Jan 16, 2021 8:00 AM

What Hades Can Teach Us About Ancient Greek Masculinity

Everyone in the game may be hot, but some of the characterizations we see aren't as subversive as you might think.

Supergiant’s epic of a rogue-like, story-driven action game Hades has understandably taken the gaming world by storm. Its lot of sultry beauties fighting and wholesomely sharing ambrosia is a delightful accompaniment to beating up The Worst Dad. (Authors note: upon further runs, I’m starting to think he might not be so bad.)

With different styles and pompous attitudes, each character makes a strong impression. If you’re like me, you’ll probably crush on a handful of them from the start. In an interview with Kotaku, developer Greg Karsavina said of their character design, “Our portrayals of the gods owe greatly to classical tradition." As interviewer Ash Parrish put it: “Gods are hot because they are gods.” But while there is a great diversity of hair, skin, voice, and presence, the limits of Supergiant’s vision quickly become apparent.

While Hades does adhere to classical tradition in notable ways, it also incisively breaks from convention. Going so far as to subvert players’ expectations of identity in Greek myth, the game smartly conjectures beyond contemporary scholarship on race in antiquity. In Hades, we are literally introduced to the pantheon by a Black Athena. And to the delight of many fans of anachronistically queer interpretations of the Iliad, Patroclus and Achilles are here and they’re quite gay. But Hades doesn’t subvert or even modernize all aspects of the myths it’s reinterpreting. The game lacks disabled characters and, given the framing of hotness, its depiction of fatness is disappointing to say the least.

Sixth grade English classes and Percy Jackson & The Olympians introduced many my age to the Greek pantheon, and classicist Kate Cook has already discussed the use of mythology in Hades, but we are seldom taught about how the Greeks practicing these religions treated women, how disabled Greeks participated in civic life, or what romance looked like for any orientation. It’s a more absurd history than you’re probably familiar with, one that recasts the adoptions and revisions of classical tradition that Supergiant decided on.

And as an author’s note, when I refer to ancient Greece below, I am talking about Classical Greece (5th to 4th centuries BCE), whose culture we know through surviving statues, architecture, pottery, and oratory fragments. Fitting with Hades own framing, what I discuss below are called “Homeric” values.

Who Gets to Be Hot?

We need to reorient our understanding of gender and beauty to talk about hotness in antiquity. While our society considers beauty a feminine trait, in Ancient Greece, masculinity superseded all. We might as well say that masculinity—cultivated by teaching and training—is beauty. So “hotness” in a classical sense isn’t the traits we as individuals find attractive in other people, but what a society, preserved through fragments of their culture, values in citizens and bodies. The aristocratic elite were even called the good and the beautiful (kalos kagathos), for their blood line inherently possessed virtue. While we could reduce this to a set of characteristics associated with masculinity, I would suggest that the question should be: Who, not what, is hot?

Hades focuses on Zagreus, who plays such a minor role in myth that, as the titular god of the underworld’s son, he makes a great canvas to fill in for the player character. He’s charming, emotionally mature, polychromatic, young, and muscular; Zag is the prototypical beauty, the “ephebe.” As the locus of masculinity in Ancient Greece, the 17- to 18-year-old boy becomes an ephebe after shaving his first beard and beginning a requisite two years of military service for the polis. This transitional phase, from the adolescent eromenos to adult man, is when the Greeks regarded “male body” as in peak condition. Ephebes were literally objectified in the civic imagery of the era, kuoroi. Placed around the polis, these statues, depicting nude young men, served as a living symbol for the ideal citizen. Kuoroi like Polykleites' The Doryphorus tell us, as they did citizens of the polis, that the ideal Greek man possesses discipline, control, balance, and symmetry.

We can’t imagine that most, if any, men looked like kuoroi—Zag himself represents such an ideal. Kuoroi are more like the idealized and fetishized bodies we see in media, propaganda, and art today. Myron’s Diskobolos, the representation of masculinity in its dynamic aspect, was infamously appropriated by Nazis as their eugenic metric for beauty. This cuts to the heart of identity production in ancient Greece, where “one is what one does.” In Bodily Arts, rhetorician Debra Hawhee writes, “For ancient Athenians, physical beauty and moral superiority were inextricably tied.” It’s no surprise, then, that gods—what Jean-Pierre Vernant calls “divine super bodies”—are hot. Of course, we moralize bodies too. Kuoroi are as indicative to the values of ancient Greece as Hades is to our own culture.

