The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (20 page)

24

DEMETER’S NATURE AND DEEDS

T
HOUGH
the priestesses of Demeter, goddess of the cornfield, initiate brides and bridegrooms into the secrets of the couch, she has no husband of her own. While still young and gay, she bore Core and the lusty Iacchus to Zeus, her brother, out of wedlock.
¹
She also bore Plutus to the Titan Iasius, or Iasion, with whom she fell in love at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia. Inflamed by the nectar which flowed like water at the feast, the lovers slipped out of the house and lay together openly in a thrice-ploughed field. On their return, Zeus guessing from their demeanour and the mud on their arms and legs what they had been at, and enraged that Iasius should have dared to touch Demeter, struck him dead with a thunderbolt. But some say that Iasius was killed by his brother Dardanus, or torn to pieces by his own horses.
²

b
. Demeter herself has a gentle soul, and Erysichthon, son of Tropias, was one of the few men with whom she ever dealt harshly. At the head of twenty companions, Erysichthon dared invade a grove which the Pelasgians had planted for her at Dotium, and began cutting down the sacred trees, to provide timber for his new banqueting hall. Demeter assumed the form of Nicippe, priestess of the grove, and mildly ordered Erysichthon to desist. It was only when he threatened her with his axe that she revealed herself in splendour and condemned him to suffer perpetual hunger, however much he might eat. Back he went to dinner, and gorged all day at his parents’ expense, growing hungrier and thinner the more he ate, until they could no longer afford to keep him supplied with food, and he became a beggar in the streets, eating filth. Contrariwise, on Pandareus the Cretan, who stole Zeus’s golden dog and thus avenged her for the killing of Iasius, Demeter bestowed the royal gift of never suffering from the belly-ache.
³

c
. Demeter lost her gaiety for ever when young Core, afterwards called Persephone, was taken from her. Hades fell in love with Core, and went to ask Zeus’s leave to marry her. Zeus feared to offend his eldest brother by a downright refusal, but knew also that Demeter would not forgive him if Core were committed to Tartarus; he therefore answered politically that he could neither give nor withhold his consent. This emboldened Hades to abduct the girl, as she was picking
flowers in a meadow – it may have been at Sicilian Enna; or at Attic Colonus; or at Hermione; or somewhere in Crete, or near Pisa, or near Lerna; or beside Arcadian Pheneus, or at Boeotian Nysa, or anywhere else in the widely separated regions which Demeter visited in her wandering search for Core. But her own priests say that it was at Eleusis. She sought Core without rest for nine days and nights, neither eating nor drinking, and calling fruitlessly all the while. The only news she could get came from old Hecate, who early one morning had heard Core crying ‘A rape! A rape!’ but, on hurrying to the rescue, found no sign of her.
⁴

d
. On the tenth day, after a disagreeable encounter with Poseidon among the herds of Oncus, Demeter came in disguise to Eleusis, where King Celeus and his wife Metaneira entertained her hospitably; and she was invited to remain as wet-nurse to Demophoön, the newly-born prince. Their lame daughter Iambe tried to console Demeter with comically lascivious verses, and the dry-nurse, old Baubo, persuaded her to drink barley-water by a jest: she groaned as if in travail and, unexpectedly, produced from beneath her skirt Demeter’s own son Iacchus, who leaped into his mother’s arms and kissed her.

e
. ‘Oh, how greedily you drink!’ cried Abas, an elder son of Celeus’s, as Demeter gulped the pitcherful of barley-water, which was flavoured with mint. Demeter threw him a grim look, and he was metamorphosed into a lizard. Somewhat ashamed of herself, Demeter now decided to do Celeus a service, by making Demophoön immortal. That night she held him over the fire, to burn away his mortality. Metaneira, who was the daughter of Amphictyon, happened to enter the hall before the process was complete, and broke the spell; so Demophoön died. ‘Mine is an unlucky house!’ Celeus complained, weeping at the fate of his two sons, and thereafter was called Dysaules. ‘Dry your tears, Dysaules,’ said Demeter. ‘You still have three sons, including Triptolemus on whom I intend to confer such great gifts that you will forget your double loss.’

