Proserpina

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Proserpina is the Roman name for the goddess the Greeks called Persephone: daughter of the grain-goddess Ceres, wife of the lord of the dead, and queen of the underworld in her own right. The Romans absorbed her early, along with her mother, into a cult drawn from Greek models; the two were worshipped together, and Latin poets told her story in the Greek shape.

The story is among the most widely retold in ancient literature. While she was gathering flowers in a meadow, the king of the underworld — Dis or Pluto to the Romans, Hades to the Greeks — burst up from below and carried her off to be his bride. Her mother searched the earth for her in grief, and in that grief let the crops fail, until the world went hungry and the gods were forced to intervene. A bargain was struck. Because the girl had eaten a few seeds of a pomegranate in the underworld, she could not return wholly to the light; she would pass part of each year below with her husband and part above with her mother. Ancient readers took the alternation as an account of the agricultural year — the grain withdrawn into the ground and rising again — though the sources do not all divide the seasons the same way.

The fullest early version is the Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter; the Roman poets Ovid and Claudian gave the abduction its most influential Latin retellings. The myth also stood close to the most famous of the Greek mystery cults, the rites at Eleusis, which were bound to Demeter and her daughter and which promised initiates a better lot after death. What was said and done there was kept secret on pain of death, and scholarship still cannot reconstruct the rite with confidence; what survives is the testimony that those who had seen it no longer feared dying.

That double aspect — a goddess of the buried seed and of the buried dead, who goes down and comes back — made Proserpina a natural figure for later allegory. Platonist and Neoplatonist readers treated the descent and return as an image of the soul’s fall into the body and its hoped-for ascent, reading the myth as philosophy in narrative dress. The reading is theirs, not the myth’s own; the early sources present a story about loss, hunger, and a mother’s recovery of her child, not a doctrine of the soul. Both layers travelled together into the Western inheritance, where Proserpina remained at once the spring that returns to the fields and the queen who rules where it does not.

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