Great Couples From Mythology: Hades & Persephone

It was a classic story of boy sees the inbred girl of his brother and sister, brother allows boy to emerge from a fiery chasm in the earth and kidnap his inbred daughter/niece, boy takes girl/niece to the Underworld to be his queen, girl's mother/boy's sister goes into a deep depression and forbids the plants to grow, girl's father/boy's brother decides girl needs to return to the world above, but girl now has to return to the Underworld on a yearly basis for the time of one month per pomegranate seed she ate there, so every year girl's mother/boy's sister gets depressed and doesn't let the plants grow, and that's why we have winter.  His name was Hades (known to the Romans as Pluto), and he was quite a catch.  Despite a difficult childhood in which his father ate him alive and didn't barf him back out until he was a full-grown god, Hades had come to manage his own business as ruler of the Underworld, and as god of the earth's riches, he was financially well to do.  Other than being her uncle (and when your parents are brother and sister, does that really matter anymore?), Hades was a marriage up for Persephone (known to the Romans as Prosperina or Libera), goddess of spring and vegetation, closely tied to her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest and agriculture.  However, Hades would have done better to ask his niece on a date like a gentleman, rather than asking his brother/her father, Zeus, if he could kidnap her.  In artistic depictions, the meet-cute of Hades and Persephone is traditionally referred to as "The Rape of Persephone", which should not be considered, for lack of a half-decent term, a, ahem, "legitimate rape," but rather comes from the Latin rapere, meaning "to snatch or take away" (related to words like "rapture," "rapacious" and "raptor") and the Old English use of "rape" to "seize or take by force."  The main thing is, the Greek gods' family dynamics were blechy and they should have all been ashamed of themselves.

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