He was the third brother among the Olympians, who drew from his share the underworld and the rule over the dead. He was also called Pluto, the God of Wealth, of the precious metals hidden in the earth. The Romans as well as the Greeks called him by this name, but often they translated it into Dis, the Latin word for rich. He had a far-famed cap or helmet which made whoever wore it invisible. It was rare that he left his dark realm to visit Olympus or earth, nor was he urged to do so. He was not a welcome visitor. He was unpitying, inexorable, but just; a terrible, not evil god.
     His wife was Persephone whom he carried away from the earth and made Queen of the Lower World.
     He was King of the Dead- not Death himself, whom the Greeks called Thanatos and the Romans, Orcus.

     I chose this passage because I have always liked the story of Hades, and what happened after the Titans, with the Gods. Though I like this short, concise, version of the story, I couldn't help but notice that a few details were left out.
     For one thing , the way the three elder brothers came to control their respective kingdoms, the lots they drew after the titan war. Another detail they left out is how Hades made Persephone his Queen of the dead. He kidnapped her on earth and took her to the underworld where he tricked her into eating six seeds. Because of this she had to stay in the underworld six months out of the year, which she doesn't like so nothing will grow in the winter. There are a few more minor details that aren't worth mentioning.

     Consider. Sethe is an escaped slave, and her children were all born in slave-owning Kentucky; their escape to Ohio is like the Israelites' escape from Egypt in Exodus. Except that this time Pharaoh shows up on the doorstep threatening to drag them back across the Red Sea. So Sethe decides to save her children from slavery by killing them, succeeding with only one of them.
      Later, when that murdered child, the title character of Toni Morrison's Beloved, makes her ghostly return, she's more than simply the child lost to violence, sacraficedto the revulsion of the escaped slave toward her former state. Instead she is one of, in the words of the epigraph to the novel, the "sixty million and more" Africans and African-descended slaves who died in captivity and forced marches on the continent or in the middle passage or in attempts to escape a system that should have been unthinkable- as unthinkable as, for instance, a mother seeing no other means of rescuing her child execpt infanticide. Beloved is in fact representative of the horrors to which a whole race was subjected.

     I chose this passage because it reallt stuck out to me. Not just because it started off with murder and threats of assault, but because of the truth the auther brings to light. The fact that white men were so cruel and unexceptive of different skin colors, that the minorities felt that the only way to escape the abuse was to kill there families. Looking at this passage makes me think about Adolf Hitler. He wanted to create a racially pure Germany and grove the world into war. This passsage begs the question"Where we so different?"