Plutus

Wealth from the Field

Hesiod tells how Demeter lay with the hero Iasion in a thrice-plowed fallow field on Crete and bore Plutus, a kindly god who goes everywhere over land and sea and makes rich whoever finds him. The story roots wealth in grain: in an agrarian world, the harvest was riches.

Blind Wealth

By the Classical period Plutus had become an abstract personification of money and fortune. Aristophanes' last surviving comedy, Plutus (388 BCE), builds its plot on the idea that Zeus blinded him so he could not tell good people from bad, which is why the wicked prosper. When the god's sight is restored at a sanctuary of Asclepius, wealth flows to the honest, and the gods lose their offerings.

Peace Holding Wealth

Plutus is best known in art as a child. Cephisodotus's statue of Eirene (Peace) holding the infant Plutus, set up in Athens in the 370s BCE and known from Roman copies, expressed the idea that prosperity is nurtured by peace. He is distinct from Plouton, a title of Hades as lord of the riches beneath the earth, though ancient writers sometimes played on the similarity.