- Looks after
- Queen of the underworld and goddess of spring growth
- Roman name
- Proserpina
- Often shown with
- The pomegranate, the narcissus, wheat, a torch.
Persephone
Περσεφόνη
Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, who was carried off by Hades and divides the year between the underworld and the upper world.
Persephone, also called Kore (the maiden), is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. While she was picking flowers in a meadow with her friends, the earth opened and Hades carried her away in his chariot. Only Hecate and Helios had heard her cry.
Demeter's search for her is told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Hermes brought Persephone back, but she had eaten a pomegranate seed, and so has to spend a third (in some versions half) of each year in the underworld. When she returns, spring comes.
In the underworld she is queen beside Hades, and receives the dead, as well as those heroes who ask for favours. In the Odyssey, she controls the ghosts. In Athens and Eleusis, she and Demeter were honoured together in the Mysteries.
The story was the Greeks' explanation of the seasons, and also an image of death and return.
In later art and language
Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her as Proserpine in 1874, holding the pomegranate, and poets from Tennyson to Swinburne wrote about her.
Ancient sources
- Homeric Hymn 2 to Demeter
- Hesiod, Theogony 912-914, 913
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.341-571