Hades is moral compared to the rest of the Greek Gods
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I mean, disregarding the fact that much of this thread is characterized by an enormous simplification of a lot of historical change, much of the Kore side of the Hades-Kore thing is lost, cause mystery cults don't write a lot down.
I mean.... Niobe, really? Really!
It's interesting how the foremost establishes her as super-important, but it's pretty hard to get much from her personality from the other two. So she's one of the chaste goddesses, and she was warned by a donkey.
Cogent point.> It's not surprising that a person who was raised by his crazy grandma and a goat would be dysfunctional
> Gods aren't people, and shouldn't be treated as if they were
(though I didn't say he was a person,
)In fairness to Zeus, regardless of how you feel about him as a person, he does to a reasonably good job as ruler of the universe. Not as good as his father, but then his father didn't have as many people trying to stop him from doing the job.
Side note: why do so many people think Mother Earth was nice?
Where she was traumatized by the possibility of another man raping her again, so Athena arranged it so men wouldn't want her and she could defend herself, you mean?
Or do you mean the version where she willing violated the sacred altar of her patron goddess with said patron goddess' greatest rival.
Multiple versions, gotta love 'em.
This awesome, I've not heard of many of these, thanks!
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What we do have of Persephone/Kore paints her as pretty boss, so it's not even like one of the gods we don't know much of, we just don't know what they said about her PoV of that story specifically. Other stuff, though?
The Illiad has two references to her-
"the gods fulfilled his curse, even Zeus of the nether world and dread Persephone."
"Althea prayed instantly to the gods, being grieved for her brother's slaying; and furthermore instantly beat with her hands upon the all-nurturing earth, calling upon Hades and dread Persephone"
Odyssey-
"And come to the house of Hades and dread Persephone to seek sooth saying of the spirit of Theban Teiresias. To him even in death Persephone has granted reason that ..."
I think it says a lot that Persephone is the one who gets called 'dread,' not Hades.
Heck, one thing I dig is her nicknames. You know how people argue 'best girl'? Persephone was called by some 'Aristi cthonia' which means "the best chthonic" or 'Best underworld/earth god.'
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Hades, who kidnapped his niece and forced her to marry him, is not, in fact, the most moral god.
You can play pretend that that's not what happened, but that takes a pretty unfounded charitable reading of the text.
You can play pretend that that's not what happened, but that takes a pretty unfounded charitable reading of the text.
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I'd argue that Aphrodite committed a lot of rape by proxy by forcing people together to satisfy her matchmaking obsession. The Illiad doesn't really make clear if Helen wanted to go to Troy with Paris or if she was taken by force, but either way Aphrodite considered her nothing but a commodity to be traded to some dude in exchange for a shiny thing. And hypocritically, Aphrodite also put Psyche through an absurd amount of abuse for being in love with Eros over the objections of the entire rest of the pantheon.
Putting aside what others have mentioned about that time he shot a bunch of children to get back at their mom, he also had a habit of either turning people who rejected him into objects or scaring the people who rejected him so much that they either asked to be turned into objects or straight up killed themselves to get away from him. So... not a great track record.
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Apollo's dismal failure at raping people does not erase his efforts to rape people, just like Hephaestus' incompetence in trying to rape Athena.
The culturally baked-in misogyny of the people who created the myths really shows, and it makes basically every male god pretty irredeemable.
The culturally baked-in misogyny of the people who created the myths really shows, and it makes basically every male god pretty irredeemable.
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The Oresteia might be Greek mythology's crowning achievement in misogyny. The moral of the story is that killing your mother is okay because women don't really count.
Nyarlathotep
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*Googles* Yeeeesh. Poor Niobe. Well, I'm definitely not that well versed in Greek mythology. I'd heard as the protector of and provider for children, he spared them the usual divine jackassery, and the Greeks tended to emulate and honor him for such. I knew he wasn't great towards adults, because hey, Olympian deity. Of course his kindness is relative.