f
. For Triptolemus, who herded his father’s cattle, had recognized Demeter and given her the news she needed: ten days before this his brothers Eumolpus, a shepherd, and Eubuleus, a swineherd, had been out in the fields, feeding their beasts, when the earth suddenly gaped open, engulfing Eubuleus’s swine before his very eyes; then, with a heavy thud of hooves, a chariot drawn by black horses appeared, and dashed down the chasm. The chariot-driver’s face was invisible, but
his right arm was tightly clasped around a shrieking girl. Eumolpus had been told of the event by Eubuleus, and made it the subject for a lament.

g
. Armed with this evidence, Demeter summoned Hecate. Together they approached Helius, who sees everything, and forced him to admit that Hades had been the villain, doubtless with the connivance of his brother Zeus. Demeter was so angry that, instead of returning to Olympus, she continued to wander about the earth, forbidding the trees to yield fruit and the herbs to grow, until the race of men stood in danger of extinction. Zeus, ashamed to visit Demeter in person at Eleusis, sent her first a message by Iris (of which she took no notice), and then a deputation of the Olympian gods, with conciliatory gifts, begging her to be reconciled to his will. But she would not return to Olympus, and swore that the earth must remain barren until Core had been restored.

h
. Only one course of action remained for Zeus. He sent Hermes with a message to Hades: ‘If you do not restore Core, we are all undone!’ and with another to Demeter: ‘You may have your daughter again, on the single condition that she has not yet tasted the food of the dead.’

i
. Because Core had refused to eat so much as a crust of bread ever since her abduction, Hades was obliged to cloak his vexation, telling her mildly: ‘My child, you seem to be unhappy here, and your mother weeps for you. I have therefore decided to send you home.’

j
. Core’s tears ceased to flow, and Hermes helped her to mount his chariot. But, just as she was setting off for Eleusis, one of Hades’s gardeners, by name Ascalaphus, began to cry and hoot derisively. ‘Having seen the Lady Core,’ he said, ‘pick a pomegranate from a tree in your orchard, and eat seven seeds, I am ready to bear witness that she has tasted the food of the dead!’ Hades grinned, and told Ascalaphus to perch on the back of Hermes’s chariot.

k
. At Eleusis, Demeter joyfully embraced Core; but, on hearing about the pomegranate, grew more dejected than ever, and said again: ‘I will neither return to Olympus, nor remove my curse from the land.’ Zeus then persuaded Rhea, the mother of Hades, Demeter, and himself, to plead with her; and a compromise was at last reached. Core should spend three months of the year in Hades’s company, as Queen of Tartarus, with the title of Persephone, and the remaining nine in Demeter’s. Hecate offered to make sure that this arrangement was kept, and to keep constant watch on Core.

l
. Demeter finally consented to return home. Before leaving Eleusis, she instructed Triptolemus, Eumolpus, and Celeus (together with Diocles, King of Pherae, who had been assiduously searching for Core all this while) in her worship and mysteries. But she punished Ascalaphus for his tale-bearing by pushing him down a hole and covering it with an enormous rock, from which he was finally released by Heracles; and then she changed him into a short-eared owl.
⁵
She also rewarded the Pheneations of Arcadia, in whose house she rested after Poseidon had outraged her, with all kinds of grain, but forbade them to sow beans. One Cyamites was the first who dared do so; he has a shrine by the river Cephissus.
⁶

m
. Triptolemus she supplied with seed-corn, a wooden plough, and a chariot drawn by serpents; and sent him all over the world to teach mankind the art of agriculture. But first she gave him lessons on the Rarian Plain, which is why some call him the son of King Rarus. And to Phytalus, who had treated her kindly on the banks of the Cephissus, she gave a fig-tree, the first ever seen in Attica, and taught him how to cultivate it.
⁷

1
. Aristophanes:
Frogs
338;
Orphic Hymn
li.

