The Children of Hades
In “vanilla” Greek mythology, Hades does not have any children. There’s only a handful of sources that suggest that he does have children, mostly related to the Orphic Mysteries, and they’re a little hard to interpret:
Zagreus is the best-attested one, but that’s not saying much, since sources on Zagreus tend to be contradictory. He’s definitely a chthonic god, and is usually identified with Dionysus. In most of the sources we have on him, he is the son of Zeus and Persephone, and Zeus names him as his successor. Zagreus is then murdered by Titans, buried at Delphi, and then reincarnated as Dionysus. Zagreus can be interpreted as a chthonic aspect of Dionysus. There are, however, a handful of sources that mention him in isolation, like this one:
Now [I came] to bid farewell to Zagreus and to his sire, the Hospitaler.
— Aeschylus, Sisyphus fragment.
This line explicitly identifies Zagreus as the son of Hades, “the Hospitaller” being among Hades’ more common epithets. But that’s all we have. We don’t know the context of this line. All we know is that at least one source calls Zagreus the son of Hades.
Makaria is even less attested. She is mentioned only in one source, the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia:
Makaria (Macaria, Blessed). Death. A daughter of Haides. And a proverb : ‘Go to blessedness,’ instead of go to misery and utter destruction. Or ‘Go to blessedness’ is said by euphemism. Since even the dead are called ‘blessed ones.’
Makaria is explicitly stated to be the daughter of Hades, and we can sort of infer that Makaria is associated with the “blessed” dead in Elysium, but that’s it. That’s all we know. We don’t even know that she’s a psychopomp.
Melinoe gives us a little more to go on than that, but she also appears in only one literary source, the Orphic Hymns. The Orphic Hymn to Melinoe helpfully gives us her domains and her origin story:
I call Melinoe, the chthonic nymph
in a saffron robe, to whom near the mouth
of the river Kokytos majestic
Persephone gave birth in the sacred
bed of Kronian Zeus. The false Plouton,
with deceitful tricks, snatched in a passion
the two-bodied flesh of Persephone.
She drives mortals mad with airy phantoms,
showing the silhouettes of monstrous shapes
and forms, sometimes bright, sometimes dark, shining
by night, hostile, coming downward from gray
night. But goddess, I pray you, queen below
the earth, to banish the maddening stings
of the soul to the ends of the earth, and show
initiates a kind and holy face.(trans. Patrick Dunn)
This hymn specifies that Melinoe is the daughter of Zeus, not Hades, and Persephone. That would make her Zagreus’ sister. Zeus takes the form of Hades in order to rape Persephone. Thomas Taylor’s translation of this hymn describes Melinoe as being half-black and half-white like the Norse Hel, with effectively both Zeus and Hades as her father. This translation lacks those lines, and I’ve found other translations that also lack them, so Taylor probably made them up. Therefore, Hades is not explicitly the father of Melinoe. But Zeus and Hades are sometimes identified with each other, especially in Orphic-related sources. For example, there’s this line attributed to Orpheus, quoted in Saturnalia by Macrobius:
Zeus is one, Hades is one, the sun is one, Dionysus is one.
So, you could interpret this as an instance of syncretism between Zeus and Hades that’s expressed through this story about Zeus taking the form of Hades. I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch, especially considering that Melinoe is clearly a chthonic goddess.
She’s associated with madness, ghosts, and nightmares, and her name means “the color of quince,” referring to the sickly pallor of death. It’s possible that Melinoe is a variant of Hecate; she shares similar domains and some similar epithets (like “saffron-robed”), but Hecate herself also appears in the Orphic Hymns as the daughter of Perses. Melinoe is also one of multiple chthonic goddesses to be mentioned on a triangular tablet from Pergamon, used for some kind of magic:
We have just enough information about these three gods to tease us with how much we don’t know. We know that they’re connected to Hades, and Zagreus and Makaria at least are named as his children, but that’s all we know. So, it’s not really misunderstanding that’s the issue here, it’s a desire to fill in the gaps left by the lack of context.