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At the time, 'ask the dad then kidnap her,' is actually a courtship pattern in that area, and we don't actually have anything on her opinions on this one way or another and it was hardly unknown for the dad to check whether or not the girl'd be into it. So, yea, it's not great, but it's also a matter of cultural context and a heck of a lot better than what the other male gods get up to, especially given the further context of 'all future stories seem to paint them as remarkably functional,' and the charitable read is really not all that out there considering the lack of Persephone POV stuff in there.
And that's, like, easily the worst thing on his record however one takes it. Even if it is taken less charitably, it's a kidnapping and a marriage that, despite it's beginnings, ends up with Persephone being fairly cool about the whole thing. Compare that to everyone else with characterization and stories.
If you have a rap sheet that can be counted on one finger, among the greek gods? You are pretty far ahead of the pack.
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I don't think there is any evidence that can be used to state whether or not Persephone was happy with the situation. And given the myth involves her being pressured to eat and therefore consign herself to staying there forever without being informed of that, it will take quite some evidence to convince me she was actually totally cool with it.
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I mean, stories conflating Hades with the devil and thinking that he's the villain of the Greek pantheon are just way off base, so the OP is right about that. This is apparently the result of some lazy translation work in early versions of the Bible.
It could even be argued that the OP is right about him being one of the better people in the Greek pantheon, since he only has one rape to his name as opposed to Zeus' dozens and seemed to only ever wreak terrible vengeance on people who did some pretty serious shit to deserve it, as opposed to a lot of the others doing it over petty stuff.
He still isn't really "good" by modern moral standards, and honestly, none of the Greek gods are. Arguably they weren't even "good" by the standards of the time: gods were obeyed because they were powerful, not because they had any sort of moral superiority.
Although if you retcon the Persephone situation into something more consensual, then you could have a Hades in your story who was fairly decent. But this is not really news to anyone who didn't learn everything they know about Greek mythology from Disney's Hercules and Percy Jackson movies....
It could even be argued that the OP is right about him being one of the better people in the Greek pantheon, since he only has one rape to his name as opposed to Zeus' dozens and seemed to only ever wreak terrible vengeance on people who did some pretty serious shit to deserve it, as opposed to a lot of the others doing it over petty stuff.
He still isn't really "good" by modern moral standards, and honestly, none of the Greek gods are. Arguably they weren't even "good" by the standards of the time: gods were obeyed because they were powerful, not because they had any sort of moral superiority.
Although if you retcon the Persephone situation into something more consensual, then you could have a Hades in your story who was fairly decent. But this is not really news to anyone who didn't learn everything they know about Greek mythology from Disney's Hercules and Percy Jackson movies....
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Well, their marriage was arranged and political in nature, so there wasn't much passion there. Still, the version I read years ago indicated there was affection. Hephaestus was honest about himself and he was willingly to put up with her dalliances, which Aphrodite liked alongside his work ethic. Hephaestus was just happy to have a vivacious consort. They didn't spend a lot of time together, but they got along well (all things considered).
When I mention he was "relatively patient" with her infidelity, I do so with the knowledge that he eventually embarrassed her and Ares in front of the pantheon (which of course had the effect of Aphrodite starting an affair with Poseidon). That was not cool on Hephaestus' part, but considering how these events usually end with a decades-long feud kicking off, some mortal dying, or some horrible curse being thrown out, I'll... take it.
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My point is there is no real evidence, it's ambiguous and open for interpretation because it's not tackled in the story itself and the next time we see them together they're chill and he listens to her and etc., and that's a step up!
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Eh. If we're allowing that, then I see no reason not to allow the various interpretations of the female gods that remove even the myths where they act poorly; there's a huge number of retellings of the Medusa story that are about Athena giving Medusa the defence she asks of her, as opposed to cursing her, for example.
Like, I think the bottom line is that because its mythology, at the end of the day you can just make it up. That's how myths work.
Triggerhappy
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Thing is, the common reading of the Greek Pantheon is just the collection of stories that a bunch of scholars and historians of the classical era decided to be definitive. There are apocryphal stories of the various gods that made them better or worse, or attributed one gods actions to another or focused on them as a major god in an aspect that we probably didn't even know they were in charge of.
What I'm saying is, forget deciding on a reading, Greek mythology has always been multiple choice.
Disclaimer : That isn't to say there weren't common trends and characterizations of each god, or that of these variations would be 'decent' by modern standards. Just that shuffling things around, adding and tossing out stories as appropriate, is in the finest tradition of the Greek gods.
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True.What I'm saying is, forget deciding on a reading, Greek mythology has always been multiple choice.
Indeed; Zeus would still be a womanizing creep even if not a rapist.
Sure, but some versions are definitely bad, and we do have some unambiguous acting-bad outside Medusa and such. She presided over a court case when she fell on the side of 'killing moms doesn't count'! She also got into that whole 'for the fairest' thing which lead to the destruction of a great city.
With Hades, we have one where there's no definitive in any direction, and it's only one story, if a major one.
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*blink*. Which version are you going for? Because assuming we're going by Aeschylus, I'm pretty sure that her argument was NOT that "killing moms doesn't count", but rather that the specific mom had murdered her husband, and Orestes' own father.
The rhetoric in Aeschylus does have her voice sexism in favour of males, mind you. ('No woman gave me birth', 'so in all things I am on the side of fathers', etc) But that's a far cry from saying that she's saying killing women in general doesn't count, (as opposed to killing that particular woman).
Also she didn't just "preside" over a court case. With Orestes's case she set up the whole concept of a court system that's judged by a jury, as opposed to either judgment by a king, or lawless vendettas. She only casts the deciding vote in favor of acquital when the jury is split in half -- and this in turn justified the later tradition in Athens that when a jury was evenly split, the accused was acquitted.
Mostly I'm calling her out on the line of reasoning that got her deciding vote.
And there's still the Troy thing.
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So, you're accusing everyone else *except* Athena, and somehow making it be Athena's fault?
If your argument was that she sided with the Greeks, and that she should have sided with the Trojans, that'd be one thing, and you could make an argument for it.
But you're blaming her for entering a beauty contest because the winner (who did not pick her) decided to steal someone else's wife?
Couldn't you equally well say that entering the contest and trying to win it (rather than Aphrodite), and thus preventing the whole debacle, was the only way she would have had to save the Trojans and many other Greeks in the first place? (let's remember that the war was a catastrophe for the Greeks as well, killing many many heroes, kings, princes, etc)
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I mean, wasn't the matricide retaliatory?
Like, she murdered her husband and his new wife as revenge for him sacrificing her daughter, but from the perspective of ancient greece at the time, sacrifice isn't murder, so she committed the first crime. That's why he was acquited, isn't it?
Like, she murdered her husband and his new wife as revenge for him sacrificing her daughter, but from the perspective of ancient greece at the time, sacrifice isn't murder, so she committed the first crime. That's why he was acquited, isn't it?
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No, his defense (courtesy of Apollo, who was acting as his attorney) was that matricide didn't count as real kinslaying because children got everything from the father and the mother was just a walking fetus incubator with no true claim to parenthood. Yes, really.
It is possible that earlier versions differed and the surviving version was rewritten to push a political agenda, given that Athens treated women extremely poorly even by ancient Greek standards.
Agamemnon was just a colossal shitbag all the way through. First he kills his daughter as a sacrifice so he can get his fleet moving, after tricking her into coming by saying she was getting married. Then during the Trojan War in the Illiad he's constantly fucking things up. He takes the daughter of a priest of Apollo as his sex slave, pissing off Apollo and causing him to spam plagues at their army. Then when that forces him to give her back, he takes Achilles' girl just to be a dick and pissing off their best warrior so that he sits out the war. Then he calls everyone else cowards but is the first one to want to cut and run when things go wrong. Then, after winning the war and exterminating the Trojans, he took Cassandra as his new sex slave and took her back home to introduce to his wife. The wife whose daughter he'd killed.
So I can't really blame Clytemnestra for killing his ass. (And for that matter, she got a pass with the gods because Agamemnon wasn't a blood relation, which is why the Furies take her side and hound Orestes.) I do blame her for also killing Cassandra, tho. The poor girl was just another victim of Agamemnon and didn't deserve to share his fate.