Characters
- Artemis — consents to the marriage/abduction; later forces the compromise
- Athena — among Persephone’s playmates in the meadow
- Celeus — king of Eleusis; builds Demeter’s temple
- Daughters of Celeus — find Demeter at the well
- Demeter — mother; searches; withdraws fertility; founds Eleusinian cult
- Demophon — infant son of Celeus and Metaneira; nearly made immortal
- Diocles — Eleusinian leader instructed in the rites
- Electra — companions at the flower-picking
- Eumolpus — Eleusinian leader instructed in the rites
- Gaia — grows the narcissus lure for Hades
- Hades — abductor and husband; gives the pomegranate seed
- Hecate — hears the cry; accompanies Demeter; later attendant of Persephone
- Helios — all-seeing sun; reveals the truth to Demeter
- Hermes — Argos-slayer; fetches Persephone from Erebus
- Iambe — jokester who makes grieving Demeter laugh
- Iris — first Olympian envoy to Demeter
- Metaneira — queen; hires Demeter; interrupts the immortalizing of Demophon
- Persephone — abducted daughter; eats the pomegranate seed; divides the year
- Rhea — Zeus’s final messenger who brings Demeter back to the gods
- Triptolemus — Eleusinian leader instructed in the rites
Places
- Callichoron — well by which the temple is to loom
- Crete — claimed origin in Demeter’s false autobiography as Doso
- Eleusis — city of Celeus; temple and Mysteries
- Olympus — company of the gods that Demeter shuns and later rejoins
- Parthenion — where Demeter sits disguised
- Plain of Nysa — meadow of the abduction
- Rarian Field — fertile plain where grain returns when Demeter yields
- Thorikos — harbor in that false tale of pirate abduction
- Underworld — underworld destination and Persephone’s married seat
Themes
Narrative
With Zeus’s consent, Hades seized Persephone as she played and gathered flowers with Oceanid companions (and with Athena and Artemis) in a meadow. Gaia, favoring the Lord of Many Guests, made a wondrous narcissus grow as a lure. When Persephone reached for it, the earth opened on the plain of Nysa; Hades sprang up in his golden chariot and carried her down against her will. She cried out to Zeus, but only Hecate in her cave and Helios heard. Demeter heard the cry too, tore her headband, veiled herself in dark cloth, and searched land and sea for nine days with blazing torches, tasting neither ambrosia nor nectar nor bathing.
On the tenth day Hecate told Demeter she had heard but not seen the abductor. