Hades names both the Greek lord of the dead and the realm he rules, and as a place it is the common destination of nearly all the dead, regardless of how they lived, a shadowy subterranean kingdom rather than a place of reward or punishment. The dead are ferried across the river Styx (or Acheron) by the boatman Charon, for whose fee a coin was placed in the mouth of the corpse; the far side is guarded by the three-headed hound Cerberus, who permits entry but no return.
Within, the realm is divided, the gray Asphodel Meadows for the ordinary dead, Elysium for the blessed, Tartarus for the damned, but for most souls the afterlife is simply a diminished, bloodless continuation, the shades retaining a faded semblance of their living selves. Hades is emphatically a one-way country: the myths that fascinate the Greeks are precisely the exceptions, the heroes who enter and return, Orpheus seeking Eurydice, Heracles fetching Cerberus, Odysseus consulting the dead. Its ruler is a grim but not evil god, and the whole conception reflects a religion oriented far more toward this life than the next: death is universal, dim, and final, and the underworld is less a moral reckoning than the place where the unseen simply are.