Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

190 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
mouth by caring relatives. Protecting the entrance to Hades was
the two-, three-, or fifty-headed dog Kerberos. (Reports differ as
to the exact number of his heads.) It was Kerberos’s duty to fawn
hypocritically on those who entered the region but menace them
if they sought to leave. Hades, the lord of the dead and king of
the entire region, who was the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, has
few known physical traits, apart from dark hair. He is “monstrous”
and “strong,” “implacable” and “relentless”—no doubt because of
the absolute finality of death itself. For obvious reasons, he is also
referred to as “all-receiving” and “ruling over many.” We know
little else about him, apart from the sinister fact that he abducted
his wife Persephone when she was innocently plucking flowers
in a meadow. His palace and its domestic arrangements are never
described. But though the image of the god is not exactly attractive,
he never assumes the role of tormentor of the dead. On the
contrary, he seems to have been content to leave the denizens of
his realm alone so that they could lead their miserable existences
uninterruptedly.
Charon, ferryman of the dead (from O. M. von
Stackelberg’s Die Gräber der Hellenen [Berlin:
G. Reimer, 1837]).