ABSTRACT
The trap was sprung and Hephaistos brought the gods in to witness the lovers so tightly bound together that they could not move. Hephaistos expressed his rage, the gods enjoyed the spectacle, Ares departed shame-faced, and Aphrodite was not put out at all. Life in a Hades organization is dreary and mechanical, without the prick of ambition or the joy of social intercourse. Hades is apparently the assimilation of the quite different gods. He is the god of the flow of life, the god of the sprouting seed, the god of feeling, of joy, of tragedy, of spontaneity, of newness, of creativity, of growth. A handful of the inhabitants, mostly defeated Giants and Titans, are subject to eternal torture for crimes against the gods, but most wander as phantoms, mere shadows of their former selves, without their bodies and forgetful of their former lives.
