On the main side of the krater the Underworld is depicted. Persephone and Hades are in a four-column building that looks like a naiskos (a small temple). Persephone holds a cross-shaped torch in her right hand and a pinakion (plate) with pomegranates that she offers to Hades. Hades holds his royal sceptre in his left hand and a kantharos (wine drinking vase) in his right.

Αround the naiskos there are scenes from various myths that took place in or relate to the Underworld. (2) In the upper left corner, the two children of Heracles with their mother Megara are depicted, whom Heracles killed in a fit of god-sent madness. To atone for the bloodshed, he was forced to perform the famous twelve labors. (3) Lower, three Furies, of which two are named Poinai (punishment) and the third as Ananke (necessity), are chasing those who have committed crimes against the physical and moral order of things (in this case, Sisyphus). (4) Next to them, the famous musician Orpheus is playing his lyre in an effort to convince the rulers of the Underworld to restore his dead wife Eurydice to life. (5) Below is the cruel punishment imposed on Sisyphus, who fooled death and Zeus himself: pushing a rock uphill, only for it to fall back down. (6) Next to him, there is Hermes acting as psychopomp, that is, being responsible for the transfer of souls and messages from the Upper World to the Underworld. (7) Just below the naiskos, Heracles captures Kerberos, the three-headed hound that guarded the Underworld, and (8) a woman rides a hippocamp. (9) In the upper right corner, Theseus and Perithous are judged by Dike, the personification of justice, because the latter misguided Hades, attempting to seduce Persephone. (10) Below are the king of Eleusis, Triptolemos, associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries and the afterlife, and two of the judges in the Underworld, Aiakos and Rhadamanthys. (11) Finally, down to the right, appear the Danaids, the daughters of the North African king Danaos, who were sentenced to pour water with their hydriae in a leaky pithos eternally in the Underworld, as a punishment for killing their husband-cousins on their wedding night.