Pluto (mythology)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Pluto (god)
)

1st century sculpture of Pluto in the Getty Villa

In

ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pluto (Greek: Πλούτων, Ploutōn) was the ruler of the Greek underworld. The earlier name for the god was Hades, which became more common as the name of the underworld itself. Pluto represents a more positive concept of the god who presides over the afterlife. Ploutōn was frequently conflated with Ploûtos, the Greek god of wealth, because mineral wealth was found underground, and because as a chthonic god Pluto ruled the deep earth that contained the seeds necessary for a bountiful harvest.[1] The name Ploutōn came into widespread usage with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as both a stern ruler and a loving husband to Persephone
. The couple received souls in the afterlife and are invoked together in religious inscriptions, being referred to as Plouton and as Kore respectively. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone.

Pluto and

heroes to the underworld.[3]

Plūtō (

genitive Plūtōnis) is the Latinized form of the Greek Plouton. Pluto's Roman equivalent is Dis Pater, whose name is most often taken to mean "Rich Father" and is perhaps a direct translation of Plouton. Pluto was also identified with the obscure Roman Orcus, like Hades the name of both a god of the underworld and the underworld as a place. Pluto (Pluton in French and German, Plutone in Italian) becomes the most common name for the classical ruler of the underworld in subsequent Western literature and other art forms
.

Hesiod

A mosaic of the Kasta Tomb in Amphipolis depicting the abduction of Persephone by Pluto, 4th century BC

The name Plouton does not appear in Greek literature of the Archaic period.[4] In Hesiod's Theogony, the six children of Cronus and Rhea are Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, and Hestia. The male children divide the world into three realms. Hades takes Persephone by force from her mother Demeter, with the consent of Zeus. Ploutos, "Wealth," appears in the Theogony as the child of Demeter and Iasion: "fine Plutus, who goes upon the whole earth and the broad back of the sea, and whoever meets him and comes into his hands, that man he makes rich, and he bestows much wealth upon him." The union of Demeter and Iasion, described also in the Odyssey,[5] took place in a fallow field that had been ploughed three times, in what seems to be a reference to a ritual copulation or sympathetic magic to ensure the earth's fertility.[6] "The resemblance of the name Ploutos to Plouton ...," it has been noted, "cannot be accidental. Plouton is lord of the dead, but as Persephone's husband he has serious claims to the powers of fertility."[7] Demeter's son Plutus merges in the narrative tradition with her son-in-law Pluto, redefining the implacable chariot-driver Hades whose horses trample the flowering earth.[8]

That the underworld god was associated early on with success in agricultural activity is already evident in Hesiod's Works and Days, line 465–469: "Pray to Zeus of the Earth and to pure Demeter to make Demeter's holy grain sound and heavy, when first you begin ploughing, when you hold in your hand the end of the plough-tail and bring down your stick on the backs of the oxen as they draw on the pole-bar by the yoke-straps."[9]

Plouton and Ploutos

Dionysos
(4th century BC)

Plouton was one of several euphemistic names for Hades, described in the Iliad as the god most hateful to mortals.[10] Plato says that people prefer the name Plouton, "giver of wealth," because the name of Hades is fear-provoking.[11] The name was understood as referring to "the boundless riches of the earth, both the crops on its surface—he was originally a god of the land—and the mines hidden within it."[12] What is sometimes taken as "confusion" of the two gods Plouton and Ploutos ("Wealth") held or acquired a theological significance in antiquity. As a lord of abundance or riches, Pluto expresses the aspect of the underworld god that was positive, symbolized in art by the "horn of plenty" (cornucopia),[13] by means of which Plouton is distinguished from the gloomier Hades.[14]

The Roman poet

Saecular Games in 249 BC, and that Dis pater was only a translation of Plouton.[16] In the mid-1st century BC, Cicero identifies Pluto with Dis, explaining that "The earth in all its power and plenty is sacred to Father Dis, a name which is the same as Dives, 'The Wealthy One,' as is the Greek Plouton. This is because everything is born of the earth and returns to it again."[17]

During the

Iberia (Roman Spain), he says that among the Turdetani, it is "Pluto, and not Hades, who inhabits the region down below."[18] In the discourse On Mourning by the Greek author Lucian (2nd century AD), Pluto's "wealth" is the dead he rules over in the abyss (chasma); the name Hades is reserved for the underworld itself.[19]

Other identifications

In Greek religious practice, Pluto is sometimes seen as the "chthonic Zeus" (Zeus Chthonios

Semitic god Muth (Μούθ). Muth was described by Philo of Byblos as the equivalent of both Thanatos (Death personified) and Pluto.[26] The ancient Greeks did not regard Pluto as "death" per se.[27]

Mythology

See also: Abduction of Persephone
The Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the Galleria Borghese in Rome

The best-known myth involving Pluto or Hades is the abduction of Persephone, also known as Kore ("the Maiden"). The earliest literary versions of the myth are a brief mention in Hesiod's Theogony and the extended narrative of the

Hyginus (ca. 64 BC–AD 17).[31]

The most influential version of the abduction myth is that of

Natale Conti's influential Mythologiae (1567), the traditions pertaining to the various rulers of the classical underworld coalesced into a single mythology
that made few if any distinctions among Hades, Pluto, Dis, and Orcus.

Offspring

Unlike his freely procreating brothers Zeus and Poseidon, Pluto is

Furies,[40] but the mother is the goddess Nox (Nyx),[41] not his wife Persephone.The lack of a clear distinction between Pluto and "chthonic Zeus" confuses the question of whether in some traditions, now obscure, Persephone bore children to her husband. In the late 4th century AD, Claudian's epic on the abduction motivates Pluto with a desire for children. The poem is unfinished, however, and anything Claudian may have known of these traditions is lost.[42]

Boccaccio records a tradition in which Pluto was the father of the divine personification Veneratio ("Reverence"), noting that she had no mother because Proserpina (the Latin name of Persephone) was sterile.[45]

In The Faerie Queene (1590s), Edmund Spenser invents a daughter for Pluto whom he calls Lucifera.[46] The character's name was taken from the 16th-century mythography of Natale Conti, who used it as the Latin translation of Greek phosphor, "light-bearer," a regular epithet of Hecate.[47] Spenser incorporated aspects of the mysteries into The Faerie Queene.[48]

Pluto and Orpheus

Orpheus before Pluto and Proserpina (1605), by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Orpheus was regarded as a founder and prophet of the mysteries called "Orphic," "Dionysiac," or "Bacchic." Mythologized for his ability to entrance even animals and trees with his music, he was also credited in antiquity with the authorship of the lyrics that have survived as the Orphic Hymns, among them a hymn to Pluto. Orpheus's voice and lyre-playing represented a medium of revelation or higher knowledge for the mystery cults.[49]

In his central myth, Orpheus

visits the underworld in the hope of retrieving his bride, Eurydice, relying on the power of his music to charm the king and queen of Hades. Greek narratives of Orpheus's descent and performance typically name the ruler of the underworld as Plouton, as for instance in the Bibliotheca.[50] The myth demonstrates the importance of Pluto "the Rich" as the possessor of a quest-object. Orpheus performing before Pluto and Persephone was a common subject of ancient and later Western literature and art, and one of the most significant mythological themes of the classical tradition.[51]

The demonstration of Orpheus's power depends on the normal obduracy of Pluto; the

notes ... / Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek."[53]

The Greek writer Lucian (ca. 125–after 180 AD) suggests that Pluto's love for his wife gave the ruler of the underworld a special sympathy or insight into lovers parted by death.[54] In one of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, Pluto questions Protesilaus, the first Greek hero killed in the Trojan War, who wishes to return to the world of the living. "You are then in love with life?", Pluto asks. "Such lovers we have here in plenty; but they love an object, which none of them can obtain." Protesilaus explains, like an Orpheus in reverse, that he has left behind a young bride whose memory even the Lethe's waters of forgetting have not erased from him. Pluto assures him that death will reunite them someday, but Protesilaus argues that Pluto himself should understand love and its impatience, and reminds the king of his grant to Orpheus and to Alcestis, who took her husband's place in death and then was permitted at the insistence of Heracles to return to him. When Persephone intercedes for the dead warrior, Pluto grants the request at once, though allowing only one day for the reunion.[55]

Mysteries and cult

Hydria (ca. 340 BC) depicting figures from the Eleusinian Mysteries

As Pluto gained importance as an embodiment of agricultural wealth within the Eleusinian Mysteries, from the 5th century BC onward the name Hades was increasingly reserved for the underworld as a place.

Ephesos, Mytilene, and Sparta as well as at Eleusis, where they were known simply as God (Theos) and Goddess (Thea).[61]

In the ritual texts of the

mystery religions preserved by the so-called Orphic or Bacchic gold tablets, from the late 5th century BC onward[62] the name Hades appears more frequently than Plouton, but in reference to the underground place:[63] Plouton is the ruler who presides over it in a harmonious partnership[64] with Persephone.[65] By the end of the 4th century BC, the name Plouton appears in Greek metrical inscriptions.[66] Two fragmentary tablets greet Pluto and Persephone jointly,[67] and the divine couple appear as welcoming figures in a metrical epitaph
:

I know that even below the earth, if there is indeed a reward for the worthy ones,
the first and foremost honors, nurse,[68] shall be yours, next to Persephone and Pluto.[69]

Hesychius identifies Pluto with Eubouleus,[70] but other ancient sources distinguish between these two underworld deities. In the Mysteries Eubouleus plays the role of a torchbearer, possibly a guide for the initiate's return.[71] In the view of Lewis Richard Farnell, Eubouleus was originally a title referring to the "good counsel" the ruler of the underworld was able to give and which was sought at Pluto's dream oracles; by the 2nd century BC, however, he had acquired a separate identity.[72]

Orphic Hymn to Pluto

The Orphic Hymn to Pluto addresses the god as "strong-spirited" and the "All-Receiver" who commands death and is the master of mortals. His titles are given as Zeus Chthonios and Euboulos ("Good Counsel").

