Persephone

The flower grown as a trap

Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Demeter. Her story is told most fully in a Homeric Hymn, one of a group of early Greek poems in praise of a god.

Persephone reaches for a narcissus flower, and the ground opens. The hymn says the goddess Earth grew the flower as a trap for the girl, as Zeus had planned. Hades, the ruler of the underworld, rises in his chariot, seizes her and drives back down while she calls to her father.

Her cry shows the betrayal at the centre of the poem. Zeus hears it, but he has already agreed to the marriage. Demeter hears only an echo. She begins to search, without knowing that Persephone’s own father allowed her to be taken.

The early Greek poet Hesiod gives an older and much shorter version. Demeter bears Persephone to Zeus, and Aidoneus, another name for Hades, carries her away with Zeus’s consent. The meadow, the narcissus and the pomegranate belong to the longer hymn. They are not in Hesiod’s two lines.

The pomegranate seed

Demeter stops the grain from growing. In the end Zeus orders Hades to let Persephone go. Hades agrees, but first he secretly gives his wife a pomegranate seed. When Persephone reaches her mother, Demeter at once asks whether she ate anything below.

Persephone says Hades forced her to taste the seed. Under the agreement that follows, she spends one third of the year in the underworld and two thirds with Demeter and the other gods. Her return comes with the new growth of the earth. It does not undo the abduction. The agreement only manages what follows from it.

Apollodorus, whose book, the Library, retells the Greek myths, changes one detail. In his version, Persephone eats without knowing what it will mean, and a figure called Ascalaphus testifies that she did. Demeter punishes him by placing a heavy rock over him in the underworld. The hymn needs no witness. The secret seed and Persephone’s own account are enough.

How the daughter becomes queen

Before he lets her go, Hades tells Persephone that she will rule over everything that lives and moves below, and will hold great honours among the gods. The promise comes from the god who took her by force, so it cannot turn force into consent. It does describe the rank that later poems take for granted.

In the Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem about the voyage home of Odysseus, the hero visits the world of the dead. There he fears that dread Persephone may send the Gorgon’s head, a monster’s head, against him from the house of Hades. The poem does not tell how she became queen. Her power is already part of what makes the underworld dangerous.

Two names for one goddess

Her two names stay in use side by side. Kore means “the Maiden”. It presents her as Demeter’s daughter, the girl whose absence ruins the earth. Persephone is the name of the feared ruler whom visitors meet among the dead. Greek worship never needed one role to replace the other. The divided year let both continue.

The division also sets limits on everyone involved. Demeter gets her daughter back, but not for the whole year. Hades keeps his queen, but he must let her go. Persephone has power below, while her movements are still governed by an agreement other gods made.

The descent shown near Eleusis

People also placed parts of the story on real ground around Eleusis, where Demeter had her sanctuary, a sacred place of worship. Pausanias, an ancient writer who described the places of Greece, records a place called Erineus beside the river Cephisus. There, it was said, Hades went down below with Persephone. Erineus was separate from the well and temple linked with Demeter’s arrival.

Inside the sanctuary walls, a shrine called the Plutoneion gave Hades his own sacred plot. Its remains include a building from the fourth century BC, built over an earlier temple. So the underworld had a place inside the very sanctuary devoted to the mother’s search and her reunion with her daughter.

At Eleusis, Persephone was more than a sign of spring. The ground kept the direction of the abduction, the closed-off place of Hades and the rites that Demeter set up after the return. Persephone’s route stayed divided: down at Erineus, back to her mother, then below again when her part of the year came round.