60 free Hades trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Hades trivia covering the god, the place and the pop culture. The quiz starts with the Greek myth: the eldest son of Cronus swallowed and regurgitated, the helm of invisibility, the drawing of lots that gave him the underworld, the abduction of Persephone and the pomegranate seed, and the mortals who crossed him - Sisyphus, Pirithous, Orpheus and Heracles. Then it maps his realm: Charon and the obol, the five rivers, the Asphodel Meadows, Elysium and Tartarus, the three judges, and the three-headed dog at the gate. It also covers the names the Greeks used to avoid saying his (Plouton, 'the rich one', which became the Roman Pluto), his cult and his sacrifices. The last section is for gamers and film fans: Supergiant's roguelike Hades and its Hugo Award, Zagreus, and James Woods's fast-talking Hades in Disney's Hercules. Every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you want the whole pantheon, try our Greek Mythology, Poseidon and Athena quizzes too.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Greek mythology, Hades is the god of what?
The dead and the underworld
His name became so synonymous with his realm that Greeks used 'Hades' for the place as much as the god.
Q 02Which two gods are Hades's brothers, with whom he divided the cosmos?
Zeus and Poseidon
The three drew lots: sky, sea and underworld, with the earth shared among them.
Q 03Persephone was doing what when Hades carried her off to be his queen?
Picking flowers
Her father Zeus had already promised her to Hades, which is why the abduction happened at his behest.
Q 04What is the name of the three-headed dog that guards the underworld?
Cerberus
Hesiod originally gave him fifty heads; later writers settled on three.
Q 05Under what Roman name was Hades widely known?
Pluto
It comes from the Greek euphemism Plouton, 'the rich one', since crops and metals come from below.
Q 06Hades was the eldest son of which Titan couple?
Cronus and Rhea
Being the firstborn made him the first swallowed and the last spat back out.
Q 07What did Hades's father do to him and his siblings at birth?
Swallowed them whole
Only the youngest, Zeus, escaped thanks to their mother's trick, and later forced the others' release.
Q 08Which magical item did the Cyclopes forge for Hades to use in the war against his father's generation?
A helm of invisibility
Athena, Perseus and the messenger god all borrow the cap in later stories.
Q 09How did the three brothers decide who would rule sky, sea and underworld?
They drew lots
The story comes from a single famous passage in Book 15 of the Iliad.
Q 10What did Hades secretly give Persephone to eat, binding her to the underworld?
A pomegranate seed
Because she had tasted the food of the dead she must spend a third of every year below.
Q 11What fraction of the year does Persephone spend in the underworld under Zeus's compromise?
One third
Her absence is when winter falls upon the earth.
Q 12Persephone's mother, who cursed the land with famine after the abduction, is which goddess?
Demeter
Mother and daughter were the central figures of the most famous Greek mystery cult.
Q 13Which god does Zeus send down to persuade Hades to release Persephone?
Hermes
The messenger god finds Hades on a couch with Persephone beside him, and takes the reins for the ride back up.
Q 14Which musician charmed Hades into freeing Eurydice, on condition he did not look back?
Q 21Hades created a white tree in Elysium as a memorial to which nymph, a daughter of Oceanus?
Leuce
A visiting hero crowned himself with its leaves to celebrate coming back from the underworld alive.
Q 22Who ferries the dead across the river into Hades's realm in exchange for a coin?
Charon
The obol was placed in the mouth of the corpse; the unburied waited a hundred years on the near shore.
Q 23Which underworld river did even the gods swear their oaths upon?
Styx
It means 'hate', and it forms the boundary between the upper and lower worlds.
Which underworld river's name means 'oblivion', its waters erasing memory?
Orpheus
Even Persephone was moved by the music; the condition, of course, was broken.
Q 15Which mortal king was punished by rolling a boulder uphill forever after twice cheating death?
Sisyphus
He once chained Death himself, so that nobody on earth could die until Ares freed him.
Q 16Which friend of Theseus went to the underworld to steal Persephone and was trapped there?
Pirithous
Hades offered them a feast; snakes coiled round their feet the moment they sat down.
Q 17Who was the only living hero to wound Hades, shooting him with an arrow at Pylos?
Heracles
The wounded god went up to Olympus to be healed by Paean, physician of the gods.
Q 18Before fetching the three-headed dog, the hero was initiated into the mystery cult of which town?
Eleusis
He wanted absolution for killing centaurs and instruction on how to get in and out of the underworld alive.
Q 19Which demigod physician was killed by Zeus, at Hades's urging, for raising the dead?
Asclepius
Hades felt cheated of his subjects; the healer was later made a god anyway.
Q 20Hades turned his nymph lover Minthe into which plant after a jealous Persephone trampled her?
Mint
In one version it is her mother, not Persephone, who does the trampling.
Lethe
Initiates of the Mysteries drank instead from the pool of Mnemosyne, memory.
Q 25Which of the underworld's rivers is the river of fire?
Phlegethon
The other four are sorrow, lamentation, oblivion and hate.
Q 26How many rivers run through the realm of Hades?
5
Each carries a symbolic meaning: sorrow, lamentation, fire, oblivion and hate.
Q 27In which region of the underworld do the shades of ordinary heroes wander, twittering like bats?
The Fields of Asphodel
Only libations of blood briefly give them back human feeling, as Odysseus discovers.
Q 28Which part of the underworld is reserved for the punishment of the impious and evil?
Tartarus
Apollodorus says it is as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky.
Q 29Who are the three judges who sit in the forecourt of Hades's palace?
Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus
They sit where three roads meet, a crossroads sacred to Hecate.
Q 30What was Hades's name generally understood to mean since antiquity?
The unseen one
Around the 5th century BC the Greeks began using Plouton instead, apparently from fear of saying it.