Roman religious vocabulary for the world of the dead borrowed heavily from Greek models, and by the historical period Dis Pater, whose name literally means the wealthy father, a reference to the buried riches, mineral and agricultural, that belong to the earth, had been substantially identified with the Greek Hades and Plouton, ruler of the underworld and, in one of his aspects, giver of the earth's fertility. Alongside him stood Proserpina, the Roman form of Persephone, carried off from the world above to reign as his consort, her Roman myth following the same broad shape as the Greek original, an abduction, a mother's grief, and a compromise dividing her year between the upper world and the realm below.
Together Dis Pater and Proserpina governed a realm distinct from the individual dead themselves, the di Manes, and distinct too from more folkloric names for the underworld such as Orcus, which circulated in popular speech and appear on curse tablets and funerary inscriptions rather than in high state religious formulas. State cult treated Dis Pater and Proserpina as the formal divine authorities of the underworld, addressed together as a pair in the rare public rites that invoked the realm below by name.