Hades

The house of Hades is a labyrinth of dark, cold, and joyless halls, surrounded by locked gates and guarded by the hellhound Cerberus. Hell’s queen, Persephone, resides there a prisoner. This somber picture is confirmed in Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits Hades to consult the seer…

…he is everlastingly punished in Hades as the penalty for cheating Death, but why he is set to roll a great stone incessantly is a puzzle to which no convincing answer has yet been given. It appears to belong with other Greek imaginings of the world of the dead as…

…Homer’s Odyssey, Book XI, in Hades Tantalus stood up to his neck in water, which flowed from him when he tried to drink it, and over his head hung fruits that the wind wafted away whenever he tried to grasp them (hence the word tantalize). According to Pindar’s first Olympian…