Setting the Record straight
This is true story of Hades and Persephone, as told by Athena.
(and I didn't choose either one of these because I'm a suck up. I love the story of Hades and Pesephone, and Athena is my favorite Goddess. Of all mythology. Eris is my second fav)
Everyone always talk about how evil Hades was for stealing Persephone. But seriously, Persephone was an idiot. And Uncle Hades would never like her in the first place.
My name is Athena, and I’m going to set the record straight for my favorite Uncle in the world, Hades. And if you want to argue, I dare you. There is a reason why I’m the Goddess of Warfare.
Persephone is my cousin, and was one of the most annoying people you will ever meet. All she cared about is flowers. Me, I like a good book, or a good puzzle, but with Sephie, it was clothes and flowers. RAH! She frustrated me to no end.
But I can understand her standpoint I suppose. Her mom, Aunt Demeter is a little high strung. Okay, Aunt Demeter is REALLY high strung. She smothered Sephie. Sephie is beautiful, and she of course attracted a lot of attention, and because of that, Aunt Demeter hid her. Poor, poor Sephie (HAHAHA, sorry I don’t have any sympathy for her)
Aunt Demeter made her stay on Earth, with the humans. But she didn’t realize that she had hid Sephie near an underworld vent. And Uncle Hades choose that time to take a ride on his spiffy new chariot. And he nearly runs Sephie over.
So Uncle Hades, being the perfect gentlegod that he is, stopped to apologize. But Sephie throws a major hissy fit. She starts screaming and yelling, and didn’t realize that she was yelling at the God of the Underworld. Uncle Hades isn’t the most patient God in the universe. So he starts yelling back.
Now you have two powerful beings screaming at each other, in the middle of the field. If I was there, I would’ve been laughing really hard.
Wwweeeelllll, Sephie doesn’t have much sense. And after Uncle Hades started yelling, Sephie slapped him. Across the face. That put an end to the yelling.
So angry Uncle Hades decides to throw Sephie onto his spiffy new chariot (what can I say, I like the chariot), and take her to Zeus. But after he’s thrown a kicking and screaming Persephone onto the chariot, he hears Hermes. Something’s wrong in the Underworld, and Uncle has to go and fix it. So he tells Sephie that she has a choice. She can get out of the chariot, and go back to her idiotic life (exact words, by the way), or she can go with him, wait while he fixes the problem, and then they can go to Zeus. He figures she’s going back to her life. Sephie chooses the Underworld.
When they get to the Underworld, Uncle Hades make Sephie stay at his place, while he goes fix the problem. While she’s there, she meets Cerberus, Uncle’s dog, and the Furies, Uncle’s roommates. Sephie was a little afraid of them, but soon, she’s sitting on the ground chatting with Megara about her hair, and giving Cerberus a belly rub.
And that’s how Uncle finds her.
Needless to say, there was another screaming match that was only stopped when Tisiphone burst out laughing. She points out that they fight like an old married couple, and they start screaming at her. Tisi wasn’t real thrilled with that, but before anything else could happen, Hermes showed up with interesting news.
Apparently Demeter found out her precious Persephone was missing, and started throwing a temper tantrum of monstrous proportions. I mean, crops shriveled up, and people were starving, and Aunt Demeter is crying all over herself. And it’s all being blamed on Uncle.
So Uncle decides, fine, I’ll just take Miss Priss back up, drop her on Demeter’s doorstep, and be done with it. If it was only that simple. Persephone will not budge. He asks, orders her, threatens to pick her up and carry her, but nothing works. So Alecto (a fury) gets annoyed. And she cuts a deal with Sephie. If Sephie takes a bite of an Underworld pomegranate, then rightfully so, she has to stay in the Underworld. Uncle is panicking by now, and tried to stop Sephie, but that stubborn wench ate the entire pomegranate. And now she’s ready to go.
Now Uncle’s stuck. If he takes her back, and they learned she ate the dang pomegranate, he’s stuck with her. If he keeps her, he risks the entirety of Mount Olympus at his doorstep.
So he decides to take her to Aunt Demeter, explain what happened, and give her back. So they hop onto the chariot, and way they go. He finds Aunt Demeter (not hard really, all you had to do was follow the screams), and starts trying to explain. But Aunt Demeter gets ticked, and starts hurling insults, and other more substantial objects at her older brother. Sephie was sat and watched, actually enjoying it a bit.
Finally Uncle Hades is able to get a word in, and yells that Persephone was right there. So Aunt Demeter swings around, see Sephie, and throws herself upon the poor girl. And Sephie looks down on her mother in disgust. Then she fights to get untangled from the half-insane goddess.
Uncle Hades is watching, and decides to help Sephie. Uncle knows that Aunt Demeter is nuttier then a rabid squirrel in fall, and is a little sympathetic towards Sephie. So they get Demeter off of Persephone, and now the real fun begins. Time for the Gods of Olympus to decide their fate!
To make a really long and boring story short, they decided that Sephie has to live in the Underworld for six months, then live in the Overworld for six months. They actually decided that this was punishment enough for poor Uncle Hades. I don’t think he was very amused. I thought it was hilarious.
So now cousin Persephone is my Aunt, and Queen of the Underworld, at least for half a year. And let me tell you, you do not want to tick that Queen off. She turned a nymph, who was tempting Uncle Hades, into a mint plant. A mint plant. Not only do you smell for the rest of your life, but you also might get eaten.
Sephie spends too much time with the Furies.
And when Sephie has to come up to Olympia for six months, she looks me up. Apparently being Queen has made her grown up, and now we are really good friends.
But that’s the real story about my Uncle Hades. He isn’t a kidnapper, an evil overlord of Hell, he’s just a poor man who got tricked into being married. Not that he doesn’t love his wife, but sometimes, I think he wishes he never got that spiffy new chariot.