus took well to the martial ways, and I am proud to say now that he was my student. Perhaps my own lack of decorum in my youth made it easier for us to get along.
He learned quickly, exhibiting his father's might, and even greater swiftness. Yet, he soon showed a quality that startled me much more. Forgive me, O gods! You are not known for your kindness.
But this son of Lord Hades always regarded me, a mere shade, with respect; and the congenial manner of an old friend. Rumors swirl about the lad; about how he bleeds red like a mortal does. Well, if there's a trace of mortality in him, I am certain he is better for it. Another myth wants her to have fallen in love with Adonis whom she raised in the underworld, but Hades never takes issue with this just like Persephone with Leuke.
It is not hell nor a place of punishment. It is merely where mortals go when they die. The underworld was split into three major areas: the Asphodel Fields, the Elysian Fields, and Tartarus.
The Asphodel Fields were where most people went. They became shades, spirit versions of the persons they were in life, and wandered around there.
The Elysian Fields were where especially heroic, good, or virtuous people went. They were bright places full of beauty, music, merriment, and cheer. The dead who could enter here had lives of bliss and happy activity. This is the closest to the Christian heaven. Tartarus, on the other hand, was where particularly evil people went.
To end up in Tartarus, severe atrocities or insults to the gods had to have been committed in life. In Tartarus, a horridly black and cold place, only punishments were meted out.
The underworld was separated from the world of the living by the sacred river Styx. Though feared because he was king of the dead, Hades is portrayed as a benign ruler with a lot of compassion.
He is interested in keeping balance and peace in his kingdom, and he is often moved by the plights of mortals. There are several myths where he and Persephone grant chances for mortal souls to return to the land of the living. The only time when Hades becomes enraged is if others try to cheat him or cheat their way out of death or try to escape without his permission. Hades has a cap or helmet which makes you invisible when you wear it, even to other gods.
It is said that he got it from the Uranian Cyclops, together when Zeus got his lightning and Poseidon his trident in order to fight in the Titanomachy. Hades has lent this cap to other gods, such as Athena and Hermes, but also to some demigods, like Perseus. He told Demeter that Zeus and Hades were to blame. She was mad and had given ultimatum for the lands to stay barren until she was able to see her daughter again. Finally Zeus intervened, scared of seeing all mortals gone.
He sent Hermes to the underworld to speak to Hades and try convincing him to let Persephone return to her mother. After Hermes' successful persuasion, Hades was willing to let her go but, on other hand, tricked her with a honey-sweet pomegranate seed as farewell gift. Once eaten the seed, she became bound to the underworld and would have to return eventually. The helm of darkness or the cap of invisibility was a magical piece of armor that the Cyclopes had made specifically for Hades, during the Titanomachy, after being set free.
It enabled the user to turn invisible upon wearing it. It is also speculated that after the war, the helm received even greater power, a power of controlling the dead in the underworld. Hades borrowed his helm for a couple of times to the other gods and once to a semi-god Perseus in his quest to defeat Medusa.
Athena is also noted to be wearing the helm during Trojan war to help Diomedes , while Hermes used it to fight Hippolytus in the Gigantomachy. Hades was also involved in the myth of Heracles who was in the last of his twelve labors. The hero came to the underworld to capture Cerberus alive and bring him back before Eurystheus. When he met Hades, Heracles asked the god for permission to take away the three-headed beast from the underworld.
Hades was surprised by the boldness and bravery of the hero and would let him take his pet, if he was able to wrestle and outmatch it.
In the end, Heracles was able to do just that and brought the beast back to Mycenae. For instance, the women of the island Lemnos ignored her, and so she made them all smell so bad that their husbands divorced them and imported new foreign wives. Out of madness and frustration the Lemnian women killed all the men on their island, hardly a well thought-out solution to the problem.
The women were then left alone and lonely on their island until the Argonauts happened by and solved their problem, incidentally repopulating the island at the same time.
