Hades was born to the Titan Cronus and the goddess Rhea, the third of six divine children. His father, terrified by a prophecy that one of his offspring would overthrow him, swallowed each child whole as soon as it was born. Hades went down into his father's belly alongside his sisters Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and his brother Poseidon. Only Zeus, the youngest, escaped this fate, hidden away on the island of Crete. When Zeus grew to manhood, he tricked Cronus into disgorging his swallowed children, and together the brothers and sisters waged a ten-year war against the older generation of Titans -- the Titanomachy, the war between the old Titans and the young Olympian gods. Armed with thunder forged by the Cyclopes and a helmet of invisibility given by the same smiths, Hades fought alongside Zeus and Poseidon until the Titans were cast down into the pit of Tartarus. When the war ended, the three brothers drew lots for the division of the cosmos. Zeus won the wide sky, Poseidon won the grey sea, and Hades won the dark realm beneath the earth -- the mists and the darkness, the kingdom of the departed.

For many years Hades ruled alone in his shadowed halls, seated upon a throne of ebony beside his queen Persephone for half the year, and alone for the other half. His realm was not merely a prison but a kingdom with many regions. The Elysian Fields awaited the virtuous and heroic dead, a place of eternal reward. Tartarus yawned beneath for the wicked, a pit of punishment. The Asphodel Meadows stretched grey and endless for the ordinary souls who had lived neither exceptionally good nor bad lives. Rivers ran through his domain -- the Styx, by which the gods themselves swore their most binding oaths; the Acheron, the river of woe; the Cocytus, the river of lamentation. At the gates stood Cerberus, the three-headed hound who allowed the dead to enter but permitted none to leave. The ferryman Charon, an aged spirit with eyes like glowing coals, rowed the souls across the dark waters in exchange for the coin placed upon their lips at burial. Hades kept the keys to this kingdom upon his belt, and when he was in his own realm he heard nothing of what passed on Olympus or earth -- only the oaths and curses of men reached his ears, for he was the god to whom the perjured and the cursed must answer.

The most famous tale of Hades is the abduction of Persephone. The maiden was gathering flowers in a meadow near Enna in Sicily, playing with the daughters of the Titan Oceanus, when she reached for a narcissus of marvellous beauty -- a flower the Earth herself had caused to grow at the will of Zeus to snare the girl. The wide earth gaped open, and Hades sprang forth in his golden chariot drawn by four black immortal horses. He seized the screaming maiden and bore her down into his realm before any god or mortal could intervene. Only Hecate, the torch-bearing goddess of crossroads and magic, heard the cry from her cave, and only Helios, the all-seeing Sun, witnessed the deed from his blazing chariot. Demeter, Persephone's mother and the goddess of the harvest, wandered the earth for nine days with flaming torches, refusing all food and drink, until Hecate led her to Helios who revealed the truth. In her fury, Demeter caused the earth to wither -- no seed sprouted, no grain grew, and famine threatened to destroy mankind. Zeus, fearing that the gods would lose their worship and honours, sent Hermes, the swift messenger with the golden wand, down to the underworld to demand Persephone's return. Hades smiled grimly and obeyed, but before she left he secretly pressed a pomegranate seed into her mouth, forcing her to taste it. Because she had eaten the food of the dead, Persephone was bound to return to him for a third of each year -- or by some accounts, half. When she is below, Demeter mourns and the earth grows cold and barren. When she returns, the mother rejoices and spring blooms again. Thus Hades became the architect of the seasons themselves.

In another tale, the musician Orpheus descended into the underworld to reclaim his dead wife Eurydice, who had died from a serpent's bite on their wedding day. Orpheus played his lyre with such skill that the very shadows wept -- the tormented souls in Tartarus paused in their suffering, Sisyphus sat motionless upon his stone, and the Furies, the three goddesses of vengeance who usually pursued sinners with whips and serpents, shed tears for the first time. Even Hades and Persephone were moved. The king of the dead granted Orpheus a single condition: he could lead his wife out, but he must not look back at her until they had reached the upper world. In his longing and fear, Orpheus turned just as they neared the light -- and Eurydice slipped away forever, her voice calling a faint farewell as she faded back into shadow. Hades had shown mercy, but his mercy came with the iron law that governs all who enter his realm: what belongs to the dead cannot return to the living.

Hades was not a cruel god, but he was pitiless and inexorable, the most hated of all gods among mortals because he accepted no bribe and granted no reprieve. Yet he was also Plouton, the Wealth-Giver, master of the fertile soil and all precious metals hidden in the earth. The Greeks built few temples to him, for who would pray to death? But they honoured him in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret rites at Eleusis that promised initiates a blessed afterlife rather than the grey oblivion of the Asphodel Meadows. Black sheep were sacrificed to him, and the worshippers turned their faces away, striking the earth with their hands to summon him. The Romans called him Dis Pater, the Wealthy Father, and later Pluto, a name that would travel across centuries to label a distant world at the edge of our solar system -- a cold, dark sphere fitting for the lord of shadows.