Homeric Hymns

Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, picks flowers by the sea and becomes entranced by a particularly beautiful flower. As Persephone goes to pick the flower, the earth opens, and Hades, god of the Underworld, emerges in a gold chariot. He snatches Persephone and takes her to the Underworld to be his wife.

Demeter, goddess of fertility, hears her daughter’s cries and searches the earth for Persephone. Soon Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, who also overheard Persephone’s cries, takes Demeter to the sun god Helios; he is watchman of gods and mortals, and he also saw what happened. He tells Demeter her daughter’s fate: Zeus has given Persephone to Hades in marriage. Angry with Zeus, Demeter leaves Olympus and lives among humankind. She takes refuge by the “Maiden’s Well” and looks “quite old, and long cut off from childbirth” (6). Girls who have come to gather water from the well notice Demeter, unaware that she is a goddess. Demeter lies to them, saying she was captured by pirates and forcefully taken to this land, and she asks the girls if there is a family in need of a nurse. Callidice, one of the girls, answers that her own mother has just given birth to a boy. Once working for the family, Demeter cares for the boy as if she were caring for another god: One night, Metaneira, Callidice’s sister, witnesses Demeter place her brother in the fire pit and calls out in anguish. Demeter is enraged by the mortal’s ignorance, claiming that her godly actions would grant the boy everlasting youth and immortality. She reveals herself as the goddess Demeter.

Her identity revealed, Demeter “grew and altered” (12). She becomes young and beautiful once more. The house awakens and the girls rush to tend to the boy, but he is left unsatisfied by mortal caregiving. The town erects a shrine to Demeter, as she has commanded, but the goddess remains tormented by the loss of her daughter. For a year, Demeter makes the “generous land merciless, grim for mortals” (12-13). Noticing the famine, Zeus sends Iris, a messenger for the gods, to summon Demeter. Demeter refuses to rejoin Olympus despite the many gifts offered her. She requests only to see her daughter Persephone. Zeus sends Hermes to proposition Hades, who grants Persephone her freedom. However, before Persephone can leave, Hades slips her a pomegranate kernel to eat, forever connecting her to the Underworld. Hades escorts Persephone to Demeter, and the two are reunited.

Zeus sends Rhea, his and Demeter’s Titan mother, to Demeter. Rhea delivers Zeus decree: Persephone will spend a third of the year with Hades and two-thirds of the year with her mother in Olympus. Affirming Zeus’s word, Demeter makes the land fertile once more and teaches humankind how to perform her sacred rites.