Eleusis
. The route from Persephone's meadow to Hades crosses the sea. The hymn concludes:

You alone were born to judge deeds obscure and conspicuous.
Holiest and illustrious ruler of all, frenzied god,
You delight in the worshiper's respect and reverence.
Come with favor and joy to the initiates. I summon you.[74]

The hymn is one of several examples of Greco-Roman prayer that express a desire for the presence of a deity, and has been compared to a similar epiclesis in the Acts of Thomas.[75]

Magic invocations

The names of both Hades and Pluto appear also in the

pig" if the curse is fulfilled by the desired deadline. The pig was a characteristic animal sacrifice to chthonic deities, whose victims were almost always black or dark in color.[77]

A set of curse tablets written in

Abrasax.[81]

Sanctuaries of Pluto

Main article: Ploutonion

A sanctuary dedicated to Pluto was called a

Nysa, where a temple of Pluto and Persephone was located. Visitors sought healing and dream oracles.[84] The ploutonion at Hierapolis, Phrygia, was connected to the rites of Cybele, but during the Roman Imperial era was subsumed by the cult of Apollo, as confirmed by archaeological investigations during the 1960s. It too was a dream oracle.[85] The sites often seem to have been chosen because the presence of naturally occurring mephitic vapors was thought to indicate an opening to the underworld.[86] In Italy, Avernus was considered an entrance to the underworld that produced toxic vapors, but Strabo seems not to think that it was a ploutonion.[87]

Iconography and attributes

kylix
, ca. 440–430 BC

In Eleusinian scenes

Kevin Clinton attempted to distinguish the iconography of Hades, Plouton, Ploutos, and the Eleusinian Theos in 5th-century vase painting that depicts scenes from or relating to the mysteries. In Clinton's schema, Plouton is a mature man, sometimes even white-haired; Hades is also usually bearded and mature, but his darkness is emphasized in literary descriptions, represented in art by dark hair. Plouton's most common attribute is a sceptre, but he also often holds a full or overflowing cornucopia; Hades sometimes holds a horn, but it is depicted with no contents and should be understood as a drinking horn. Unlike Plouton, Hades never holds agrarian attributes such as stalks of grain. His chest is usually bare or only partly covered, whereas Plouton is fully robed (exceptions, however, are admitted by the author). Plouton stands, often in the company of both Demeter and Kore, or sometimes one of the goddesses, but Hades almost always sits or reclines, usually with Persephone facing him.[88] "Confusion and disagreement" about the interpretation of these images remain.[89]

The keys of Pluto

Attributes of Pluto mentioned in the Orphic Hymn to Pluto are his

scepter
, keys, throne, and horses. In the hymn, the keys are connected to his capacity for giving wealth to humanity, specifically the agricultural wealth of "the year's fruits."

Pluto (1592) by Agostino Carracci, probably influenced by the description in Vincenzo Cartari's mythography,[90] with the god holding his scepter and key, Cerberus at his side

Jove (Greek Zeus) and the trident of Neptune (Poseidon).[92]

A golden key (chrusea klês) was laid on the tongue of initiates by priests at Eleusis[93] and was a symbol of the revelation they were obligated to keep secret.[94] A key is among the attributes of other infernal deities such as Hecate, Anubis, and Persephone, and those who act as guardians or timekeepers, such as Janus and Aion.[95] Aeacus (Aiakos), one of the three mortal kings who became judges in the afterlife, is also a kleidouchos (κλειδοῦχος), "holder of the keys," and a priestly doorkeeper in the court of Pluto and Persephone.[96]

Vegetation and color

According to the

cataplasm. The plant was also used as an aphrodisiac[99] and contraceptive.[100] It grew in humid places. In an obscure passage, Cornutus seems to connect Pluto's wearing of phasganion to an etymology for Avernus, which he derives from the word for "air," perhaps through some association with the color glaukos, "bluish grey," "greenish" or "sea-colored," which might describe the plant's leaves. Because the color could describe the sky, Cornutus regularly gives it divine connotations.[101] Pluto's twin sister was named Glauca
.

Ambiguity of color is characteristic of Pluto. Although both he and his realm are regularly described as dark, black, or gloomy, the god himself is sometimes seen as pale or having a pallor. Martianus Capella (5th century) describes him as both "growing pale in shadow, a fugitive from light" and actively "shedding darkness in the gloom of Tartarean night," crowned with a wreath made of ebony as suitable for the kingdom he governs.[102] The horses of Pluto are usually black, but Ovid describes them as "sky-colored" (caeruleus, from caelum, "sky"), which might be blue, greenish-blue, or dark blue.[103]

The narcissus, frequently linked to the myth of Persephone, who was snatched into the Underworld by the god Hades while picking the flowers

The

Gaia (Earth) produced the narcissus at Zeus's request as a snare for Persephone; when she grasps it, a chasm opens up and the "Host to Many" (Hades) seizes her.[105] Narcissus wreaths were used in early times to crown Demeter and Persephone, as well as the Furies (Eumenides).[106] The flower was associated with narcotic drugginess (narkê, "torpor"),[107] erotic fascination,[108] and imminent death;[109] to dream of crowning oneself with narcissus was a bad sign.[110] In the myth of Narcissus, the flower is created when a beautiful, self-absorbed youth rejects sexuality and is condemned to perpetual self-love along the Styx.[111]

Conti's inclusion of adianthus (

Platonic cave with capillaires, in French both "maidenhair fern" and "blood vessels".[114]

The cypress (Greek cyparissus, Latin cupressus) has traditional associations with mourning.

Tree of Life in various world mythologies. The description of the cypress as "white" (Greek leukē), since the botanical tree is dark, is symbolic, evoking the white garments worn by initiates or the clothing of a corpse, or the pallor of the dead. In Orphic funeral rites, it was forbidden to make coffins of cypress.[119]

The tradition of the mystery religions favors Pluton/Hades as a loving and faithful partner to Persephone, but one ancient myth that preserves a lover for him parallels the abduction and also has a vegetative aspect.

funeral games.[123] Like other plants associated with Pluto, white poplar was regarded as a contraceptive in antiquity.[124] The relation of this tree to the white cypress of the mysteries is debated.[125]

The helmet of invisibility

The

Titans: Zeus thunder and lightning; Poseidon a trident; and Pluto a helmet (kyneê).[126]

The helmet Pluto receives is presumably the magical

Rabelais (16th century) do attribute the helmet to Pluto.[128] Erasmus calls it the "helmet of Orcus"[129] and gives it as a figure of speech referring to those who conceal their true nature by a cunning device. Francis Bacon notes the proverbial usage: "the helmet of Pluto, which maketh the politic man go invisible, is secrecy in the counsel, and celerity in the execution."[130]

Bident

Hendrik Goltzius

No ancient image of the ruler of the underworld can be said with certainty to show him with a

scholiast, who mentions Poseidon being armed with a bident.[135]

In the Middle Ages, classical underworld figures began to be depicted with a pitchfork.

Early Christian writers had identified the classical underworld with Hell, and its denizens as demons or devils.[137] In the Renaissance, the bident became a conventional attribute of Pluto. In an influential ceiling mural depicting the wedding of Cupid and Psyche, painted by Raphael's workshop for the Villa Farnesina in 1517, Pluto is shown holding the bident, with Cerberus at his side, while Neptune holds the trident.[138] Perhaps influenced by this work, Agostino Carracci originally depicted Pluto with a bident in a preparatory drawing for his painting Pluto (1592), in which the god ended up holding his characteristic key.[139] In Caravaggio's Giove, Nettuno e Plutone (ca. 1597), a ceiling mural based on alchemical allegory, it is Neptune who holds the bident.[140]

In Greek literature and philosophy

Persephone and Pluto[141] or Hades[142] on a pinax from Locri

The name Plouton is first used in

descent to the underworld by the god Dionysus to bring back one of the dead tragic playwrights in the hope of restoring Athenian theater to its former glory. Pluto is a silent presence onstage for about 600 lines presiding over a contest among the tragedians, then announces that the winner has the privilege of returning to the upper world.[144] The play also draws on beliefs and imagery from Orphic and Dionysiac cult, and rituals pertaining to Ploutos (Plutus, "wealth").[145]
In a fragment from another play by Aristophanes, a character "is comically singing of the excellent aspects of being dead", asking in reference to the tripartition of sovereignty over the world:

And where do you think Pluto gets his name [i.e. "rich"],
if not because he took the best portion?
...
How much better are things below than what Zeus possesses![146]

To Plato, the god of the underworld was "an agent in [the] beneficent cycle of death and rebirth" meriting worship under the name of Plouton, a giver of spiritual wealth.[147] In the dialogue Cratylus, Plato has Socrates explain the etymology of Plouton, saying that Pluto gives wealth (ploutos), and his name means "giver of wealth, which comes out of the earth beneath". Because the name Hades is taken to mean "the invisible", people fear what they cannot see; although they are in error about the nature of this deity's power, Socrates says, "the office and name of the God really correspond":

He is the perfect and accomplished Sophist, and the great benefactor of the inhabitants of the other world; and even to us who are upon earth he sends from below exceeding blessings. For he has much more than he wants down there; wherefore he is called Pluto (or the rich). Note also, that he will have nothing to do with men while they are in the body, but only when the soul is liberated from the desires and evils of the body. Now there is a great deal of philosophy and reflection in that; for in their liberated state he can bind them with the desire of virtue, but while they are flustered and maddened by the body, not even father Cronos himself would suffice to keep them with him in his own far-famed chains.[148]

Since "the union of body and soul is not better than the loosing,"[149] death is not an evil. Walter Burkert thus sees Pluto as a "god of dissolution."[150] Among the titles of Pluto was Isodaitēs, "divider into equal portions," a title that connects him to the fate goddesses the Moirai.[151] Isodaitēs was also a cult title for Dionysus and Helios.[152]

In ordering his ideal city, Plato proposed a calendar in which Pluto was honored as a benefactor in the twelfth month, implicitly ranking him as one of the twelve principal deities.

