valiantparadox:

Hades and Persephone, 2015

Hades has always been one of the chillest of the Greco-Roman gods and my all-time favorite, but of course his most famous myth is the unfortunate ‘Rape of Persephone’. I thought this was quite uncharacteristic, seeing that in all his other myths he’s really cool about a lot of shit, so I asked one of my professors about it and she laid down some knowledge. Beginning with the name, rape was actually a poor translation of the latin verb rapére (to snatch or to take) meaning that the myth is actually ‘the snatching of persephone’. Still pretty bad but it gets a bit better. Between falling madly in love with Persephone and abducting her, Hades went to her father, Zeus, and asked to marry her. Since women didn’t count in ancient Greece, Persephone and her mother, Demeter, didn’t have any say in this and Zeus was probably like “oh wow I forgot I had that daughter but yeah sure bro go for it” and so Hades did. Similar to the way Greek grooms picked up their brides, Hades shows up literally out of the earth and says “hey babe I’m your husband now let’s go to my house.” I’m not saying this is good I mean it’s still really fucked up but I hope it explains some things.

Further on, Hades is still pretty chill husband (for antiquity). I mean even though he’s besotted with her, he lets Persephone go home for nearly half a year and I can see them being a pretty great arranged marriage. This has been a psa.