2
. Homer:
Odyssey
v. 125–8; Diodorus Siculus: v. 49; Hesiod:
Theogony
969 ff.

3
. Servius on Virgil’s
Aeneid
iii. 167; Hyginus:
Fabula
250; Callimachus:
Hymn to Demeter
34 ff.; Antoninus Liberalis:
Transformations
11,; Pausanias: x. 30. 1.

4
. Hyginus:
Fabula
146; Diodorus Siculus: v. 3; Scholiast on Sophocles’s
Oedipus at Colonus
1590; Apollodorus: i. 5. 1; Scholiast on Hesiod’s
Theogony
914; Pausanias: vi. 21. 1 and i. 38. 5; Conon:
Narrations
15;
Homeric Hymn to Demeter
17.

5
. Apollodorus: i. 5. 1–3 and 12;
Homeric Hymn to Demeter
398 ff. and 445 ff.

6
. Pausanias: viii. 15. 1 and i. 37. 3.

7
.
Homeric Hymn to Demeter
231–74; Apollodorus: i. 5. 2;
Orphic Fragment
50; Hyginus:
Fabula
146; Ovid:
Metamorphoses
v. 450-563 and
Fasti
iv. 614; Nicander:
Theriaca
; Pausanias: i. 14. 2 and 37. 2.

1
. Core, Persephone, and Hecate were, clearly, the Goddess in Triad as Maiden, Nymph, and Crone, at a time when only women practised the mysteries of agriculture. Core stands for the green corn, Persephone for the ripe ear, and Hecate for the harvested corn – the ‘carline wife’ of the English countryside. But Demeter was the goddess’s general title, and
Persephone’s name has been given to Core, which confuses the story. The myth of Demeter’s adventure in the thrice-ploughed fields points to a fertility rite, which survived until recently in the Balkans: the corn-priestess will have openly coupled with the sacred king at the autumn sowing in order to ensure a good harvest. In Attica the field was first ploughed in spring; then, after the summer harvest, cross-ploughed with a lighter share; finally, when sacrifices had been offered to the Tillage-gods, ploughed again in the original direction during the autumn month of Pyanepsion, as a preliminary to sowing (Hesiod:
Works and Days
432–3, 460, 462; Plutarch:
On Isis and Osiris
69;
Against Colotes
22).

2
. Persephone (from
phero
and
phonos
, ‘she who brings destruction’), also called Persephatta at Athens (from
ptersis
and
ephapto
, ‘she who fixes destruction’) and Proserpina (‘the fearful one’) at Rome, was, it seems, a title of the Nymph when she sacrificed the sacred king. The title ‘Hecate’ (‘one hundred’) apparently refers to the hundred lunar months of his reign, and to the hundredfold harvest. The king’s death by a thunderbolt, or by the teeth of horses, or at the hands of the tanist, was his common fate in primitive Greece.

3
. Core’s abduction by Hades forms part of the myth in which the Hellenic trinity of gods forcibly marry the pre-Hellenic Triple-goddess – Zeus, Hera; Zeus or Poseidon, Demeter; Hades, Core – as in Irish myth Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba marry the Triple-goddess Eire, Fodhla, and Banbha (see
7.
6
and
16.
1
). It refers to male usurpation of the female agricultural mysteries in primitive times. Thus the incident of Demeter’s refusal to provide corn for mankind is only another version of Ino’s conspiracy to destroy Athamas’s harvest (see
70.
c
). Further, the Core myth accounts for the winter burial of a female corn-puppet, which was uncovered in the early spring and found to be sprouting; this pre-Hellenic custom survived in the countryside in Classical times, and is illustrated by vase-paintings of men freeing Core from a mound of earth with mattocks, or breaking open Mother Earth’s head with axes.