Skirophorion; the name may be connected to the rape of Persephone.[154]

Theogonies and cosmology

Euhemerism and Latinization

In the theogony of

Jupiter (Greek Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptune, Pluto, and Glauca
:

Then Saturn took Ops to wife.

Titan, the elder brother, demanded the kingship for himself. Vesta their mother, with their sisters Ceres [Demeter] and Ops, persuaded Saturn not to give way to his brother in the matter. Titan was less good-looking than Saturn; for that reason, and also because he could see his mother and sisters working to have it so, he conceded the kingship to Saturn, and came to terms with him: if Saturn had a male child born to him, it would not be reared. This was done to secure reversion of the kingship to Titan's children. They then killed the first son that was born to Saturn. Next came twin children, Jupiter and Juno. Juno was given to Saturn to see while Jupiter was secretly removed and given to Vesta to be brought up without Saturn's knowledge. In the same way without Saturn knowing, Ops bore Neptune and hid him away. In her third labor Ops bore another set of twins, Pluto and Glauce. (Pluto in Latin is Dis pater;[156]
some call him Orcus.) Saturn was shown his daughter Glauce but his son Pluto was hidden and removed. Glauce then died young. That is the pedigree, as written, of Jupiter and his brothers; that is how it has been passed down to us in holy scripture.

In this theogony, which Ennius introduced into Latin literature, Saturn, "Titan,"

Dante.[159]

In Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, dating mostly to the 2nd century AD, Rhea gives birth to Pluto as she passes by Dodona, "where the watery paths of the River Europus flowed, and the water ran into the sea, merged with the Peneius. This is also called the Stygian river."[160]

Orphic and philosophical systems

The Orphic theogonies are notoriously varied,

Phanes is born and the world is formed. The release of Phanes and his ascent to the heavenly top of the world-egg causes the matter left in the sphere to settle in relation to weight, creating the tripartite world of the traditional theogonies:[163]

Its lower part, the heaviest element, sinks downwards, and is called Pluto because of its gravity, weight, and great quantity (plêthos) of matter. After the separation of this heavy element in the middle part of the egg the waters flow together, which they call Poseidon. The purest and noblest element, the fire, is called Zeus, because its nature is glowing (ζέουσα, zeousa). It flies right up into the air, and draws up the spirit, now called Metis, that was left in the underlying moisture. And when this spirit has reached the summit of the ether, it is devoured by Zeus, who in his turn begets the intelligence (σύνεσις, sunesis), also called Pallas. And by this artistic intelligence the etherial artificer creates the whole world. This world is surrounded by the air, which extends from Zeus, the very hot ether, to the earth; this air is called Hera.[164]

This cosmogony interprets Hesiod allegorically, and so the heaviest element is identified not as the Earth, but as the netherworld of Pluto.

primordial element.) Supposed etymologies are used to make sense of the relation of physical process to divine name; Plouton is here connected to plêthos (abundance).[166]

In the Stoic system, Pluto represented the lower region of the air, where according to Seneca (1st century AD) the soul underwent a kind of purgatory before ascending to the ether.[167] Seneca's contemporary Cornutus made use of the traditional etymology of Pluto's name for Stoic theology. The Stoics believed that the form of a word contained the original truth of its meaning, which over time could become corrupted or obscured.[168] Plouton derived from ploutein, "to be wealthy," Cornutus said, because "all things are corruptible and therefore are 'ultimately consigned to him as his property.'"[169]

Within the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic traditions, Pluto was allegorized as the region where souls are purified, located between the Moon (as represented by Persephone) and the Sun.[170] Neoplatonists sometimes interpreted the Eleusinian Mysteries as a fabula of celestial phenomena:

Authors tell the fable that Ceres was Proserpina's mother, and that Proserpina while playing one day was kidnapped by Pluto. Her mother searched for her with lighted torches; and it was decreed by Jupiter that the mother should have her daughter for fifteen days in the month, but Pluto for the rest, the other fifteen. This is nothing but that the name Ceres is used to mean the earth, called Ceres on analogy with crees ('you may create'), for all things are created from her. By Proserpina is meant the moon, and her name is on analogy with prope serpens ('creeping near'), for she is moved nearer to the earth than the other planets. She is called earth's daughter, because

elements. By Pluto is meant the shadow that sometimes obstructs the moon.[171]

Plouton Helios

Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, ceiling mural (ca. 1597) by Caravaggio (see description under Fine art below)

A dedicatory inscription from Smyrna describes a 1st–2nd century sanctuary to "God Himself" as the most exalted of a group of six deities, including clothed statues of Plouton Helios and Koure Selene, "Pluto the Sun" and "Kore the Moon."[172] The status of Pluto and Kore as a divine couple is marked by what the text describes as a "linen embroidered bridal curtain."[173] The two are placed as bride and groom within an enclosed temple, separately from the other deities cultivated at the sanctuary.

Plouton Helios is mentioned in other literary sources in connection with Koure Selene and Helios Apollon; the sun on its nighttime course was sometimes envisioned as traveling through the underworld on its return to the east. Apuleius describes a rite in which the sun appears at midnight to the initiate at the gates of Proserpina; it has been suggested that this midnight sun could be Plouton Helios.[174]

The Smyrna inscription also records the presence of Helios Apollon at the sanctuary. As two forms of Helios, Apollo and Pluto pose a dichotomy:

Helios Apollon Plouton Helios
One Many
clarity invisibility
bright dark
memory oblivion[175]

It has been argued that the sanctuary was in the keeping of a Pythagorean sodality or "brotherhood". The relation of Orphic beliefs to the mystic strand of Pythagoreanism, or of these to Platonism and Neoplatonism, is complex and much debated.[176]

Plutonius

Serapis with moon and sun on oil lamp

In the

Hellenistic era, the title or epithet Plutonius is sometimes affixed to the names of other deities. In the Hermetic Corpus,[177] Jupiter Plutonius "rules over earth and sea, and it is he who nourishes mortal things that have soul and bear fruit."[178]

In

Mithraic religion at Alexandria, and that he "assures the eternity of the city," where the birth of Aion was celebrated at the sanctuary of Kore on 6 January.[180] In Latin, Plutonius can be an adjective that simply means "of or pertaining to Pluto."[181]

Neoplatonic demiurge

The Neoplatonist

of being and of not-being, a royal Pluto." This demiurgic figure identified with Pluto is also "'a purifier of souls' who presides over the magic of love and generation and who uses a fantastic counter-art to mock, but also ... to supplement, the divine icastic or truly imitative art of the sublime translunar Demiurge."[184]

In Western art and literature

See also: Planets in astrology § Pluto
Etruscan Charun presiding over an execution

Christianization

Christian writers of late antiquity sought to discredit the competing gods of Roman and Hellenistic religions, often adopting the euhemerizing approach in regarding them not as divinities, but as people glorified through stories and cultic practices and thus not true deities worthy of worship. The infernal gods, however, retained their potency, becoming identified with the Devil and treated as demonic forces by Christian apologists.[185]

One source of Christian revulsion toward the chthonic gods was the arena. Attendants in divine costume, among them a "Pluto" who escorted corpses out, were part of the ceremonies of the

Charon received their souls as his payment, to the delight of the underworld Jove (Iovis infernalis).[189]

Medieval mythography

Medieval mythographies, written in Latin, continue the conflation of Greek and Roman deities begun by the ancient Romans themselves. Perhaps because the name Pluto was used in both traditions, it appears widely in these Latin sources for the classical ruler of the underworld, who is also seen as the double, ally, or adjunct to the figure in

Devil, Satan, or Lucifer. The classical underworld deities became casually interchangeable with Satan as an embodiment of Hell.[190] For instance, in the 9th century, Abbo Cernuus, the only witness whose account of the Siege of Paris survives, called the invading Vikings the "spawn of Pluto."[191]

In the Little Book on Images of the Gods, Pluto is described as

an intimidating personage sitting on a throne of sulphur, holding the scepter of his realm in his right hand, and with his left strangling a soul. Under his feet three-headed Cerberus held a position, and beside him he had three

Harpies. From his golden throne of sulphur flowed four rivers, which were called, as is known, Lethe, Cocytus, Phlegethon and Acheron, tributaries of the Stygian swamp.[192]

This work derives from that of the

Third Vatican Mythographer, possibly one Albricus or Alberic, who presents often extensive allegories and devotes his longest chapter, including an excursus on the nature of the soul, to Pluto.[193]

Medieval and Renaissance literature

In

Furies.[198] Pluto is treated likewise as a purely Satanic figure by the 16th-century Italian poet Tasso throughout his epic Jerusalem Delivered,[199] in which "great Dis, great Pluto" is invoked in the company of "all ye devils that lie in deepest hell."[200]

Influenced by Ovid and Claudian,

romance Sir Orfeo (ca. 1300), Pluto and Proserpina rule over a fantastical world that melds classical myth and fairyland.[205] Chaucer has the couple engage in a comic battle of the sexes that undermines the Christian imagery in the tale, which is Chaucer's most sexually explicit.[206] The Scottish poet William Dunbar ca. 1503 also described Pluto as a folkloric supernatural being, "the elrich incubus / in cloke of grene" ("the eldritch incubus in cloak of green"), who appears among the courtiers of Cupid.[207]

The name Pluto for the classical ruler of the underworld was further established in English literature by Arthur Golding, whose translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1565) was of great influence on William Shakespeare,[208] Christopher Marlowe,[209] and Edmund Spenser.[210][211] Golding translates Ovid's Dis as Pluto,[212] a practice that prevails among English translators, despite John Milton's use of the Latin Dis in Paradise Lost.[213] The Christian perception of the classical underworld as Hell influenced Golding's translation practices; for instance, Ovid's tenebrosa sede tyrannus / exierat ("the tyrant [Dis] had gone out of his shadowy realm") becomes "the prince of fiends forsook his darksome hole".[214]

