Asking because Iâm researching for my own story.
Did Hades ever cheat on Persephone? Iâve seen two different versions of a myth that he fell in love with two people.
One is that he did love these two but Demeter or Persephone turned one into a mint and Hades turned another into a tree (I think?)
But another version where he was pursued by these two and he didnât actually love them?
Not sure about the second version, feels like someone babied Hades a bit.
Ah yes, the famous Leuce and Minthe everybody talks about... Well, while I am no expert on the matter, I'll give you the trick that make you seem like an expert: just look at the sources for these stories. As in who wrote about them, when did they write about them, and which culture did they belong to?
Let us begin with Minte, the lover turned to mint. For example, when it came to the sources of the Minthe's legend, one of them is Ovid - so alarm bells - but said mention is just one quick throw-away line, not a full story ; unless the other sources which go into more details about it, and these other sources are Greek. So already the alarm bell can be put down: the Greeks seemed to know more about this than the Romans. However who are the Greeks in question that wrote about this legend? Strabo and Oppian - people who lived in the post-roman age of Greece, in (or around) the first centuries after Christ (Oppian even more obviously since he is in the third century CE). So we are into the latest part of Greek mythology document, the most "recent", and thus it has to be considered carefully. Because while in these late era we did find people digging up and preserving old myth we had no other record of (see how Apollodorus ended up actually preserving an old Medusa story, the one of Medusa being cursed for her vanity, when everybody believed him for a long time to have just collected an alternate tale of Ovid), but on the other we also have LOTS of inventions and stuff that clearly did not exist in very ancient, and not even in Classical Greece (see Nonnos' Dionysiaca which is... a quite special thing.)
It should especially be considered that the two late Greek versions contradict each other, and come from works with very different purposes. Strabo collected the legend as part of his geographical work, and mentions it because there is a mountain near an area sacred to Hades called Minthe, and according to the legend Strabo heard and that he wrote down, Minthe was a lover of Hades that Kore/Persephone "trampled" to death (probably out of jealousy) and turned into a mint. Note that this is the same version Ovid briefly mentions in his Metamorphosis. So by the town the Romans came around, we can be pretty sure this story was the most common one... And yet a few centuries later, Oppian collected a different story in his Halieutica, and Oppian was not a geographer but a poet, and the Halieutica is a ... didactic epic about fishing. I know it sounds weird, but I swear it makes sense. Anyway, in the story Oppian gives us, the tale goes differently: Minthe was still Hades' lover, but the story explicitely says she was BEFORE Hades ravished/captured Persephone to be his bride, and as a result Minthe was actually pushed away/abandoned. (Note that in the Ovid/Strabo stories Minte seems to be a human woman, while in Oppian's tale, she is a "nymph of the Cocytus", aka one of the nymphs of the rivers of the underworld). And in Oppian's tale it is not Persephone that was jealous, but Minthe, who kept complaining, and saying bad things about Hades' new bride, and who kept boasting about her own beauty supposedly greater than Persephone's, and she kept repeating that Hades would end up being tired of Persephone and divorce her and take Minte back... And the goddess that got angry with Minthe wasn't Persephone, but it was Demeter, who became very angry at Minthe slandering her daughter, and trampled her until she was turned into a mint-plant.
These are the main sources for the Minthe tale, but there are other secondary records about it. For example saint Photios of the Orthodox Church wrote in the ninth century a "Lexicon", a work meant to explain words and vocabulary of Antique authors that had gone obscure - and he had a mention of Minthe, where he merely described her as Hades's mistress/extra-marital lover, and yet a "nymph of Cocytus" (so we have a mix of the previous versions above). We also have a preserved scholia of a Greek poet of the second century (Nicander) that mentions another story of Minthe being killed by Persephone for having slept with Hades - but in this scholia, Persephone rather "ripped to pieces" Minthe, and it was Hades himself that turned her into a mint.
So conclusion: the story did exist... But apparently only was recorded in very, very late Greek mythology, meaning it might be one of the very latest developments of Hades' love life. THAT BEING SAID... there is an element that might hint at the source of this sudden legend. John M. Edmonds published in 1957 "The Fragments of Attic Comedy" in which he mentions the writings of the second century CE scholar Julius Polux, who mentions that Minthe was evoked and described in an old Greek play we now have lost: "Nomoi", the "Laws", written by Cratinus, an Athenian playwright of the 6-5th century BCE... So given all the elements we have, we might be to imagine that Minthe started her life as a theatrical invention, that became more and more popular until it became a widespread legend.
We also have to consider the cultural elements surrounding the mint-plant in Ancient Greece - because whenever someone turns into a plant, it is very revealing. The myth of Minthe seems to be a poetic transliteration of the various roles the mint had in Ancient Greece. After all, it was a plant used for funerary rites and rituals - explaining why it would be associated with Hades and the underworld. It was also one of the ingredients of the sacred brew used in the Eleusian Mysteries, again linking it to the Underworld, but with the additional links to Demeter and Kore. (Even though some rather saw Minte as being an opposite of Persephone/Demeter, for example Marcel Detienne in "The Garden of Adonis" (a studies of spices in Ancient Greece), points out that the mint was seen as a plant of sterility, or a sterile symbol, and that thus Minthe being destroyed by Demeter represents the victory of a goddess of fertility against the plant of sterility. We also have records of the mint being considered an aphrodisiac by Ancient Greeks - which again would explain Minthe's role as a lover of Hades... So Minthe might have been an allegorical character to depict the role of the mint in relation to the funerary rites and/or Eleusinian rites, that gained a life of its own... Maybe. We can never be sure.
But one thing we are sure of is that Minthe did not belong to the oldest versions of Greek mythology - she is not from the Homeric or Hesiodic traditions, in both of which Hades is very much faithful to Persephone.
As for Leuce, she is... very very much less interesting than Minthe. Because the story of Leuce/Leuke only comes from one source: Servius. Who was not from Greece, but from Italy, and who lived between the fifth and sixth century, aka at a time where a lost of the old myths had been lost or very, very warped - and he is to this day the only source we have for this story so... he might have either invented it, or recorded someone else's invention or deformation. Mind you, people will come saying "But... Leuke was turned into a poplar tree, and the poplar tree was HUGE in Underworld symbolism and Greek mythology!". And I do not deny that... But when the only source we have for a character is a non-Greek person that is the only one speaking of said character and came long after Ancient Greece and even after the glory days of the Roman Empire... Yeah I am doubting Leuke ever really belonged to Greek mythology.
If you want to write something about Hades having another lover, at least go with Minthe, she has more roots in Greek mythology (no pun intended). But you are not even forced to include Minthe because she is part of the very late stages of Greek mythology, she is not a constant, so you can add her if you want, or go with older traditions where she did not exist.
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