Weren’t They Kinda Gay, Though?

Zagreus and Thanatos, the twinkish personification of death himself, epitomize the ephebe, but older men had a role too. Whether of a statue or person, men of all ages participated in ritual undressing. As historian Donald G. Kyle recounts in Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, “disrobing fully to become nude for sport became an assertive communication of maleness, ethnicity, status, freedom, privilege, and physical virtue.” It was then a man’s responsibility to maintain his physicality at all times, ready for sport as much as battle. Men were supposed to react to these instances of public nudity with infatuation, recognizing that these bodies are beautiful, virtuous, and good. And the nude man should respond with modesty or shame (aidos). Even nude kuoroi portrayed modesty through their limited motion.

But compulsory homoeroticism is not the same as queerness.

To better understand how the Greeks treated same-gendered relationships, we need to talk about one of the most overlooked institutions of Greek life in our reinterpretations of their stories: pederasty.

An institution of the aristocracy, pederasty was a courting between younger and older men: the eromenos and erastes, loved and lover. The older man is bound to protect and teach, while the younger, in his teens, honors the older and maintains the bond between their households. These pairs may also do combat together, a way of encouraging each to fight. Kyle writes, “Pederasty had a role in education at Athens and elsewhere, but it was predominantly a social fashion among the elite, one reflected in the pottery and poetry of that class and related to its associations with symposia, gymnasia, and athletics." Gyms were carefully regulated with hours and schedules to foster pederastic relations, eventually serving as a place of education where philosophers would teach.

Plato is just one noteworthy example who “applauds pederasty, which barbarians saw as shameful, as a band of friendship that inspired higher thoughts.” The role of gyms is noted by Thomas Scanlon, who, in Kyle’s words, “presents nude physical education (gymnike paideia) as an effective form of socialization—an erotically charged relationship of mutual respect whereby mature males set cultural examples for teenage youths.” Often homoeroticized, these couples are described through romantic or spiritual connections. Philosophers, all participants, would even claim that these connections transcended relationships men had in their arranged marriages with women.

Perhaps the most famous pederastic couple is Achilles and Patroclus, refigured in Hades as adult lovers on a more equal footing. While classical philosophers were unsure which was older (scholars today claim that Patroclus was the elder erastes), they did depict the two as lovers. Still, homosexual and gay would be anachronistic identifiers to give the ancient figures, both tied to 19th-century beliefs of gender and sexuality that simply didn’t exist before then. Achilles, as he’s preserved in myth, is no longer eromenos. While he is classically portrayed as an ephebe, he is much older in Hades. But Achilles and Patroclus could only be such historic lovers because they were not mortal men living in Homeric Greece. It would make more sense that, as his teacher, Achilles took on the role of Zag’s erastes (a ship I will gladly let sink).

It’s worth reiterating here that the mythical figures of Achilles and Patroclus are outliers as intelligibly queer men. We don’t know enough about coercion and consent to dig into the possibility of romance in real pederastic relationships, but we don’t have to. After the eromenos shaves his first beard, he’s no longer a boy. Continuing sexual relationships with men into adulthood was disgraceful, as the pederastic relationship rests on its age difference. In Greece, masculinity was tied to an active role, to giving. While the eromenos as an adolescent could receive, in the passive role, it was disgraceful for a man or an erastes to desire such things. Accusations of such behavior became a common oratory practice to discredit an opponent. A man subject to his desires, they argued, was womanly—the worst thing you could be.

So What Were the Women Up To While the Men Were Busy?

Women were institutionally and socially subordinate to men in civic life, while their bodies were often portrayed as the antithesis to virtuous masculinity. Korai, statues of women, are shown in static poses that signify laziness, that they’re undisciplined and asymmetrical alike. When in motion, women are cast as unbalanced for their lack of control over emotion and sexuality.

The only agential women existed in myth as goddesses and Amazons, which make a cogent example of the gender binary in Greece. What made the Amazons mythological was their unnaturally hypermasculine behavior and expression in a “womanly body,” making them literally andro and gyné—androgynous. This physique, developed by their own system of training, lent itself to their superior combat abilities compared to mortal women. The Amazons were, however, defeated by Greek heroes like Heracles, serving as just another example of men’s naturalized superiority. From the myths, we gain that, while both are unnatural, manly women inspire awe and legend, with some cities even crediting their foundation to Amazons, while womanly men can’t even stand against an orator. Masculinity, again, supersedes all.