Pluto's court as a literary setting could bring together a motley assortment of characters. In

dream allegory The Assembly of Gods, the deities and personifications are "apparelled as medieval nobility"[216] basking in the "magnyfycence" of their "lord Pluto," who is clad in a "smoky net" and reeking of sulphur.[217]

Throughout the

Midsummer Eve festival in London.[219] During the 15th century, no mythological theme was brought to the stage more often than Orpheus's descent, with the court of Pluto inspiring fantastical stagecraft.[220] Leonardo da Vinci designed a set with a rotating mountain that opened up to reveal Pluto emerging from the underworld; the drawing survives and was the basis for a modern recreation.[221]

Opera and ballet

The tragic descent of the hero-musician Orpheus to the underworld to retrieve his bride, and his performance at the court of Pluto and Proserpina, offered compelling material for librettists and composers of opera (see List of Orphean operas) and ballet. Pluto also appears in works based on other classical myths of the underworld. As a singing role, Pluto is almost always written for a bass voice, with the low vocal range representing the depths and weight of the underworld, as in Monteverdi and Rinuccini's L'Orfeo (1607) and Il ballo delle ingrate (1608). In their ballo, a form of ballet with vocal numbers, Cupid invokes Pluto from the underworld to lay claim to "ungrateful" women who were immune to love. Pluto's part is considered particularly virtuosic,[222] and a reviewer at the première described the character, who appeared as if from a blazing Inferno, as "formidable and awesome in sight, with garments as given him by poets, but burdened with gold and jewels."[223]

Jean Raoux's Orpheus and Eurydice (1718–20), with Pluto and Proserpina releasing the couple

The role of Pluto is written for a bass in Peri's Euridice (1600);[224] Caccini's Euridice (1602); Rossi's Orfeo (1647); Cesti's Il pomo d'oro (1668);[225] Sartoris's Orfeo (1672); Lully's Alceste, a tragédie en musique (1674);[226] Charpentier's chamber opera La descente d'Orphée aux enfers (1686);[227] Telemann's Orpheus (1726); and Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733).[228] Pluto was a baritone in Lully's Proserpine (1680), which includes a duo dramatizing the conflict between the royal underworld couple that is notable for its early use of musical characterization.[229] Perhaps the most famous of the Orpheus operas is Offenbach's satiric Orpheus in the Underworld (1858),[230] in which a tenor sings the role of Pluton, disguised in the giddily convoluted plotting as Aristée (Aristaeus), a farmer.

Scenes set in Pluto's realm were

régale.[231]

Pluto has also been featured as a role in ballet. In Lully's "Ballet of Seven Planets'" interlude from Cavalli's opera Ercole amante ("Hercules in Love"), Louis XIV himself danced as Pluto and other characters; it was a spectacular flop.[232] Pluto appeared in Noverre's lost La descente d'Orphée aux Enfers (1760s). Gaétan Vestris danced the role of the god in Florian Deller's Orefeo ed Euridice (1763).[233] The Persephone choreographed by Robert Joffrey (1952) was based on André Gide's line "king of winters, the infernal Pluto."[234]

Fine art

Albrecht Dürer, Abduction of Proserpine on a Unicorn (1516)
Rembrandt's Abduction of Proserpina (ca. 1631)

The abduction of Proserpina by Pluto was the scene from the myth most often depicted by

Rubens is similar. Rembrandt incorporates Claudian's more passionate characterizations.[236]
The performance of Orpheus in the court of Pluto and Proserpina was also a popular subject.

Major artists who produced works depicting Pluto include:

Modern literature

After the Renaissance, literary interest in the abduction myth waned until the revival of classical myth among the

D.H. Lawrence, where the character Ciccio[244] acts as Pluto to Alvina's Persephone, "the deathly-lost bride ... paradoxically obliterated and vitalised at the same time by contact with Pluto/Dis" in "a prelude to the grand design of rebirth." The darkness of Pluto is both a source of regeneration, and of "merciless annihilation."[245] Lawrence takes up the theme elsewhere in his work; in The First Lady Chatterley (1926, an early version of Lady Chatterley's Lover), Connie Chatterley sees herself as a Persephone and declares "she'd rather be married to Pluto than Plato," casting her earthy gamekeeper lover as the former and her philosophy-spouting husband as the latter.[246]

In

Hazel Levesque is the daughter of Pluto, god of riches. She is one of seven characters with a parent from classical mythology.[247]

Scientific terms

Scientific terms derived from the name of Pluto include:

