Plutus- Greek GodDeity"God of Wealth"

Born in a Plowed Field

Plutus was the child of Demeter and the mortal Iasion, conceived when the goddess lay with him in a thrice-plowed field in Crete. Zeus struck Iasion dead with a thunderbolt for his presumption in lying with a goddess. Calypso would later cite the killing as proof that the gods begrudged any goddess who took a mortal lover. The child survived. Diodorus Siculus placed the union at the wedding feast of Cadmus and Harmonia on Samothrace.

He wandered over land and sea. Riches followed wherever he went. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter declares that whoever Demeter favors with his presence grows wealthy, and the Eleusinian Mysteries counted his blessing among the rewards promised to initiates. In Attic art he appears as a small child in the arms of Eirene or Demeter. The sculptor Cephisodotus carved the pair: Eirene holding the infant Wealth.

The Blind God

Zeus blinded Plutus so that he would distribute wealth without seeing who received it, to the wicked as freely as to the just. Aristophanes built a comedy around this premise, performed in 388 BCE. An Athenian citizen named Chremylus takes the blind god to the temple of Asclepius, where his sight is restored. Once able to see, Plutus visits only the virtuous and deserving. The wicked are suddenly impoverished, the honest suddenly rich. Poverty herself appears to argue that she drives human effort, that without her, no one would work. Even Hermes comes down from Olympus to complain: with Plutus seeing clearly, mortals have stopped making offerings to the gods. The play ends with Plutus installed in Athena's treasury on the Acropolis, wealth restored to where the city kept it.