It's All Geek to Me:
tales of the Greek Gods by Leah Samul
Samhain 1989: Hades
Son of Rhea and Cronus. Brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Hades was known as "the other Zeus" or "the subterranean Zeus." Hades had two other names. He was called Pluto by both the Greeks and the Romans. Tripp speculates that this was so because the Greeks didn't want to call out the name of this powerful deity, lest they attract him in some way. The name Pluto is taken from the word Ploutus, which means wealth or riches. This might sound incongruous, but Pluto was the God whose influence from under the earth helped the crops give forth richly of their fruits. There is some evidence that in this aspect he was a benevolent deity and was associated with the cult of Demeter. Burkert comments that "The Athenians called the dead Demetreioi and sowed corn on graves."
This is not to say that Hades was commonly associated with regeneration and growth; he was much more frequently connected with death. According to Burkert, to be carried away by Hades or to speak of celebrating marriage with him were common metaphors for death, especially in reference to young girls. Because of the fear in which mortals held the Hades/Pluto deity, he was usually worshiped under the name Pluto, since this was his less frightening aspect. When the Greeks did call on him as Hades, they prayed to him by striking the ground with a staff or with their bare hands.
Sacrifices to Hades usually consisted of a black animal: a black ewe or a black ram. His other name, used by Homer in the Hymn to Demeter, is Aidoneus, which means "the unseen one" or "the invisible." In addition to being invisible to mortals because he lived in the underworld, Hades possessed a helmet which could make him invisible when he travelled above ground.
Hades was both the name of the God of the underworld and the name given to the underworld itself. As a God he was the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Generally, he does not seem to have been seen as a malicious or nasty deity. Both Gods and mortals respected him, although mortals generally tried to stay out of his way. But it must be stressed that Hades bore no similarity to the threatening evil-doer that Christians later called the devil. Nor did the ancients seem to fear Hades as one who would punish them in the afterlife for the crimes they had committed in life. There is only one occasion when Hades did something like that: when Pirithous and Theseus came to the underworld to ask Persephone to marry Pirithous. Hades offered them hospitality and tricked them into sitting in chairs of forgetfulness, to which they became attached and bound by coils of snakes. Heracles rescued Theseus from this predicament but couldn't help Pirithous because an earthquake occurred.
Hades interacted on a number of occasions with Gods and mortals other than Heracles. He is best known for the episode in which he abducts Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. The story goes that Persephone was gathering flowers in a field one day with her friends. As she reached out for a particularly lovely one, the earth opened up and Hades came roaring out in a chariot. He grabbed the girl and took her to the underworld, which was his home. After looking for her for a long time, Demeter finally became distraught and witheld her fertile powers from the earth. This means that nothing bore fruit. Eventually Zeus had to tell Hades to let Persephone return to the earth. But Hades was clever. While she was in the underworld he gave Persephone a pomegranate to eat. This fruit was sacred to the underworld, and would therefore bind anyone who ate it to the underworld. Persephone only ate a portion of the fruit, and so she had to return to Hades for several months out of the year. Sources conflict on the time period. Some say four months and some say six.
Hades had a three headed watchdog named Cerberus who helped insure that no one would get away from the underworld. But in one case someone almost got out. When Eurydice died, her husband Orpheus descended to the underworld to try to persuade Hades to let her come back to earth with him. He succeeded, but Hades said she could only go back if Orpheus did not turn around to look at her as they left the underworld. For whatever reason, Orpheus looked, and Eurydice had to stay in the underworld.
Heracles came down to the underworld on his twelfth labor, which was to bring back Cerberus. Hades told Heracles that he could have the dog if he could subdue him without using his weapons. Heracles was able to do so and after he showed Cerberus to King Eurystheus, who had ordered the labors, he brought the dog back to Hades. Two sources, Larousse and Schwab, mention that Hades only agreed to let Heracles wrestle with the dog because he first wounded Hades in the shoulder with his arrow. Thus feeling the pains of a mortal body, Hades did not try to argue with Heracles. According to Apollodorus, Hades was wounded by Heracles again when he took the side of the Pylians against whom the hero was fighting.
A number of plants and trees are associated with the God Hades: the pomegranate, the herb mint, the narcissus and the cypress. Two of these, the narcissus and the pomegranate, were also sacred to Persephone. The mint was originally an underworld nymph named Minthe with whom Hades became infatuated. Persephone went after her and trampled her into the ground, and Hades then transformed Minthe into the mint plant. Additionally, black poplars and fruit-perishing willows were said to grow in the underworld, which Homer calls "the groves of Persephone."
(Apollodorus, 2.5.12, 2.7.3, 3.16.24; Homer, HYMN TO DEMETER, and also THE ODYSSEY, Book 10, lines 509-10; Larousse, p. 164; Schwab, p. 181; Burkert, p. 161 & 196)