In the mythology and daily religious life of ancient Greece, wealth was originally inseparable from the fertility of the soil and the abundance of the grain harvest. The divine personification of this material prosperity was Plutus, known in Greek as Ploutos, whose name gave modern languages words such as plutocracy. Born in a thrice plowed field and linked intimately to the mysteries of the earth, Plutus evolved over centuries from an agricultural spirit of overflowing granaries into a satirical figure of gold, silver, and the blind distribution of human riches.
Birth in the Thrice-Plowed Field and the Eleusinian Mysteries
According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Plutus was the son of Demeter, the Olympian goddess of grain and agriculture, and the mortal Cretan hero Iasion. During the wedding celebration of Cadmus and Harmonia, Demeter fell in love with Iasion and lay with him in a fertile field that had been plowed three times on the island of Crete. From their union was born Plutus, a benevolent deity who traveled across land and the broad back of the sea, bestowing rich agricultural fortune and overflowing barns upon whomever met him and took him into their hands.
Because his mother was Demeter, Plutus became a central figure in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most sacred religious initiation rites of the ancient Greek world held annually at Eleusis near Athens. When Persephone was abducted into the Underworld by Hades—who was himself frequently called Plouton, the Rich One, because both mineral ores and seeds lay beneath the soil—the return of Persephone each spring brought the birth of Plutus, symbolizing that agricultural wealth emerges directly from the union of the subterranean underworld and the sunlit earth.
Artistic Depictions with Eirene and Tyche
In Classical Greek art and civic sculpture, Plutus was rarely depicted as a bearded monarch; instead, artists portrayed him as a radiant infant or a young boy holding a cornucopia—the horn of plenty overflowing with pomegranates, figs, wheat cakes, and grapes. His most famous visual representation in antiquity was a bronze statue group sculpted around 370 BC by Cephisodotus the Elder, the father or uncle of Praxiteles, which stood in the Athenian Agora and survives today through Roman marble copies.
Created to celebrate the peace treaty following Athens’ naval victory over Sparta, the sculpture depicted Eirene, the serene goddess of peace, holding the infant Plutus affectionately in her left arm while the child reached up to touch her chin. The political allegory was unmistakable to every citizen walking through the marketplace: true economic prosperity and material wealth can only grow and be nurtured under the protection of civic peace. In later Hellenistic sanctuaries, similar statues showed the infant Plutus cradled in the arms of Tyche, the goddess of fortune, or Athena Ergane, patroness of craftsmen.
Why Plutus Is Blind in Aristophanes’ Comedy
As Athens transitioned from a purely agrarian economy to a maritime commercial empire powered by the silver mines of Laurion and silver owl coinage, philosophers and playwrights began questioning why honest, hard-working citizens often lived in poverty while corrupt politicians, informers, and swindlers grew fabulously rich. In 388 BC, the master comic playwright Aristophanes answered this question in his final surviving comedy, titled Wealth (Ploutos).
In the play, an honest but poor elderly Athenian farmer named Chremylus consults the Oracle of Delphi and is instructed to follow the first man he sees upon leaving the temple. That man turns out to be a ragged, filthy, blind beggar who reveals himself as the god Plutus. When Chremylus asks how the god of wealth came to be blind, Plutus explains that in his youth he had threatened to visit only the homes of righteous, wise, and virtuous people. Hearing this, Zeus grew jealous of good mortals and struck Plutus blind so that he could no longer distinguish the wicked from the noble, forcing him to wander randomly into whatever household happened to cross his path.
The Healing of Plutus and Philosophical Allegory
The plot of Aristophanes’ comedy follows Chremylus as he brings the blind Plutus to the sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of medicine, where sacred temple serpents lick the god’s eyelids and restore his eyesight. Immediately, the social order of Athens is turned upside down: honest farmers become wealthy overnight, corrupt sycophants lose their ill-gotten fortunes, and even Hermes complains that no one is offering sacrifices to the Olympian gods anymore because good people now automatically receive the wealth they deserve. Midway through the play, Chremylus must also debate Penia, the fierce goddess of poverty, who argues persuasively that if everyone were rich, no one would ever farm the land, forge iron tools, build ships, or practice science, because necessity is the true mother of human industry.
In later Greek and Roman literature, writers such as Lucian of Samosata expanded upon the physical allegory of Plutus. Not only was the god of wealth blind, Lucian observed, but he was also lame and slow-footed when approaching a mortal’s house, yet possessed swift wings when departing—explaining why fortunes take decades of grueling labor to accumulate through honest work, yet can vanish in a single afternoon of extravagance.
