Pluto

Meaning

"Pluto" is the Latin spelling of the Greek name Ploutōn (Πλούτων), which is not the underworld god's oldest or only name in Greek - that is Hades - but a secondary title that eventually became the more commonly used name for the same god in later antiquity, and the one the Romans borrowed wholesale rather than translating. Ploutōn is built directly on the Greek noun ploutos, "wealth" or "riches," making the name transparently mean something close to "the wealthy one" or "giver of wealth." The logic behind the name is preserved explicitly in ancient Greek philosophical writing: in Plato's dialogue Cratylus, Socrates walks through why people prefer to call the god of the dead Ploutōn rather than Hades, explaining that the name refers to the wealth that comes up out of the earth beneath - both the visible wealth of crops grown in the soil and the hidden wealth of metals and gems mined from underground. Because the underworld god was also, by extension, lord of everything buried within the earth, ancient writers link Ploutōn's cult title directly to the god of wealth proper, Ploutos, and the two figures were frequently blended or confused with one another in art and later religious practice, despite originally being distinct: Ploutos was a minor personification of abundance and agricultural wealth, while Ploutōn was the ruler of the dead. The underlying motive for the name is usually described by classicists as euphemistic: Hades' own name carried genuinely frightening, ill-omened associations in Greek religious life, described in Homer as the god "most hateful of all gods to mortals," and Greek speakers were often reluctant to invoke it directly. Renaming the god after wealth and abundance - good, desirable things - softened the association and made the underworld's ruler less dangerous to name aloud, a pattern of avoidance-naming that appears elsewhere in ancient religion for feared powers. The Romans took over Ploutōn's Greek name directly as Pluto rather than inventing a separate native title, which is itself notable: where Zeus became the etymologically related but independently formed Jupiter, and Poseidon became Neptune, Pluto is a name Rome imported essentially unchanged, alongside the older, fully Roman name for the same underworld god, Dis Pater - itself a contracted phrase meaning "wealthy father," built on the Latin adjective dives ("rich"), which shows that Latin independently arrived at the identical euphemistic wealth-association Greek had already encoded into Ploutōn.

Carried By

• Character Pluto

Sources