Persephone is the Greek goddess who is both the daughter of Demeter and the queen of the underworld. In the oldest surviving full telling of her story, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hades seizes her from a meadow with the consent of her father, Zeus. Her mother's grief stops the crops until Zeus sends for her. Before she leaves, Hades gives her a pomegranate seed, and because she has eaten in his kingdom she must go back to him for a third of every year.
Later sources change the number of seeds and the length of her stay, and the love story popular today is not in the hymn.
Who is Persephone?
Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. Hesiod's Theogony gives her parentage in three lines and the rest of her story in a clause: Hades carried her off from her mother, "but wise Zeus gave her to him." The Library attributed to Apollodorus once names the river goddess Styx as her mother, but when the same handbook tells the abduction, it follows Demeter.
She went by several names. She was also known as Kore, the Maiden. In Plato's Cratylus she is Pherephatta, and Socrates remarks how many people are afraid of her name before offering a playful etymology that makes her a goddess of wisdom. The Romans called her Proserpina. Ovid sets her abduction at a lake near Henna in Sicily, while the hymn names only the plain of Nysa.
She is often called a goddess of spring, though the hymn does not call her that; it times her return to the spring flowers. At Eleusis she was worshipped with Demeter as a goddess of the crops, and where ancient poets show her at home, she is ruling the dead.
What is the story of Persephone and Hades?
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, probably composed in the seventh or sixth century BC, opens with Persephone picking flowers with the daughters of Oceanus. Earth, at the will of Zeus, had grown a narcissus with a hundred blooms "to be a snare for the bloom-like girl." When she reached for it, the ground opened and Hades drove out in a golden chariot and took her. She cried out for her father. The poet is plain about who arranged it: Hades was carrying her off "by leave of Zeus," and she was "his own brother's child and all unwilling."
Only two gods heard her: Helios, the sun, and Hecate, from her cave. Demeter searched for nine days with flaming torches in her hands, touching neither ambrosia nor nectar and never bathing. On the tenth day Hecate met her, and together they went to Helios. He told Demeter that Zeus had given her daughter to Hades as his wife and urged her to accept it: Hades was Demeter's own brother, and he had received his third share when the gods first divided their realms.
Demeter left Olympus. Disguised as an old woman, she found work in the house of Celeus, king of Eleusis, nursing his infant son, and at night she hid the boy in the fire to make him immortal until his mother caught her at it. Demeter then revealed herself, had the people build her a temple and sat in it grieving. For a year nothing would sprout. Oxen pulled plows over the fields and the barley seed came to nothing, until Zeus saw that the human race would starve and the gods would lose their sacrifices.
He sent Iris, then every other god in turn, and Demeter refused them all. At last he sent Hermes down to fetch her daughter. Hermes found Hades on a couch with Persephone beside him, "much reluctant, because she yearned for her mother." Hades obeyed, but first he slipped her the seed. After mother and daughter were reunited, Hecate came and embraced Persephone, and the hymn says she was her "minister and companion" from that day on.
Did Persephone love Hades?
Not in the oldest surviving full telling. The hymn tells a seizure agreed between her father and her uncle, and she is unwilling at every stage: crying out in the meadow, reluctant on the couch and, in her own account to her mother, forced to taste the seed. Hades gets one speech. As she leaves, he asks her to think kindly of him and promises that while she is with him she will "rule all that lives and moves" and hold the greatest rights among the gods. She springs up for joy when he finishes, but the joy is at going home.
In Ovid's abduction scene, the love is Hades' own. In book 5 of the Metamorphoses, Venus has Cupid shoot him so that the underworld will not stay outside her power, and Proserpina is seen, loved and carried off almost in the same moment. The scene says nothing of her loving him. Later in the poem, Orpheus goes down to beg for his dead wife and uses that story as his argument: if the old tale of the abduction is true, he tells the two rulers, then Love joined them as well.
Frazer's 1921 notes to Apollodorus call the episode the rape of Persephone, using the word for the abduction. Neither the hymn nor Ovid's abduction scene shows her loving Hades. Modern retellings often do. The webcomic Lore Olympus, by Rachel Smythe, is filed under romance and bills itself as the taking of Persephone "as it's never been told before."
How many pomegranate seeds did Persephone eat?
One, in the oldest surviving full telling. Ovid gives her seven, and a children's book of 1853 gives her six.
| Source | Seeds | Time below each year |
|---|---|---|
| Homeric Hymn to Demeter | One | A third of the year |
| Apollodorus, Library | One | A third of the year |
| Ovid, Metamorphoses | Seven | Half the year |
| Hawthorne, Tanglewood Tales (1853) | Six | Six months, one for each seed |
In the hymn the seed is a trick. Hades gives it to her "secretly," the poet says, so that she will not stay with Demeter for good, and when Persephone tells her mother what happened, she says he put it in her mouth and forced her to taste it. Apollodorus keeps the single seed and adds a witness, Ascalaphus, whom Demeter punishes by laying a heavy rock on him in Hades. Ovid changes the most. His Proserpina picks the fruit herself in an underworld garden, breaks her fast with seven seeds, and turns Ascalaphus into an owl for reporting it. Jupiter then splits the year evenly between her mother and her husband.
The six seeds are at least as old as Nathaniel Hawthorne's children's book Tanglewood Tales, first published in 1853. Hawthorne's Proserpina, faint with hunger, bites a dried-up pomegranate, and six seeds stay in her mouth. Ceres tells her she must spend one month a year with Pluto for each of them. Hawthorne is the earliest source for the six-seed version found in researching this article, which is not the same as proof that he invented it.