Notes

  1. ^ William Hansen, Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 182.
  2. ^ Hansen, Classical Mythology,, p. 180.
  3. ^ Hansen, Classical Mythology, pp. 180–181.
  4. ^ Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States (Clarendon Press, 1907), vol. 3, p. 281.
  5. ^ Odyssey 5.125–128: And so it was when Demeter of the lovely hair, yielding / to her desire, lay down with Iasion and loved him / in a thrice-turned field (translation of Richmond Lattimore).
  6. ^ Hesiod, Theogony 969–74; Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, Shield (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, 2004), p. 56.
  7. ^ Athanassakis, Hesiod, p. 56.
  8. ^ Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (University of California Press, 1979), pp. 37, 219; Hendrik Wagenvoort, "The Origin of the Ludi Saeculares," in Studies in Roman Literature, Culture and Religion (Brill, 1956), p. 198.
  9. ^ Hesiod, Works and Days 465–9.
  10. ^ Hansen, Classical Mythology, pp. 162 and 182, citing Homer, Iliad 9.158–159. Euphemism is a characteristic way of speaking of divine figures associated with the dead and the underworld; Joseph William Hewitt, "The Propitiation of Zeus," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 19 (1908), p. 66, considers euphemism a form of propitiation.
  11. ^ Plato, Cratylus 403a; Glenn R. Morrow, Plato's Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws (Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 452–453.
  12. ^ Fernando Navarro Antolin, Lygdamus: Corpus Tibullianum III.1–6, Lygdami Elegiarum Liber (Brill, 1996), pp. 145–146.
  13. ^ Charlotte R. Long, The Twelve Gods of Greece and Rome (Brill, 1987), p. 179; Phyllis Fray Bober, "Cernunnos: Origin and Transformation of a Celtic Divinity," American Journal of Archaeology 55 (1951), p. 28, examples in Greek and Roman art in note 98; Hewitt, "The Propitiation of Zeus," p. 65.
  14. ^ Tsagalis, Inscribing Sorrow, pp. 101–102; Morrow, Plato's Cretan City, pp. 452–453; John J. Hermann, Jr., "Demeter-Isis or the Egyptian Demeter? A Graeco-Roman Sculpture from an Egyptian Workshop in Boston" in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 114 (1999), p. 88.
  15. accusative
    form of the noun (Plutona instead of Latin Plutonem) at Carmen 2.14.7, as noted by John Conington, P. Vergili Maronis Opera (London, 1883), vol. 3, p. 36.
  16. ^ H.D. Jocelyn, The Tragedies of Ennius (Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 331, with reference to Kurt Latte, Römische Religionsgeschichte (C.H. Beck, 1967, 1992), p. 246ff.
  17. ^ Cicero, De natura deorum 2.66, translation of John MacDonald Ross (Penguin Books, 1972): Terrena autem vis omnis atque natura Diti patri dedicata est, qui dives, ut apud Graecos Πλούτων quia et recidunt omnia in terras et oriuntur e terris.
  18. Natale Conti describes Pluto's imperium as "the Spains
    and all the places bordering the setting sun" (Mythologiae 2.9, edition of 1651, p. 173; cf. Strabo 3.12).
  19. ^ Lucian, On Mourning (see Greek text); Peter Bolt, Jesus' Defeat of Death: Persuading Mark's Early Readers (Cambridge University Press, 2003) discusses this passage (pp. 126–127) and Greco-Roman concepts of the underworld as a context for Christian eschatology passim.
  20. ^ Noel Robertson, Religion and Reconciliation in Greek Cities: The Sacred Laws of Selinus and Cyrene (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 102, citing passages from the Orphic Hymns, throughout which Plouton is the ruler of the underworld, and Hades is the name of the place itself.
  21. Men
    ," Corpus monumentorum religionis dei Menis: Interpretation and Testimonia (Brill, 1976), vol. 3, p. 77, citing the entry on Katachthonioi in Roscher, Lexikon II, i, col. 998ff.
  22. ^ Zeus Chthonius and Pluto are seen as having "the same significance" in the Orphic Hymns and in the Dionysiaca of Nonnus (6.156ff.), by Hewitt, "The Propitiation of Zeus," p. 74, note 7. Overlapping functions are also suggested when Hesiod advises farmers to pray to "Zeus Chthonius and to holy Demeter that they may cause the holy corn of Demeter to teem in full perfection." This form of Zeus receives the black victims typically offered to underworld deities.
  23. ^ Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis 2.161.
  24. John Lydus
    , De mensibus 4.25.
  25. Heracleides Ponticus who holds the oracle in Canopus to be an oracle of Pluto" (Loeb Classical Library translation of 1936, LacusCurtius edition). Also spelled Sarapis. See Jaime Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation, and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis, and Mithras, translated by Richard Gordon (Brill, 2008), pp. 53 online
    and 58; Hermann, "Demeter-Isis or the Egyptian Demeter?", p. 84.
  26. ^ Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 1.10.34, attributing this view to the semi-legendary Phoenician author Sanchuniathon via Philo of Byblos. In addition to asserting that Muth was equivalent to both Thanatos (Death personified) and Pluto, Philo said he was the son of Cronus and Rhea. See entry on "Mot," Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, edited by Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking and Pieter Willem van der Horst (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999, 2nd ed.), p. 598, and Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide, edited by Sarah Iles Johnston (Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 479. Philo's cosmogony as summarized by Eusebius bears some similarities to that of Hesiod and the Orphics; see Sanchuniathon's history of the gods and "Theogonies and cosmology" below. Philo said that these were reinterpretations of "Phoenician" beliefs by the Greeks.
  27. ^ Hansen, Classical Mythology, p. 182.
  28. ^ Diane Rayor, The Homeric Hymns (University of California Press, 2004), pp. 107–109.
  29. ^ Christos Tsagalis, Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-century Attic Funerary Epigrams (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 101–102.
  30. ^ Sources used to prepare this article uniformly refer to the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus as the Library of Apollodorus. Recent scholarship prefers to view the authorship of this work as anonymous; see Bibliotheca (Pseudo-Apollodorus).
  31. Hyginus, Fabulae 146. The late-antique mythographer Fulgentius
    also names the ruler of the underworld as Pluto, a practice continued by medieval mythographers.
  32. ^ Andrew D. Radford, The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850–1930 (Editions Rodopi, 2007), p. 24. For an extensive comparison of Ovid's two treatments of the myth, with reference to versions such as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see Stephen Hinds, The Metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse (Cambridge University Press, 1987), limited preview online.
  33. Vergil
    also names the ruler of the underworld more often as Dis than Pluto.
  34. ^ See also, for instance, J.J.L. Smolenaars, Statius. Thebaid VII: A Commentary (Brill, 1994), passim, or John G. Fitch, Seneca's 'Hercules Furens' (Cornell University Press, 1987), passim, where the ruler of the underworld is referred to as "Pluto" in the English commentary, but as "Dis" or with other epithets in the Latin text.
  35. ^ Radford, The Lost Girls, p. 22 et passim.
  36. Natale Conti observes (Mythologiae 2.9, edition of 1651, p. 174) that before the abduction, Pluto was the only childless bachelor among the gods (solus omnium deorum coelibem et filiis carentem vitam traduceret). The nymph Minthē was the concubine (pallakis, Strabo
    8.3.14) of the ruler of the underworld under the name of Hades, but no ancient source records Pluto in this role; Conti, however, describes Minthē (Menthe) as the pellex of Pluto.
  37. ^ Orphic fragments 197 and 360 (edition of Kern) and Orphic Hymn 70, as cited by Helene P. Foley, Hymn to Demeter (Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 110, note 97.
  38. ^ Orphic Hymn 71.
  39. Nox) is their mother. Proclus, in his commentary on the Cratylus of Plato, provides passages from the Orphic Rhapsodies that give two different genealogies of the Eumenides, one making them the offspring of Persephone and Pluto (or Hades) and the other reporting a prophecy that they were to be born to Persephone and Apollo
    (Robertson, Religion and Reconciliation, p. 101).
  40. ^ When she had spoken these words, fearsome, she sought the earth: and summoned Allecto, the grief-bringer, from the house of the Fatal Furies, from the infernal shadows: in whose mind are sad wars, angers and deceits, and guilty crimes. A monster, hated by her own father Pluto, hateful to her Tartarean sisters: she assumes so many forms, her features are so savage, she sports so many black vipers. Juno roused her with these words, saying: 'Grant me a favour of my own, virgin daughter of Night, this service, so that my honour and glory are not weakened, and give way, and the people of Aeneas cannot woo Latinus with intermarriage, or fill the bounds of Italy(Aeneid 7.323 – Verg. A. 7.334 ). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:phi,0690,003:7:337
  41. ^ Men speak of twin plagues, named the Dread Ones, whom Night bore untimely, in one birth with Tartarean Megaera, wreathing them equally in snaky coils, and adding wings swift as the wind.)." ( Aeneid 12. 845 – 12. 848 ff )
  42. ^ Foley, Hymn to Demeter, p. 110.
  43. ^ Justin Martyr, Apology 2.5; see discussion of the context by David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 193–194.
  44. ^ Hesychius, lexicon entry on Ἰσοδαίτης (Isodaitês), 778 in the 1867 edition of Schmidt.
  45. Genealogia deorum gentilium 8.6; see also the Italian translation of 1644, p. 130. Boccaccio cites Servius as his source, adding that Theodontius names the daughter of Pluto as Reverentia and says she was married to Honos ("Honor"). Makaria, "Blessedness," was a daughter of Hades, according to the Suda
    .
  46. ^ "Of griesly Pluto she the daughter was": Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.iv.11.1, as noted by G.W. Kitchin, Book I of The Faery Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, 9th ed.), p. 180. In the 15th-century allegory The Assembly of Gods (lines 601–602), the figure of Vice personified is the bastard son of Pluto.
  47. ^ A.C. Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia (University of Toronto Press, 1990, 1997), p. 351, noting that Hecate is called a "phosphor", bringer of light, by Euripides, Helen 569. The title Phosphoros is a common one for Hecate; Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999), p. 206.
  48. ^ Douglas Brooks-Davies, entry on "Mysteries" in The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 486–487.
  49. ^ Claude Calame, "The Authority of Orpheus, Poet and Bard: Between Tradition and Written Practice," in Allusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis (De Gruyter, 2010), p. 16.
  50. ^ As accurately reflected by the translation of Michael Simpson, Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus (University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 13–15. Apollodorus consistently names the ruler of the underworld Plouton throughout, including the myths of his birth, tripartite division of sovereignty over the world, and the abduction.
  51. ^ Geoffrey Miles, Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology (Routledge, 1999), p. 54ff.
  52. ^ Horace, Carmen 2.14.6–7, inlacrimabilem Plutona (Greek accusative instead of Latin Plutonem).
  53. ^ A.S.P. Woodhouse et al., A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton (Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 327.
  54. ^ In the dialogue Amatorius (Ἐρωτικός) 20, Plutarch says that the only god Hades listens to is Eros; the 17th-century classicist Daniel Clasen, translating the Moralia into Latin, gives the god's name as Pluto, and in his mythographical work Theologia gentilis 2.4.6 includes this quality in his chapter on Pluto; see Thesaurus graecarum antiquitatum (Leiden, 1699), vol. 7, 104.
