When Persephone returns to Demeter, she is asked by her mother if she ate any fruit while in the underworld. Hades agrees to release Persephone, but before she leaves, he gives her a pomegranate to eat. Zeus mediates the release of Persephone from Hades in the underworld by sending Hermes to deliver the message. To stop the famine, Hades must return Persephone to her mother on the earth. ![]() When Demeter notices that her daughter has been abducted by Hades, she is angered and sends the earth into a great famine. He was completely enamored in her beauty and chose to abduct her by opening up the earth to the underworld where she was picking flowers. Persephone was abducted by Hades when he saw her in a meadow picking wildflowers. Zeus and Demeter both play a role in her marriage to Hades and her life in the underworld. Persephone is the daughter of Zeus, Greek god of the skies, and Demeter, Greek goddess of the harvest. Fact #1: Persephone is the Daughter of Zeus and Demeter Here are some facts you may not have known about Persephone, the wife of Hades. There is more to this Greek goddess than you may know. We must continue to strive to do better and be better against all odds.When you hear the name Persephone, you might think of her marriage to Hades and the time she spends each year ruling the underworld alongside her husband. As Quinn adds: “We can allow ourselves to give in and give up in the face of all the sadness that is occurring in our country and in the world today. To know how it ends and still begin to sing it again as if it might turn out this time.”Īnd those themes are in many ways all too human. “In Hadestown, (the Greek god) Hermes says ‘It’s a sad song, but we sing it anyway. “The theme that I would want the audiences to leave remembering is one of hope,” he says. While the thought of the underworld typically conjures up images of suffering, pain and literal darkness, Quinn Emphasizes that Hadestown does provide a ray of, at least, emotionally, on the Road to Hell. He isn’t simply mean for the sake of being mean. He is a product of his experience. He is suffering from his own self-doubt and unfortunately, he does not realize that the use of the souls of the underworld to mine all the riches from the earth to impress his wife is doing more harm than good.” “It’s his blinding love for her that fuels his every action. And although those choices are a means to an end, that end being to impress his wife and prove to her that Hadestown is a worthwhile place for her to spend her time and she need not abandon him for half of the year,” he points out. ![]() ![]() “In our version of the myth Hades’ choices are made out of fear, self-doubt and jealousy. Nathan Lee Graham and company in 'Hadestown'. In many ways, the story of the two lovers parallels today’s times of people simply trying to survive in a world that can be cold, unfriendly, unsupportive.Īs the actor points out, this Hades is a “heavy-handed businessman” who’s providing for his family-in this case his queen, Persephone-and is very much “human” in a number of ways. He remains focused on his duty and maintains law and order fairly.” “While various gods fight one another during the epic battle, the Trojan War, Hades doesn’t choose sides. “In modern retellings Hades is made to be plotting and mischievious. But in reality, he was very impartial and never attempted to usurp others’ power,” Quinn explains. In the production at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Matthew Quinn plays Hades and finds that the dark lord is not the stereotype he’s made out to be. With music, lyrics and book by Anais Mitchell, Hadestown retells the classic love story of Orpheus and his beloved Eurydice, who now seeks to escape her life of poverty and ends up you-know-where only to find that there is indeed a hell on, or at least, beneath the earth. In classic Greek mythology, Hades is the god of the underworld, the king who ruled the dead in the darkness below.īut in Hadestown, it’s been updated into a modern-day musical from the classic Greek myth to a place of hellish, never ending industrial labor.
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