Greeks were so wary of Hades that they avoided saying his name
From around the fifth century BC, many Greeks stopped calling the god of the dead by his name. They preferred Plouton, the rich one, a flattering title pointing to the crops and metals that come from underground. Romans later turned that nickname into Pluto, the name most people now know.
Other workarounds existed too. Some spoke of him as Zeus katachthonios, the Zeus beneath the earth, a nod to his total power over his realm. Epithets such as Agesilaos cast him as the one who carries everyone off. The Greeks gave him so little personality in their stories partly because they did not want to draw his notice. Even the original name is a puzzle. Since antiquity it has usually been read as the unseen one, but in Plato's Cratylus Socrates argues playfully for a link to knowing all noble things, and the scholar Martin Litchfield West proposed a meaning closer to the one who presides over meeting up, since death gathers everyone.
In myth he was the eldest son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, swallowed at birth with his siblings and later freed through Zeus's scheming. Wearing a helmet of invisibility made by the Cyclopes, he fought in the ten-year war that toppled the Titans. Afterwards, in a single well-known passage of the Iliad, the three brothers drew lots: Zeus took the sky, Poseidon the sea and Hades everything below, with the earth itself shared.
His best-known story involves taking Persephone, Demeter's daughter, with Zeus's approval. The grieving Demeter made the land barren until Hermes was sent to bring the girl back. Before she left, Hades had her eat a pomegranate seed, and having tasted food of the underworld she was bound to spend a third of each year below. Her absence was linked to winter.
Hades rarely left his kingdom and cared mostly that no soul escaped it. He persuaded Zeus to strike down the healer Asclepius, who had begun raising the dead, and trapped Pirithous, who came to steal Persephone, on a Chair of Forgetfulness. Yet he could relent. Orpheus's music moved him, with Persephone's urging, to release Eurydice, on the one condition that Orpheus not look back.
Source: Hades
