Plutus

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Plutus (Greek Ploutos, “wealth”) is the Greek personification of riches: the divine figure of material abundance, most often imagined as a child or youth carrying a cornucopia spilling grain and fruit. He is a minor god in the strict sense — a power named and depicted rather than the center of a great cult — but a persistent one, because what he stands for is concrete and universal.

His parentage ties him to the soil. Hesiod’s Theogony makes him the son of the grain-goddess Demeter and the mortal Iasion, conceived in a thrice-plowed field — a genealogy that fixes wealth, in the older Greek imagination, as something agricultural: the harvest, the full granary, the fertile land. That descent also links him to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Demeter’s great cult, where the child holding the horn of plenty appears in the company of the goddesses as a figure of the bounty the rites promised. Over time, as Greek economic life moved beyond the farm, Ploutos broadened to mean wealth in general, including coined money.

The detail that made him memorable is his blindness. Greek writers explained that Zeus had blinded him so that he would scatter his gifts at random, without regard to merit — which is why, the reasoning went, the wicked so often prosper and the good go poor. Aristophanes built a comedy on the conceit, the Plutus of 388 BCE, in which an honest farmer leads the blind god to a healing sanctuary and restores his sight; once Plutus can see, he gives only to the deserving, and the established order is thrown into confusion. The play uses the god as a vehicle for a hard question about justice and fortune, one the figure was built to carry.

Plutus is easily — and anciently — confused with Plouton, that is Pluto or Hades, lord of the underworld, whose name draws on the same root for wealth, since the riches of metals and the seed-corn alike were held to come from beneath the earth. The two were sometimes assimilated, and the overlap is real; scholars nonetheless treat them as distinct figures, one a personified abstraction of riches, the other a major chthonic god. The Latin Pluto for the underworld deity, and the modern habit of calling the moneyed “plutocrats,” both descend from the same cluster of words. What the Greek figure preserved, across his shifts of meaning, was an old intuition that wealth is something given rather than earned — and that its giver is not looking.