The seed matters because of what Demeter asks first on getting her daughter back: whether she "tasted any food while below." In his notes to the same passage of Apollodorus, the anthropologist James Frazer collected beliefs from ancient Egypt, New Caledonia and New Zealand that whoever eats in the land of the dead cannot return.
Does the Persephone myth explain the seasons?
The hymn ties her return to spring. Demeter tells her daughter she will come up again "when the earth shall bloom with the fragrant flowers of spring," and when Demeter finally gives way, the poem describes a bare field that would soon wave with long ears of grain "as springtime waxed." The usual reading goes a step further and treats her yearly absence as the barren season, when her mother mourns and nothing grows. The Metropolitan Museum's audio guide to a vase painted around 440 BC tells it that way. The hymn itself describes one famine, during Demeter's first grief, and does not say that it comes back every year.
In 1913 the classicist F. M. Cornford proposed another reading. He pointed to an inscription from the third quarter of the fifth century BC that ordered three underground granaries built at Eleusis to store the first fruits of the harvest. The date the grain went in is not recorded. Cornford reasoned that it must have followed the harvest of May and June, and he found no mention of the grain being used in ritual before the Eleusinia, the festival held just before the autumn sowing. His suggestion was that Persephone's descent could also stand for that storage, and her return for the stored grain being taken out again at seed time. "No one ever sowed corn in a cave," he wrote, "but it is a very suitable place for storing it." He drew on Frazer and Martin Nilsson, who had read a Sicilian festival held as the grain ripened, the bringing home of Kore, as the carrying of the harvest to the barn.
On Cornford's reading, her time below would fall in summer rather than winter. He thought the storage meaning was the older one and that the familiar reading, her descent as the sowing and her return as the sprouting crop, took over once it was forgotten. The hymn as it survives still times her return to spring. Cornford's idea is a reading of the ritual behind the poem.
Why is Persephone called the queen of the underworld?
Because she already rules there in Homer. Neither Homeric epic tells the abduction story, but both know the queen. In the Iliad, a father's curse on his son is fulfilled by "Zeus of the nether world and dread Persephone." In the Odyssey, Circe sends Odysseus to "the house of Hades and dread Persephone" and explains that Persephone allowed the dead prophet Teiresias alone to keep his mind. Among the dead, it is Persephone who sends the women's shades up to speak with Odysseus, and he finally flees for fear that she will send the Gorgon's head out against him.
In Ovid she is one of the two rulers Orpheus has to move. When he finishes singing for Eurydice, neither the queen nor the lord of the depths can bring themselves to refuse him.
Above ground she was worshipped with her mother. The hymn ends with Demeter teaching her rites at Eleusis and blessing whoever has seen them: "Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries." The Metropolitan Museum calls the Eleusinian Mysteries the earliest and most celebrated of the ancient mystery cults, and it admitted non-Athenians, women and slaves as well as Athenian men. In the separate Orphic tradition, Persephone was the mother of Dionysus by Zeus.
What are Persephone's symbols?
The list below keeps to things an ancient text or object connects with her. Some belong to her story more than to her person.
| Symbol | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Pomegranate | The seed Hades gives her in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, seven seeds in Ovid. |
| Narcissus | The hundred-bloomed flower Earth grew to lure her in the meadow. |
| Crown | On the Met's vase she rises from the earth wearing a crown and necklace. |
| Torches | Held by the goddesses around her, not by Persephone herself in these sources. Demeter searches with torches, and on the Met's vase Hecate lights her way up with two. |
| Ears of grain | Demeter's gift. Mother and daughter were worshipped together at Eleusis as goddesses of the crops, though no source here makes grain Persephone's own emblem. |
| Poplar and willow | Homer's "groves of Persephone" at the edge of the world of the dead. |
| Mint | Strabo's myth of Minthe, a lover of Hades whom Kore trampled and turned into garden mint. |
From the archive
Persephone: The Underworld Throne seats her among roots and skulls with a split pomegranate in her hands. Persephone And The Pomegranate puts the fruit in a skeleton's hand beside narcissus flowers, and Persephone Heart Hands frames it inside a heart made of her own hands. For the goddess who heard her cry and found Demeter on the tenth day, read Hecate: Greek Goddess of Witchcraft and Crossroads.
Sources
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914). Perseus Digital Library.
- Hesiod. Theogony, lines 912-914, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (1914).
- Homer. Iliad 9.453-457, translated by A. T. Murray (1924).
- Homer. Odyssey 10.487-540 and book 11, translated by A. T. Murray (1919).
- Apollodorus. Library 1.3.1 and 1.5.1-3, translated with notes by James George Frazer (1921).
- Ovid. Metamorphoses 5.385-571 and 10.1-63, translated by Brookes More (1922). Latin text checked at The Latin Library.
- Plato. Cratylus 404c-d, translated by Harold N. Fowler (1921).
- Strabo. Geography 8.3.14, translated by H. L. Jones (1924).
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853. "The Pomegranate Seeds."
- Cornford, F. M. (1913). The ἀπαρχαί and the Eleusinian Mysteries. In Essays and Studies Presented to William Ridgeway, Cambridge University Press, 153-166.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Terracotta bell-krater attributed to the Persephone Painter, about 440 BC, 28.57.23. Object entry and audio guide.
- Karoglou, Kiki (2013). Mystery Cults in the Greek and Roman World. Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Smythe, Rachel. Lore Olympus. WEBTOON.