Despite her eternal youth and beauty, Aphrodite was a very ancient goddess, perhaps borrowed by the Greeks from their eastern neighbors. Originally a mother-goddess, a type worshiped widely throughout the ancient Near East, Aphrodite bears close resemblance in many ways to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or the Canaanite Ashtoreth Astarte. For example, Aphrodite's priestesses in several Greek towns were prostitutes just as Ishtar's.
According to Herodotus, the worship of Mylitta, Aphrodite's equivalent in Babylon, required that women offer themselves at least once during their lives in the goddess' temple to strange men for any price. This, Herodotus notes with a smirk, posed a problem for ugly women who might have to remain in the temple for many years awaiting an offer.
In general, Aphrodite is treated rather lightly by the Greeks, especially Homer who makes her subordinate to Hera and Athena. A famous exception is Euripides' portrait of the goddess in his tragic masterpiece Hippolytus , where she emerges as all-powerful and highly dangerous.
Also, the Romans who called her Venus worshiped her with great solemnity. The god of fire and the forge, Hephaestus is one of the few legitimate children of Zeus and Hera. According to a different story, Hera grew angry at Zeus' perpetual infidelity and gave birth to Hephaestus parthenogenetically, that is, without her husband's involvement.
Either way Hephaestus was largely ignored by his father along with the majority of ancient poets and playwrights. Indeed, so preternaturally ugly and lame, the new-born baby Hephaestus was flung out of Olympus by his own mother disgusted at his deformity.
He fell for many days, according to myth, finally landing on the island of Lemnos where there was a cult to him in antiquity. Hephaestus is associated with volcanic eruptions, often accredited to his working in a smithy deep below the earth. He was best known for his many inventive creations, for instance, the shield of Achilles The Iliad , Book 18 , palaces for the gods and golden robots which speak and think and assisted him in his work at the forge.
Most myths concerning Hephaestus center around his wife Aphrodite. Having been awarded her as wife in order to prevent a violent quarrel among the other more powerful and handsome gods who wanted her, Hephaestus won last place in her heart, a sentiment she proved by having numerous affairs.
Homer, for instance, describes in The Odyssey Book 8 how Hephaestus thought he'd gotten revenge on her for her frequent infidelities.
He trapped her and her current lover, Ares the god of war, in bed by dropping a mesh of chains on them as they were making love. The indignant cuckold then called the gods to the scene—the goddesses refused to come out of shame—to witness her adultery. Some gods laughed, others expressed their disgust, but none refused to look at the naked Aphrodite and in the back Apollo whispered to Hermes, "Would you suffer these humiliating chains, if you could lie down with golden Aphrodite?
Ares is the god of war and an exceptionally unpleasant character. In many stories he's little more than a bully and a butcher, loved only by Hades because he's the death-god's best wholesale supplier.
Like Hephaestus, Ares is the son of Zeus and Hera and further evidence that his parents' marriage wasn't a very good match. Moreover, for all his vainglorious boasting Ares isn't very successful in war. In mythological combat, he's defeated by his sister Athena, the hero Heracles four times!
When he complains of his mistreatment to his father, Zeus calls him a two-faced brute, tells him to quit whining and says that his quarrelsome nature comes from his mother Hera, and that if he were not his son he would have kicked him out of Olympus long ago.
The Greeks' scorn of war comes through clearly in this depiction of Ares, and in the fact that archaeologists have found relatively few shrines to him in Greece. Most of his centers of worship were in northern Greece from which this deity may have been exported to the cities of the south. As a deity of war, Athena was far preferable to most Greeks, especially in Athens the city named after her. Also a goddess of wisdom and crafts, her prominence is at least in part due to Athens' dominance of our historical and literary sources.
