The Aidoneus of Homer.
There is a marked contrast between the mere rank of Aides or Aidoneus, and his want of substance and of activity, in the poems. He is one of the three Kronid Brothers, of whom Neptune asserts—and we are nowhere told that it is an unwarrantable boast—that they are of equal dignity and honour. He bears the lofty title of Ζεὺς καταχθόνιος: and he is the husband of Persephone the Awful. It is plain that he belonged of right to the order of Olympian deities, because Dione states that he repaired to the divine abode, to have the wounds healed there by Paieon, which he had received from Hercules: but it is very doubtful whether we ought to understand him to have attended even the great Chapter, or Assembly, of the Twentieth Iliad. His ordinary residence is exclusively in the nether world. At the same time there is, in his position, and in that of Persephone, a remarkable independence. This the very title of subterranean Jupiter is enough to indicate. Neptune is never called the Jupiter of the sea. And it is quite plain that the power of Jupiter over the dead was limited. We cannot say it was null: for Castor and Pollux after death are still τιμὴν πρὸς Ζῆνος ἔχοντες, and they live accordingly on alternate days. But it was Minerva who interfered to carry Hercules safely through the Shades, and bring him back; and it appears that but for her Jupiter would not have been able to give effect to his design[397].
But the share of action ascribed to this divinity in any part of the poems is a very small one. In the Twentieth Iliad, the tramp of the Immortals, when engaged in fight, and the quaking of the earth under the might of Neptune, cause him to tremble. And his having received wounds from Hercules, though he shared this indignity with Juno, detracts from his mythological greatness.
Love of symmetry has sometimes led writers on the Greek mythology to find matrimonial arrangements for Jupiter’s brothers similar to his own, by giving to Neptune Amphitrite, and to Aidoneus Persephone, for their respective wives. The former of these two unions has no foundation in Homer; and the latter bears little analogy to that of Jupiter and Juno. For Proserpine is the real Queen of the Shades below: all the higher traditions and active duties of the place centre around her, while he appears there as a sort of King-Consort. There is no sign whatever of his exercising any influence over her, far less of her acting in the capacity of his organ. And while she has a cult or worship on earth, he apparently has none.
Under these circumstances, we do not expect to find her exhibiting any tokens of derivation from, or ideal dependance on him. They would appear to be respectively derived from traditions of independent origin.
Homer has not attached marks to Aidoneus which would enable us to trace him to any particular source beyond the limits of the Olympian system. It would be natural to seek his prototype among the darkest and earthiest of the elemental powers. But he appears before us in the poems rather as an independent and Hellenic creation, metaphysical in kind, and representing little beyond (1), a place in the trine number of the Kronid Brothers, which appears to be the Hellenic form of a great primitive tradition of a Trinity in the Godhead; and (2), the consciousness that there was a city and a government of the dead, and that a ruler must be provided for them, while the idea of the Supreme Deity had not retained enough of force and comprehensiveness to seem sufficient for the purpose.
As the representative of inexorable death, Aidoneus was the opposite of the bright and life-giving Apollo: and was naturally the most hateful to mortals of all the Olympian deities[398]. But the place in which the idea of punishment centres is the domain of Κρόνος rather than that of Aides: and he is the ruler over a state of the dead which is generally neither bliss nor acute suffering, but which is deeply overspread with chillness and gloom.
I shall refer hereafter[399] to the peculiar relation which appears to subsist between Aidoneus, together with Persephone, and the mysterious Ἐρινύες.
Demeter, or Ceres.
The Ceres or Demeter of Homer.