  55. ^ Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead 23 (English translation from the 1820 edition of William Tooke; Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods (Northwestern University Press, 1987), pp. 95–97. Lucian's dialogue has sometimes been referenced as a model for the premature loss of love between an active man carried suddenly into death and his young wife; see for instance Alfred Woltmann, Holbein and His Times (London, 1872), p. 280, and A.P. Russell, In a Club Corner: The Monologue of a Man Who Might Have Been Sociable (Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), pp. 78–79. The dialogue has also been seen as a burlesque of domesticity; Betrand A. Goldgar, Henry Fielding: Miscellanies (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), vol. 2, p. xxxviii.
  56. phiale by the Douris painter, dating to ca. 490 BC, according to Jan N. Bremmer, "W. Brede Kristensen and the Religions of Greece and Rome," in Man, Meaning, and Mystery: Hundred Years of History of Religions in Norway. The Heritage of W. Brede Kristensen (Brill, 2000), pp. 125–126. A point of varying emphasis is whether the idea of Plouton as a god of wealth was a later development, or an inherent part of his nature, owing to the underground storage of grain in the pithoi
    that were also used for burial. For a summary of these issues, see Cora Angier Sowa, Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns (Bolchazy-Carducci, 1984, 2005), p. 356, note 105.
  57. ^ Morrow, Plato's Cretan City, p. 452; Long, The Twelve Gods, p. 154.
  58. ^ a b Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, p. 281.
  59. ^ Long, The Twelve Gods, p. 179. See lectisternium for the "strewing of couches" in ancient Rome. Two inscriptions from Attica record the names of individuals who participated in the ritual at different times: IG II21933 and 1934, as cited by Robert Develin, Athenian Officials, 684–321 B.C. (Cambridge University Press, 1989, 2003), p. 417.
  60. ^ Nicholas F. Jones, The Associations of Classical Athens: The Response to Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 125, citing IG II21363, dating ca. 330–270; Karl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 110–111.
  61. ^ Tsagalis, Inscribing Sorrow, pp. 101–102.
  62. ^ Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts and the Afterlife (Routledge, 2007), first page (not numbered).
  63. Pharsalos, Thessaly, 350–300 BC). Hades is also discernible on the "carelessly inscribed" Tablet 38 from a Hellenistic-era grave in Hagios Athanasios, near Thessalonike
    .
  64. ^ Kevin Clinton, Myth and Cult: The Iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Stockholm, 1992), p. 111, observing that this presentation in art contrasts with the earliest literary sources.
  65. ^ Giovanni Casadio and Patricia A. Johnston, "Introduction", Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia (University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 21.
  66. ^ Tsagalis, Inscribing Sorrow, p. 101.
  67. Rethymnon 1, from the early Roman Empire, 25–40 AD), from Crete
    , in the numbering of Graf and Johnston.
  68. ^ Sometimes read as "father," as in the translation given by Alberto Bernabé and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets (Brill, 2008), p. 84.
  69. ^ Παρὰ Φερσεφόνει Πλούτωνί τε: Tsagalis, Inscribing Sorrow, pp. 100–101. Tsagalis discusses this inscription in light of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Thesmophoria.
  70. ^ The entry in Hesychius reads: Εὐβουλεύς (sch. Nic. Al. 14) · ὁ Πλούτων. παρὰ δὲ τοῖς πολλοῖς ὁ Ζεὺς ἐν Κυρήνη (Eubouleus: ho Ploutôn. para de toîs polloîs ho Zeus en Kyrene), 643 (Schmidt).
  71. ^ Kevin Clinton, "The Mysteries of Demeter and Kore," in A Companion to Greek Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 347–353.
  72. ^ Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, vol. 3, p. 145.
  73. ^ Euboulos may be a cult title here and not the name of the god Eubuleus; elsewhere it is an epithet of the sea god Nereus, perfect in his knowledge of truth and justice, and in his own Orphic hymn the guardian of the "roots" of the sea. See Pindar, Pythian Ode 3.93; Hesiod, Theogony 233–236; Orphic Hymn 23; Athanassakis, Hesiod, p. 52; Pierre Bonnechere, "Trophonius of Lebadea: Mystery Aspects of an Oracular Cult in Boeotia," in Greek Mysteries: The Archaeology and Ritual of Ancient Greek Secret Cults (Routledge, 2003, 2005), p. 188.
  74. ^ The translations of the Orphic Hymn to Pluto are from Apostolos N. Athanassakis, The Orphic Hymns (Scholars Press, 1977).
  75. ^ Act of Thomas 50, as cited and discussed by Susan E. Myers, Spirit Epicleses in the Acts of Thomas (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), p. 174.
  76. ^ Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1992), passim; John G. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 12 (examples invoking Pluto pp. 99, 135, 143–144, 207–209) and passim on Hades.
  77. ^ Bolt, Jesus' Defeat of Death, p. 152; John Scheid, "Sacrifices for Gods and Ancestors", in A Companion to Roman Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 264.
  78. ^ Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 212, with English translation of the curse.
  79. ^ Gager, Curse Tablets, p. 131, with translations of both tablets, and note 35.
  80. ^ Derek Collins, Magic in the Ancient Greek World (Blackwell, 2008), p. 73.
  81. ^ Esther Eidinow, "Why the Athenians Began to Curse," in Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution: Art, Literature, Philosophy and Politics 430–380 BC (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 50; Ogden, Magic, Withcraft, and Ghosts, p. 212.
  82. ^ Bernard Dietrich, "The Religious Prehistory of Demeter's Eleusinian Mysteries," in La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell' Impero Romano (Brill, 1982), p. 454.
  83. ^ Robertson, Religion and Reconciliation, p. 163 online, citing IG 13356.155 and IG 221672.140; see also The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore: Topography and Architecture (American School of Classical Studies, 1997), p. 76, note 31.
  84. ^ Strabo 14.1.44; "Summaries of Periodicals," American Journal of Archaeology 7 (1891), p. 209; Hewitt, "The Propitiation of Zeus," p. 93.
  85. ^ Frederick E. Brenk, "Jerusalem-Hierapolis. The Revolt under Antiochos IV Epiphanes in the Light of Evidence for Hierapolis of Phrygia, Babylon, and Other Cities," in Relighting the Souls: Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion, and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background (Franz Steiner, 1998), pp. 382–384, citing Photius, Life of Isidoros 131 on the dream.
  86. ^ Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reconstructing Change: Ideology and the Eleusinian Mysteries," in Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient World (Routledge, 1997), p. 137; Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 2006, 2nd ed.), p. 505.
  87. ^ Strabo C244–6, as cited by Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 190 –191.
  88. Triptolemos, with Demeter on the left and Persephone as Pherephata ([Φε]ρ[ε]φάτα) on the right. Theos wears a himation
    over a spangled tunic with decorated hem (Clinton, p. 106).
  89. ^ Catherine M. Keesling, "Endoios's Painting from the Themistoklean Wall: A Reconstruction," Hesperia 68.4 (1999), p. 544, note 160.
  90. ^ Clare Robertson et al., Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections (Ashmolean Museum, 1996), p. 35.
  91. ^ Pausanias 5.20.
  92. ^ Natale Conti, Mythologiae 2.9, edition of 1651, pp. 173–174.
  93. ^ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1051 ("Rites they to none betray, / Ere on his lips is laid / Secrecy's golden key / By their own acolytes, / Priestly Eumolpidae," in the 1912 translation of F. Storr), as cited by Jane Ellen Harrison, introduction to Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, a translation of Pausanias by Margaret de G. Verrall (London, 1890), pp. liv–lv. It is unclear whether a literal key is meant, or a golden lamella (Totenpass).
  94. ^ Robert Turcan, Les religions de l'Asie dans la vallée du Rhône (Brill, 1972), p. 26.
  95. ^ Turcan, Les religions de l'Asie, pp. 23–26. Both Persephone (as Persephassa and "Kore out of Tartaros") and Anubis are key-holders throughout the Greek Magical Papyri. Jesus Christ, as the conqueror of death and Hades, holds keys in the Book of Revelation 1:18; see Walter A. Elwell and Philip W. Comfort, Tyndale Bible Dictionary (Tyndale, 2001), p. 561.
  96. ^ For extensive notes on Aiakos, see Radcliffe Guest Edmonds, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 148, note 116. As a possessor of keys, he appears in Apollodorus 3.12.6, PGM IV.1264, and inscriptions.
  97. De Materia Medica E 2.101; Pliny, Natural History 21.107–115; Pseudo-Apuleius
    , Herbarius 79, as cited by Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (Routledge, 2003), p. 105, characterizing Pliny's entry on the plant as "confused." The correspondence of ancient plant names to modern species is always uncertain. Both the Greek xiphion and the Latin word gladiolus ("little sword") come from a word meaning "sword."
  98. ^ Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle (Paris, 1819), pp. 315–316; Julius Billerbeck, Flora classica (Leipzig, 1824), p. 13; "L'origine dei maccheroni," Archivo per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari 17 (1898), vol. 36, p. 428.
  99. Paulus Aegineta
    (London, 1847), p. 270; Dalby, Food in the Ancient World, p. 105; Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle, p. 315.
  100. ^ John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 42; Nouveau dictionnaire d'histoire naturelle, p. 315.
  101. ^ P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Studies in Greek Colour Terminology: ΓΛΑΥΚΟΣ (Brill, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 40, 42, citing Cornutus, Theologiae Graecae Compendium 9, 20, 35. The word γλαυκότης (glaukotēs), however, is a textual crux in the passage pertaining to Pluto.
  102. ^ Lucifuga inumbratione pallescens and Tartareae noctis obscuritate furvescens, Martianus Capella, De nuptiis 1.79–80; Danuta Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Book 1 (University of California Press, 1986), p. 171.
  103. Fasti
    4.446, as cited John G. Fitch, Seneca's Hercules furens: A Critical Text with Introduction and Commentary (Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 166, note to Seneca's identical description of the horses of the Sun (line 132). Ovid describes the horses as black (ater) in his version of the abduction myth in the Metamorphoses, 5.310. On the color caeruleus, see also Hendrik Wagenvoort, "Caerimonia," in Studies, pp. 98–101.
  104. ^ Natale Conti, Mythologiae 2.9. Conti's sources on this point are unclear, and he thoroughly conflates traditions pertaining to the various classical rulers of the underworld.
  105. ^ Homeric Hymn to Demeter, lines 7–9, as cited by Radford, Lost Girls, p. 145; Clayton Zimmerman, The Pastoral Narcissus: A Study of the First Idyll of Theocritus (Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 2.
  106. scholion, on Demeter and Persephone (the two "Great Goddesses"); Euphorion, fragment 94, on the Eumenides; Zimmerman, The Pastoral Narcissus, p. 2; Jan Coenradd Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles, Commentaries: The Oedipus Colonus (Brill, 1984), vol. 7, p. 106, noting that garlands of flowers were expressly forbidden at the Thesmophoria
    ; James C. Hogan, A Commentary on the Plays of Sophocles (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 99.
  107. ^ "Death and Greek Myths," in Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, edited by Yves Bonnefoy (University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1992), p. 110.
  108. ^ Zimmerman, The Pastoral Narcissus, p. 2; Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 92. The phallus as a magic charm was the remedy for invidia or the evil eye, a self-induced form of which was the ruin of the mythological figure Narcissus.