Had we more records from ancient cities outside of Athens, we would, no doubt, see a more balanced picture of Athena. As it is, she comes across as a strong, virgin goddess, the protectress and patron of civilized man against errant barbarians. The personification of ingenuity and genius, she is attributed with inspiring such remarkable inventions as the Trojan horse, the double flute, the ship Argo, the magic bridle used to harness the flying horse Pegasus and the mirrored shield with which Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa.
Her wisdom was, thus, rarely the abstract sort we tend to associate with philosophers and poets, more often the practical kind linked with cunning and technical expertise.
Athena was born in a highly unusual manner. Her father Zeus ate her mother Metis "Wisdom" in fear that the pregnant Metis would give birth to a child who would be greater than he was. Metis survived, however—she was clever, after all—living on in Zeus' head where eventually she went into labor causing Zeus to have a great headache.
Hephaestus—or in some stories the Titan Prometheus—split Zeus' skull open and out came the goddess Athena fully grown and armed. In art she can be identified by her crested helmet, spear and shield emblazoned with a Gorgon's head, a present from Perseus for her help in killing the Medusa. She's also often depicted with an owl, the bird that symbolized wisdom and her city Athens.
Sometimes she's called Pallas Athena in memory of her childhood friend Pallas whom she killed accidently while playing war-games. Apollo represents a wide amalgam of powers and attributes.
He's the god of the sun, wisdom, prophesy, music, flocks, wolves, mice, entrances, plagues and medicine. How he came to be included in the Greek pantheon and was introduced to Greece is not at all clear, but some historical data suggest he may have been an eastern god originally—possibly Apulunas, a god of the Hittites who occupied central Asia Minor Turkey in the second millennium BCE—though the ancient Greeks linked him with the peoples of the far North.
Whatever the truth, it's evident from both the many spheres he controls and his other names, Loxias see below and Phoebus —sometimes combined with Apollo to make "Phoebus Apollo"—that he represents the conflation of several deities, native and foreign perhaps. The story of his birth is one of the most famous myths in the Greek canon. His mother the Titaness Leto was impregnated by Zeus, extra-maritally as usual.
When Hera discovered this, she became enraged and wished to prevent the birth of Leto's child—or children, as it turned out, since Leto had twins, Apollo and Artemis. When she felt their birth coming on, Leto searched for a place to have her children, but out of fear of Hera's anger no place would receive her until she came to the island Delos in the Aegean Sea east of Greece.
She persuaded the island to allow her to stay there with the promise that it would become an important center of worship. There under a palm tree she gave birth to Apollo and Artemis, and henceforth the island was sacred to Apollo. Despite his birth on Delos, Apollo was more closely associated with Delphi in central Greece on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. There, as a precocious babe of only four days, Apollo killed a huge snake named Pytho and established a center of worship in Delphi from which he prophesied.
This so-called Oracle of Delphi was maintained by a succession of prophetesses, each called the Pythia after the snake, lasting well into historical times. The Pythia often spoke in riddles, words which were true but hid their truth from plain view in some way. One of the most famous prophesies of the Oracle of Delphi was that delivered to King Croesus of Lydia who asked the Pythia what would happen if he attacked the Persians.
The oracle replied that "a great kingdom will fall. Only too late he realized that the "kingdom" the oracle meant was his own! Thus, as the god of prophesy, Apollo is often called Loxias "slanting".
Apollo was very popular in the Classical Age and appears often in later myth and literature. He provided much fodder for myth-making in that he had many love affairs with women, nymphs and young men and was heavily involved in the Trojan War and its aftermath. He's often held up as the ideal—or the anomaly—of the perfect male according to the classical Greeks. Despite his personal excesses and often outrageous behavior, he preached a philosophy of self-awareness and moderation seen on his temple in Delphi which bore the inscriptions "Know yourself" and "Nothing in excess.
Apollo's twin sister Artemis is both his antithesis and counterpart. She represents the moon, where he represents the sun; she darkness, he light; she primitive chastity, he civilized intercourse; she the child, he the adult; she black magic, he science; she death, he healing.
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