Myth · Greek

Persephone

Greek mythology — queen of the underworld and goddess of spring growth

Persephone is the daughter of Demeter and Zeus, carried off by the lord of the dead while gathering flowers and made queen of the underworld. Because she ate pomegranate seeds there she must return below for part of every year, and her going and coming gave the Greeks their myth of the seasons. As Kore, "the Maiden", she is the gentle goddess of spring growth; as the dread queen below, she is a formidable power whom the Greeks preferred not to name.

How to spot them

▸The pomegranate, the torch, sheaves of grain and the asphodel
▸Called Kore, 'the Maiden', and euphemistically Despoina, 'the Mistress'
▸Seized while picking flowers in a meadow — at Enna in Sicily, or Nysa
▸Worshipped with her mother at Eleusis as one of 'the Two Goddesses'

Stories & episodes

Seized while picking flowers, as the earth opened beneath her

A narcissus was the lure; the abduction is placed at Enna in Sicily by Ovid.

Ate a few pomegranate seeds, and so could never wholly leave

Six seeds in the usual telling, giving six months below; the hymn keeps the number vague.

Her mother searched with lit torches for nine days, and the earth went barren

Hecate and Helios finally told her who had taken the girl.

Granted a musician's plea and let his wife follow him out, on one condition

Orpheus charmed the queen of the dead, but looked back at Eurydice.

Quarrelled with the goddess of love over a beautiful youth, and shared him by the year

Adonis, divided between the world above and below — a doublet of her own story.

Turned a rival nymph into the mint plant

Minthe, a lover of her husband; the herb keeps her name.

Held Theseus and Pirithous fast when they came to carry her off

They were stuck to the chair of forgetfulness; Heracles freed only Theseus.

Key ideas

Her annual descent and return is the ancient world's explanation of the barren season, and the model for the dying-and-rising vegetation figures later compared with her
Her dual nature — the Maiden above, the queen below — makes her the hinge of the Eleusinian promise that death is not the end

Quick-fire facts

•Roman equivalent: Proserpina (Proserpine), whose abduction is the subject of Claudian's De raptu Proserpinae
•Daughter of Demeter and Zeus; wife of Hades and queen of the underworld
•The Homeric Hymn to Demeter is the fullest early account; Ovid tells it twice, in Metamorphoses 5 and Fasti 4
•The Greeks often avoided her name, using Kore or 'the Maiden', as they avoided naming her husband
•With Demeter she is one of 'the Two Goddesses' of Eleusis; the Eleusinian Mysteries turn on her return
•Ascalaphus, who reported that she had eaten the pomegranate, was turned into a screech owl
•Bernini's Rape of Proserpina (1621–22) in the Galleria Borghese is the most famous sculpture of the scene
•Rossetti's Proserpine (1874), modelled by Jane Morris, shows her holding the bitten pomegranate
•Stravinsky wrote the melodrama Perséphone (1934) to a text by André Gide
•Asteroid 26 Proserpina and 399 Persephone both carry her names

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Sources

Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Persephone
Ovid — Metamorphoses Book 5, the abduction at Enna and the bargain over the pomegranate