Like toxic masculinity today, the hatred of women and femininity reinforced ideals of masculinity. Ritual undressing takes on the more sinister role of policing men’s bodies when we consider what it meant for those not deemed conventionally attractive. Aelian records a Spartan law in VariaHistoria: “None of the Lakedaimonians is to be seen with a more effeminate complexion of body or with more weight than the gymnasia will give it. One is a confession of laziness, the other of effeminacy.” This practice and its negative values were present throughout the Balkan peninsula. Such is the result of a society where virtue is inscribed upon the body.

You can decide who’s the top, but either Zag or Than is failing his station when they hook up. Meanwhile, Zag’s obvious positionality to the androgynous Megaera would be similarly demeaning. (Not in a hot way though!) So whether Than’s brooding gaze plucks your heartstrings or Meg’s stompy attitude really gets to you, each of these relationships are quite subversive to classical tradition. But Supergiant doesn’t subvert all these literally antiquated beliefs in their reinterpretation.

A Greek Myth for Everyone

As we’ve seen, fatness is associated with effeminacy in Greek culture, but only one of them is recovered in Hades. The only fat characters are an enemy type, the Wretched Lout, who, as Achilles writes in his codex, have “been reduced to merely their most base of negative impulses, these damnable wretches do their part to help uphold the Underworld's cruel reputation.” Though it doesn’t name those impulses, they’re depicted holding vessels filled to the brim with glowy, neon drink. The implication is clear: Fatness signifies bad judgment and a lack of control. While it echoes ancient fatphobia, this pernicious moralizing is just as contemporary as the most progressive elements of Hades. But with its positive depictions of race, gender, and sexuality, this presentation of fatness is distinctly out of place in a work that otherwise does leaps over bulls to present an inclusive myth for today.

And missing entirely from Hades are disabled characters. Whereas most abilities are bestowed by a god, weapon upgrades take the name of Daedalus, the mortal inventor of myth. The game seemingly shuns the pantheon’s own blacksmith, Hephaestus. This mortal substitution appears innocuous unless we consider that Hephaestus is not just the god of fire and metalworking but he’s also disabled. Thrown off Olympus by his father Zeus, the god was injured as a child, his feet characteristically twisted around. Disability rhetorician Jay Dolmage has repeatedly invoked Hephaestus in his work. He argues that, in myth, Hephaestus’ disability is not an impairment but a way for the god to move side to side quicker. Besides helping the blacksmith work, this side-to-side movement symbolizes an intellectual cunning useful in both the assembly and gymnasium, a bodily knowledge the Greeks called mêtis.

In “Metis, Mêtis, Mestiza, and Medusa,” Dolmage writes, “Hephaestus was robustly worshipped and celebrated in the Greek context, his bodily difference not fetishized or diminished, not overcome or compensated for, but idealized.” Further, the god was celebrated with major temples and festivals in his honor and, while we don’t know much of what life was like for disabled Greeks, disparate pieces of evidence suggest that accommodations may have been commonplace. A recent publication in the journal Antiquity argues that, among other normalized practices enacted to aid disabled citizens, temples of healing were made accessible to people with mobility impairments through the use of access ramps. And in a recent lecture at Brandeis University, study author Debby Sneed discussed her archaeological work on the use of feeding bottles for disabled children and the elderly while disputing fanciful myths of ableism (like Spartan infanticide) in antiquity. Able-bodied developers working with myth would do well to hold this understanding of disability together with contemporary scholarship and activism when reviving these worlds.

Hades modernizes, subverts, and adopts the classical tradition all at once. Though it took gaming by storm, it fits in neatly with Greek revivals across other mediums. The Song of Achilles modernizes a tale of love and lust, The Trials of Apollo brings the gods closer than ever to the mortal realm, Hadestown transplants contemporary anxieties into Orphean myth while Portrait of a Lady on Fire rewrites it altogether, and Antigone Uprising further subverts myths’ gender politics. Hades’ vision of the pantheon is distinct—but not unique—in how thorough the narrow slice of gods and goddesses it pulls from are reconfigured in a contemporary light. To each their own myth, but I wish there was room for everyone in the underworld.