Persephone
Daughter of Demeter, carried off by Hades to be queen of the underworld. Because she ate a pomegranate seed below, she must go back for part of every year. Greek art shows her with torches, ears of wheat and, in southern Italy, a cockerel.
Meaning
Persephone (per-SEF-uh-nee, as Dictionary.com respells it) was also called Kore, the Maid; the Romans knew her as Proserpina. She is the daughter of Demeter and Zeus, carried off by Hades to be queen of the underworld, as Dictionary.com puts it. In the Odyssey, Odysseus flees the underworld in fear that “the high goddess Persephone” will send up the Gorgon’s head against him. Vase painters gave her torches. Diana Burton describes an amphora by the Dinos Painter of about 430 BC with the white-haired Hades between Demeter and Persephone, who holds torches. On the clay plaques dedicated in her sanctuary at Locri in southern Italy, a famous plaque in Reggio Calabria shows her enthroned beside Hades holding a cockerel and an ear of wheat. On a mixing bowl of about 440 BC in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she climbs up out of the ground guided by Hermes and by Hekate, who carries torches, while Demeter waits to receive her.
Origin and history
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story most fully. She was picking flowers in a meadow with the daughters of Ocean when she reached for a marvellous narcissus that Earth had grown, at Zeus’s wish, as a snare. The earth opened on the plain of Nysa, and the Host of Many sprang out with his immortal horses and carried her off on his golden chariot. Only Hecate and the Sun heard her cry. Demeter searched for her, and in her grief she kept the seed from sprouting, “a most dreadful and cruel year for mankind”, until Zeus sent Hermes to bring the girl back.
Before she left, Hades promised that she would rule all that lives and moves, and then “secretly gave her sweet pomegranate seed to eat”, so that she would not stay for ever with her mother. Telling Demeter afterwards, Persephone says he forced her to taste it against her will. Because she had eaten, Demeter tells her, she must go back below “to dwell a third part of the seasons every year”; when the earth blooms with spring flowers she will come up again. The hymn ends with Demeter teaching her mysteries at Eleusis, and with a prayer to Demeter and “your daughter all beauteous Persephone” together.
A third of the year, or half?
The Greek sources give her a third of the year below. The Homeric Hymn says so twice, and Apollodorus agrees that “Persephone was compelled to remain a third of every year with Pluto”. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Latin, makes it half: Jupiter “divides the rolling year equally”, and the goddess spends as many months with her mother as with her husband. Ovid has her eat seven pomegranate seeds, picked in Pluto’s garden. The Metropolitan Museum’s label for its krater follows the Roman version and says she spent half of each year with Hades. Ascalaphus, who saw her eat and told, is punished differently too: Apollodorus says Demeter laid a heavy rock on him, while in Ovid the queen of the underworld turns him into an owl, “a direful omen to mortals”.
The pomegranate
In Apollodorus, Pluto gives her the seed “in order that she might not tarry long with her mother”. His translator James Frazer gathered examples of a belief found in many places that a living person who eats the food of the dead cannot return. Burton reads the fruit two ways: the pomegranate had a meaning for marriage, sealing the union of Hades and Persephone, but it also bound her to the world of the dead. On the Locri plaques it is Hades who usually holds the pomegranate, while Persephone holds a ball, a toy girls dedicated to the gods when they married.
Read next
- Next in Greek gods and their symbolsMedusaThe Gorgon whose gaze turned people to stone, beheaded by the hero Perseus. Her staring face, the gorgoneion, was put on shields, temples, cups and coins to frighten off harm. Since about 2021 a Medusa tattoo has also been widely worn as a sign of surviving sexual violence.
- In Ovid, Persephone turns Ascalaphus, who saw her eat the pomegranate, into an owlOwl symbolismThe bird of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, stamped on the coins of Athens, and in Hindu art the vahana, or animal vehicle, of the goddess Lakshmi. In Roman and English belief, and in Cherokee and North Carolina folk belief as it was recorded, its cry at night was a warning of death or evil.
See also
Demeter, Hades, Goddesses of death, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon.
Sources
- Persephone (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Persephone” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary and The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy), Dictionary.com, entry and pronunciation
- Apollodorus, Library 1.5.3 (tr. J. G. Frazer), Apollodorus, The Library, translated by Sir James George Frazer (Loeb, 1921), 1.5.3, with Frazer’s note, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Apollod. 1.5.3 and Frazer’s note 1
- Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White), Hesiod, Theogony; Shield of Heracles; The Homeric Hymns, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), Project Gutenberg eBook #348, Project Gutenberg, Homeric Hymn II, To Demeter
- The Odyssey of Homer (tr. Butcher and Lang), Homer, The Odyssey, translated by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879), Project Gutenberg eBook #1728, Project Gutenberg, Book XI
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books I–VII (tr. Henry T. Riley), Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Henry T. Riley (1851), Project Gutenberg eBook #21765, Project Gutenberg, Book V
- Bell-krater attributed to the Persephone Painter, 28.57.23 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Terracotta bell-krater attributed to the Persephone Painter, Attic, ca. 440 BC, accession 28.57.23, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalogue description
- Hades: Cornucopiae, Fertility and Death (Diana Burton, ASCS 32 Proceedings), Diana Burton (Victoria University of Wellington), “Hades: Cornucopiae, Fertility and Death”, ASCS 32 Proceedings (Australasian Society for Classical Studies, 2011), Australasian Society for Classical Studies, pp. 3–5; p. 4
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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