Hades holds an unusual place among the Olympians: he received the underworld as his share when the three brothers divided the cosmos, yet he was barely worshipped in the ordinary way, and Greeks were wary even of naming him. To speak the name of the lord of the dead was to draw his attention, so they used euphemisms, above all Plouton, the wealthy one, from which Latin Pluto comes. The wealth was literal and agricultural: everything that grows and everything that is buried belongs to the ground he rules.
His realm took his name; the Greeks spoke of going down to the house of Hades rather than to a place called by another word. It was not, in the older conception, a place of punishment. Most of the dead were simply shades, drained of strength, existing without reward or torment, the picture the Odyssey gives when Odysseus meets them and Achilles says he would rather be a landless labourer among the living than king over all the dead.
Cult reflected the caution. Sacrifices to Hades and the underworld powers were chthonic: offered at night, over a pit, with the victim's head turned down and the offering burned entire rather than shared, the mirror image of a feast for the Olympians above.