Hades

Hades was a son of Kronos and Rhea. He was swallowed at birth along with his siblings and later freed when Zeus forced Kronos to disgorge them. After the Titanomachy, Homer has Poseidon describe how the three brothers divided the world by lot. Zeus received the sky, Poseidon the sea, and Hades the underworld, with the earth and Olympos held in common. Hades ruled the realm of the dead from his dark palace beyond the river Styx. His three-headed guard dog Cerberus let shades in but none out. His most famous myth is the abduction of Persephone, daughter of Demeter. He carried her down to the underworld to be his queen with Zeus's tacit consent. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells this story from Demeter's side, as a mother's search rather than Hades's own adventure. Hades was not considered evil in the way later religious traditions would frame a lord of the dead. He was an impartial ruler who enforced the boundary between the living and the dead. Punishing the dead was left to judges like Minos. Few heroes dared enter his realm and return. Heracles, Orpheus, and Odysseus each made the journey and came back alive.

In later tradition, Hades was increasingly called Plouton, "the wealthy one." The name is a euphemism for his dominion over the earth's buried mineral riches and its buried seed-grain alike. It survives directly into English as Pluto. The Roman name of Hades is Pluto, and Cicero says the Latin name for this god of the earth is Dis, as the Greek is Plouton (De Natura Deorum 2.66). In Roman religion, he was identified with the native god Dis Pater as well as with the borrowed Greek name Pluto. Roman writers extended his wealth-association further by linking him to Plutus, the minor god of material riches. They sometimes blurred the two figures together.