  109. ^ On the difficulty of identifying precisely which flower the ancients meant by "narcissus," see R.C. Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments (Cambridge University Press, 1900, 3rd edition), p. 115.
  110. ^ Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 1.77, as noted by Jebb, Sophocles, p. 115.
  111. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.505; Zimmerman, The Pastoral Narcissus, p. 48. The Styx here is a pool.
  112. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
    4.24; Adams, The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta, pp. 22–23; Richard Hunter, Theocritus: A Selection (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 277, noting that "the association of lush vegetation ... with female 'otherness' and sexuality has a long history."
  113. ^ Riddle, Contraception and Abortion, pp. 31, 82, 180 (note 5).
  114. ^ Samuel Beckett, "Jusque dans la caverne ciel et sol", the last of twelve poems in the cycle Poèmes 38–39 (1946); C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press, 2004), pp. 293, 443, 599.
  115. ^ Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, p. 25.
  116. Servius, note to Aeneid
    3.680.
  117. ^ Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 17.7.34.
  118. ^ Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.106ff.; Servius, note to Vergil's Georgics 1.20.
  119. ^ Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, pp. 25–28.
  120. ^ The nymph Minthē, a rival for the attentions of Hades (not named as Pluto), was transformed by Persephone into the mint plant, a major ingredient in the ritual drink of the mysteries (Strabo 8.3.14).
  121. Vergil's Eclogue
    7.61. Persephone is not mentioned.
  122. ^ Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, pp. 93 and 124–125, citing Harpocration.
  123. Rhodians; the heroine Polyxo
    awarded white poplar wreaths to child athletes at the games she presented in honor of her husband; Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Blackwell, 1986, 1996), p. 385.
  124. ^ Riddle, Contraception and Abortion, p. 33.
  125. ^ Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1925), pp. 420–422; Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, pp. 25–26; W.K.C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Princeton University Press, 1952, 1993), p. 182.
  126. J.G. Frazer
    .
  127. ^ Hansen, Classical Mythology, p. 182. Apparent references to the "helmet of Pluto" in other authors, such as Irenaeus (Against Heresies), are misleading; "Pluto" is substituted by the English translator for "Hades."
  128. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
    Book 5, Chapter 8.
  129. ^ Erasmus, Adagia 2.10.74 (Orci galea).
  130. ^ Francis Bacon, Essays Civil and Moral 21, "Of Delays."
  131. ^ A.L. Millin, "Mythologie," in Magasin Encyclopédique (Paris, 1808), p. 283; G.T. Villenave, Les métamorphoses d'Ovide (Paris, 1806), p. 307; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion (Oxford University Press, 1924), vol. 2, p. 798 ff.; John G. Fitch, Seneca's Hercules Furens: A Critical Text With Introduction and Commentary (Cornell University Press, 1987), p.
  132. ^ Cook, Zeus, vol. 2, p. 801.
  133. genitive case), Hercules Furens line 47, in the prologue spoken by Juno
    .
  134. ^ Diro Iovi, line 608 of Hercules Furens; compare Vergil, Aeneid 4.638, Iove Stygio, the "Jove of the Styx". Fitch, Seneca's Hercules Furens, p. 156.
  135. Phoenician Women
    , line 188, as cited by Cook, Zeus, vol. 2, p. 806, note 6.
  136. ^ Cook, Zeus, vol. 2, p. 803.
  137. ^ Friedrich Solmsen, "The Powers of Darkness in Prudentius' Contra Symmachum: A Study of His Poetic Imagination," Vigiliae Christianae 19.4 (1965), pp. 238, 240–248 et passim.
  138. ^ Richard Stemp, The Secret Language of the Renaissance: Decoding the Hidden Symbolism of Italian Art (Duncan Baird, 2006), p. 114; Clare Robertson et al., Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections (Ashmolean Museum, 1996), p. 78.
  139. ^ Robertson et al., Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections, pp. 78–79.
  140. ^ a b Creighton Gilbert, Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals (Penn State University Press, 1995), pp. 124–125.
  141. ^ Identified as Pluto by Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, p. 275.
  142. ^ Identified as Hades by Hansen, Classical Mythology, p. 181.
  143. ^ A.M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1996), p. 229.
  144. ^ As summarized by Benjamin Bickley Rogers, The Comedies of Aristophanes (London, 1902), pp. xvii and 214 (note to line 1414).
  145. ^ Bowie, Aristophanes, pp. 231–233, 269–271.
  146. ^ Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, Instructions for the Netherworld, pp. 127–128.
  147. ^ Morrow, Plato's Cretan City, pp. 452–453.
  148. ^ Translation by Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (London, 1873), vol. 1.
  149. ^ Plato, Laws 828d, translation from Long, The Twelve Gods, p. 69.
  150. ^ Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Harvard University Press, 1985, originally published 1977 in German), pp. 231, 336. See also Homo Necans (University of California Press, 1983, originally published 1972 in German), p. 143.
  151. ^ Hesychius, entry on Ἰσοδαίτης, 778 in the 1867 edition of Schmidt, as translated and discussed by Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 51. Hesychius notes that Isodaites may alternatively refer to a son of Pluto as well as Pluto himself.
  152. ^ H.S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion: Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual (Brill, 1993, 1994), p. 119, especially note 93.
  153. ^ Plato, Laws 828 B-D; Morrow, Plato's Cretan City p. 452; Long, The Twelve Gods, p. 179.
  154. ^ Morrow, Plato's Cretan City, p. 453; Long, The Twelve Gods, p. 179.
  155. ^ Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1.14; Brian P. Copenhaver, Polydore Vergil: On Discovery (Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 564.
  156. ^ This parenthetical remark is part of the original text. Several manuscripts of Lactantius read Diespiter, which is usually a title of Jupiter, but Dis pater is regarded as the more likely reading. See Katherine Nell MacFarlane, "Isidore of Seville on the Pagan Gods (Origines VIII. 11)," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 70 (1980), p. 20, citing Migne, Patrologia Latina vol. VI, col. 190. The relation of the title Dis Pater to Diespiter in Latin is debated.
  157. ^ "Titan" usually refers to a class or race of deities, but sometimes means Helios or other divine personifications of the Sun.
  158. Latona
    , is better known. A tradition holds that Upis is the father and Glauca the mother of the third [Diana]" (Dianae item plures: prima Iovis et Proserpinae, quae pinnatum Cupidinem genuisse dicitur; secunda notior, quam Iove tertio et Latona natam accepimus; tertiae pater Upis traditur, Glauce mater: eam saepe Graeci Upim paterno nomine appellant); Copenhaver, Polydore Vergil: On Discovery, p. 564.
  159. ^ Boccaccio's Expositions on Dante's Comedy, translated by Michael Papio (University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 332–333, 355.
  160. ^ Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and Its Social Setting (Brill, 2003), p. 157.
  161. ^ Gábor Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretations (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 151, has noted that "one cannot establish a linear descent between the different versions"; though efforts to do so have been made, "we cannot find a single mytheme which would occur invariably in all the accounts and could thus create the core of all Orphic theogonies."
  162. ^ J. van Amersfoort, "Traces of an Alexandrian Orphic Theogony in the Pseudo-Clementines," in Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions, Presented to Gilles Quispel on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday (Brill, 1981), p. 13.
  163. ^ Van Amersfoort, "Traces of an Alexandrian Orphic Theogony," pp. 16–17.
  164. ^ Van Amersfoort, "Traces of an Alexandrian Orphic Theogony," pp. 17–18. Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus, p. 151, summarizes this version as follows: "The story starts with Chaos; then comes the egg; the bottom part of the egg submerges and becomes Pluton, and Kronos – not a separate god but identified with Chronos – swallows this heavy matter. The middle part, covering the first sediment, becomes Poseidon. The upper part of the egg, being purer and lighter, fiery in nature, goes upward and is called Zeus, and so forth."
  165. ^ Van Amersfoort, "Traces of an Alexandrian Orphic Theogony," p. 23; Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus, p. 150.
  166. ^ Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 746.
  167. ^ Cornutus 5; Varro, De lingua latina 5.66 (on Dis); Seneca, Consolatio ad Marciam 25; all as cited by Joseph B. Mayor, De natura deorum libri tres (Cambridge University Press, 1883), vol. 2, p. 175, note to 2.26.66.
  168. ^ R.M. van den Berg, Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming (Brill, 2008), pp. 34–35.
  169. ^ David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (University of California Press, 1992), p. 33, citing Epidrome 5.5.7–9.
  170. ^ Plutarch, The Face of the Moon, LacusCurtius edition of the Loeb Classical Library translation online, as discussed by Leonard L. Thompson, "ISmyrna 753: Gods and the One God," in Reading Religions in the Ancient World: Essays Presented to Robert McQueen Grant on His 90th Birthday (Brill, 2007), p. 113, with reference also to Iamblichus. See also Van den Berg, Proclus' Commentary, p. 49, with reference to Plutarch, On the E at Delphi.
  171. ^ This interpretation is attributed to the Greek Neoplatonist Numenius (2nd century AD), by the French scholastic William of Conches, as cited and translated by Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Brill, 1985), p. 54.
  172. Mēn, an Anatolian moon deity sometimes identified with Attis
    , who had a table before him for ceremonial dining (pp. 106, 109).
  173. ^ Thompson, "ISmyrna 753," pp. 104–105.
  174. ^ Thompson, "ISmyrna 753," p. 111.
  175. ^ Thompson, "ISmyrna 753," pp. 110–111, 114, with reference to the teachings of Ammonius as recorded by Plutarch, The E at Delphi. The relevant passage (21) is: "This appears from the names, in themselves opposite and contradictory. He is called Apollo, another is called Pluto; he is Delius (apparent), the other Aidoneus (invisible); he is Phoebus (bright), the other Skotios (full of darkness); by his side are the Muses, and Memory, with the other are Oblivion and Silence; he is Theorius and Phanæus, the other is 'King of dim Night and ineffectual Sleep'." See also Frederick E. Brenk, "Plutarch's Middle Platonic God," Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch (Walter de Gruyter, 2005), pp. 37–43, on Plutarch's etymological plays that produce these antitheses.
  176. ^ Thompson, "ISmyrna 753," passim, conclusion presented on p. 119. Thompson bases his argument on the particular collocation of deities at the sanctuary, and explicating theological details in the inscription through comparative material. See also Neoplatonism and Gnosticism.
  177. ^ In the Latin dialogue Asclepius sometimes attributed to Apuleius; see B.L. Hijmans, "Apuleius, Philosophus Platonicus," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.36.1 (1987), p. 441, et passim on the question of authorship.
  178. Baal-Hammon, may explain this particular syncretism; Jean-Pierre Mahé
    , Le fragment du "Discours parfait" dans la Bibliothèque de Nag Hammadi, Colloque International sur les textes de Nag hammadi (Québec, 22–25 août 1978) (Éditions Peeters, 1981), p. 310.
  179. Pseudo-Callisthenes
    , I.30–33, as cited by Jarl Fossum, "The Myth of the Eternal Rebirth: Critical Notes on G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity," Vigiliae Christianae 53.3 (1999), p. 309, note 15. On the oracle and for the passage in which Aion Plutonius is named, see Irad Malkin, Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Brill, 1987), p. 107, especially note 87.
