Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Hesiod sings that Demeter, bright goddess, bore Plutos (Wealth) to the hero Iasion in Crete’s rich land, uniting with him in love in a thrice-ploughed field. Plutos goes everywhere on earth and on the sea, and into whose hands he comes he makes him rich and bestows great fortune. Homer’s Calypso, listing goddesses harmed for loving mortals, recalls that Zeus struck Iasion with the bright bolt when Demeter yielded to him in that thrice-turned fallow—so the lover dies, the child Wealth remains. Apollodorus and others keep the Cretan setting and the thunderbolt. The myth ties grain-mother Demeter to the personification of agricultural and chthonic riches: Plutos is not Hades, but the abundance that rises from ploughed earth—and the tale warns that even a goddess’s mortal lover may pay Zeus’s price.