  180. ^ "On this day and at this hour the Virgin gave birth to Aion": Gilles Quispel, "Hermann Hesse and Gnosis," in Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica: Collected Essays (Brill, 2008), p. 258, noting that this date coincided with Epiphany and was a new year's celebration.
  181. ^ As at Horace, Carmen 1.4.17, where the domus ... Plutonia renders in Latin the Greek phrase "house of Hades."
  182. ^ Entry on "Demiurge," The Classical Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 256.
  183. ^ Entry on "Orpheus," The Classical Tradition, p. 665. It was even said that the soul of Orpheus had been reborn into Ficino.
  184. ^ Entry on "Demiurge," in The Classical Tradition p. 256.
  185. ^ Friedrich Solmsen, "The Powers of Darkness in Prudentius' Contra Symmachum: A Study of His Poetic Imagination," Vigiliae Christianae 19 (1965) 237–257; Margaret English Frazer, "Hades Stabbed by the Cross of Christ," Metropolitan Museum Journal 9 (1974) 153–161.
  186. ^ K.M. Coleman, "Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments," Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990), p. 67.
  187. De civitate Dei; see 2.15, where Pluto and Neptune are described as the brothers of Jove; 4.10, in noting their three-way division of sovereignty over the earth and with Proserpina as Pluto's spouse (coniunx); 4.11, in deriding the allegorizing of divinity in physical cosmogony; and 6.7, in denouncing the mysteries (sacra
    ) as obscene.
  188. ^ Daniel P. Harmon, "The Religious Significance of Games in the Roman Age," in The Archaeology of the Olympics: The Olympics and Other Festivals in Antiquity (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 242; Paul-Marie Duval, "Sucellus, the God with a Hammer," in American, African, and Old European Mythologies (University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 222.
  189. ^ Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1.379–398; Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998, 2001), p. 59.
  190. ^ Solmsen, "The Powers of Darkness," pp. 237–257; Frazer, "Hades Stabbed by the Cross of Christ", pp. 153–161.
  191. ^ Dic igitur, praepulchra polis, quod Danea munus / Libavit tibimet soboles Plutonis amica, Bella Parisiacae urbis 1.21, as noted by Nirmal Dass, "Temporary Otherness and Homiletic History in the Late Carolingian Age: A Reading of the Bella Parisiacae urbis of Abbo of Stain-Germain-des-Prés," in Difference and Identity in Francia and Medieval France (Ashgate Publishing, 2010), p. 106. In his earlier edition, translation, and commentary of the work, Dass gives "Speak, most wondrous of cities, of the gift the Danes brought for you, / Those friends of Pluto", in Viking Attacks on Paris: The 'Bella Parisiacae Urbis' of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Peeters, 2007), pp. 28–29, but soboles (classical Latin suboles) means "progeny, offspring," modified by amica, "dear, beloved."
  192. ^ De deorum imaginibus libellus, chapter 6, "De Plutone": homo terribilis in solio sulphureo sedens, sceptrum regni in manu tenens dextra: sinistra, animam constringes, cui tricipitem Cerberum sub pedibus collocabant, & iuxta se tres Harpyias habebat. De throno aurê eius sulphureo quatuor flumina manabunt, quae scilicet Lethum, Cocytû, Phlegethontem, & Acherontem appellabant, & Stygem paludem iuxta flumina assignabant.
  193. ^ The questions of authorship involving the De deorum imaginibus libellus and the Liber Ymaginum deorum ("Book of Images of the Gods") are vexed; Ronald E. Pepin, The Vatican Mythographers (Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 7–9.
  194. Dante, Inferno
    , Canto VII.
  195. ^ For instance, Peter Bondanella in his note to the translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Inferno: Dante Alighieri (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), pp. 202–203. Dante may simply be preserving the longstanding conflation of Greek Plouton and Ploutos; see Allen Mandelbaum, note to his translation of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno (Bantam Dell, 2004, originally published 1980), p. 357. In modern Italian, the name of the classical ruler of the underworld is Plutone.
  196. ^ The tormented souls wail "Perché tieni? e "Perché burli?" ("'Why do you hoard?' 'Why do you squander?'"): Inferno, Canto VII, line 30.
  197. ^ Il gran nemico, Inferno, Canto VI, line 115.
  198. ^ Bondanella, The Inferno p. 206; Mandelbaum, Inferno p. 69.
  199. ^ Ralph Nash, Jerusalem Delivered: An English Prose Version (Wayne State University Press, 1987), pp. xi and 475.
  200. ^ Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 13.7, translated by Edward Fairfax (1907).
  201. ^ In The House of Fame (lines 1510–1511), Chaucer explicitly acknowledges his debt to Claudian "That bar up al the fame of helle, / Of Pluto, and of Proserpyne," as noted by Radford, The Lost Girls, p. 25.
  202. ^ In Troilus and Criseyde (lines 590–503), as noted by Rosalyn Rossignol, Critical Companion to Chaucer: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (Facts on File, 2006), p. 540.
  203. ^ Chaucer, "The Knight's Tale" 2082 and 2299.
  204. ^ Rossignol, Critical Companion pp. 432, 540.
  205. ^ John M. Fyler, "Pagan Survivals," in A Companion to Chaucer (Blackwell, 2000, 2002), p. 351.
  206. ^ Seth Lerer, "The Canterbury Tales," in The Yale Companion to Chaucer (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 270. Pluto and Proserpina in The Merchant's Tale have been seen as Shakespeare's model for Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a view at least as old as Chaucer's editor Thomas Tyrwhitt (see 1798 edition) and reiterated by Walter William Skeat in his edition of The Canterbury Tales (1894 edition).
  207. ^ William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe (1503), lines 126–7, as cited by Ian Simpson Ross, William Dunbar (Brill, 1981), p. 252. Compare also Arthur Golding's "elves of hell" to translate Ovid's Avernales ... nymphas, "nymphs of Avernus" (Metamorphoses 5.670, in his account of the abduction).
  208. A Winter's Tale
    (IV.iii): "O Proserpina, / For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou lett'st fall / From Dis's waggon!"
  209. identified with Dis, and 576), but uses both names in the mythological narrative Hero and Leander
    .
  210. ^ Spenser plays on the conflation of Pluto and Plutus: "but a little stride ... did the house of Richesse from hell-mouth divide" and "Here Sleep, there Richesse, and Hel-gate them both betwext" (24.5), as noted by Thomas E. Maresca, entry on "Hell", The Spencer Encyclopedia, p. 352. See Offspring of Pluto (above) on the daughter Spenser invents for Pluto. His favored epithet for Pluto is griesly, an archaism for "grisly" (FG I.iv.11.1, II.vii.24.1, IV.iii.13.2, VI.xii.35.6, applied to Proserpina at I.i.37.4; Pluto named also at FG I.v.14.8, II.viii.24.1, VI.xii.35.6, VII.vii.5.9, and The Shepheardes Calender "October" 29).
  211. ^ Robert DeMaria Jr. and Robert D. Brown, Classical Literature and Its Reception: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2007), p. 453. Both Dis and Pluto appear in the works of Shakespeare and Marlowe, but Pluto with greater frequency; Spenser prefers the name Pluto.
  212. ^ Arthur Golding, Ovid's Metamorphoses (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) passim, with a few instances of Dis; Radford, The Lost Girls, p. 25.
  213. ^ For instance, at Paradise Lost 4.270, as cited by Radford, The Lost Girls, p. 25, where Proserpine is described as a flower fairer than those she was gathering and "by gloomy Dis / was gathered."
  214. ^ Ovid's Metamorphosis Translated by Arthur Golding, edited by Madeleine Forey, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 164. Pluto rules over Hell throughout Spenser's Faerie Queene, as noted by Maresca, The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 352.
  215. ^ John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Syracuse University Press, 2000), p. 238; Li Tournoiemenz Anticrit (Le tornoiement de l'Antéchrist) text.
  216. ^ Theresa Lynn Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry (Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 132.
  217. ^ The Assembly of Gods, lines 82, 51, 311, 314, in the edition of Oscar Lovell Triggs (London, 1896).
  218. ^ Entry on "Popular Culture," The Classical Tradition, p. 766.
  219. Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans
    ; Henri Schindler, Mardi Gras Treasures: Costume Designs of the Golden Age (Pelican, 2002), p. 15.
  220. ^ Nino Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge University Press, 1992, originally published in Italian 1969), passim, especially p. ix.
  221. ^ Pirrotta, Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi, with Leonardo's drawing (n.p.); Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: The Machines (Giunti, 1999), p. 72.
  222. ^ Mark Ringer, Opera's First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi (Amadeus Press, 2006), pp. 34, 75, 103–104; Tim Carter, Monteverdi's Musical Theatre (Yale University Press, 2002), p. 95; Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1927), pp. 112–113.
  223. ^ Tim Carter, Monteverdi's Musical Theatre p. 81, quoting Follino, Compendio delle sontuose feste (1608), and p. 152.
  224. ^ George J. Buelow, A History of Baroque Music (Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 37.
  225. ^ Kristiaan Aercke, Gods of Play: Baroque Festive Performances as Rhetorical Discourse (SUNY Press, 1994), p. 230.
  226. ^ Piero Gelli and Filippo Poletti, Dizionario dell'opera 2008 (Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2005, 2007), p. 36.
  227. ^ Charpentier's Pluto is a bass-baritone.
  228. ^ Gelli and Poletti, Dizionario dell'opera 2008, p. 625.
  229. ^ James R. Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (Amadeus Press, 1997), p. 115.
  230. ^ Pluto does not have a singing role in Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762).
  231. ^ Aercke, Gods of Play, p. 250; Ringer, Opera's First Master, p. 71.
  232. ^ Andrew Trout, City on the Seine: Paris in the Time of Richelieu and Louis XIV (St. Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 189–190; Buelow, A History of Baroque Music, p. 160.
  233. ^ Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 488–492.
  234. ^ Sasha Anawalt, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 66.
  235. ^ Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 60–61.
  236. ^ Amy Golahney, "Rembrandt's Abduction of Proserpina," in The Age of Rembrandt: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Penn State University Press, 1988), p. 30; Eric Jan Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude (Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 109–111.
  237. ^ Mary Margaret Heaton, The History of the Life of Albrecht Dürer of Nürnberg (London, 1870), p. 187; Walter L. Strauss, The Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer (Dover, 1973), p. 178.
  238. ^ Strauss, The Complete Engravings, p. 178.
  239. ^ Entry on "Orpheus," The Classical Tradition p. 665.
  240. ^ Entry on "Sculpture," The Classical Tradition, p. 870.
  241. ^ Golahny, "Rembrandt's Abduction of Proserpina," p. 30ff.
  242. ^ Amy Golahny, Rembrandt's Reading: The Artist's Bookshelf of Ancient Poetry and History (Amsterdam University Press, 2003), pp. 102–103.
  243. ^ Radford, The Lost Girls, pp. 85, 98, 114, citing Chelser, Women and Madness, pp. 240, 266.
  244. ^ Perhaps a play on the Italian verb chioccia used by Dante to describe Pluto's manner of speaking in Inferno, Canto VII, line 2.
  245. ^ Radford, The Lost Girls, pp. 247, 252, 254, et passim.
  246. ^ Radford, The Lost Girls, p. 254.
  247. ^ Rick Riordan, The Son of Neptune (Disney-Hyperion Books, 2011), p. 111 (vol. 2 of The Heroes of Olympus series).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pluto (mythology).
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pluto_(mythology)&oldid=1212330077"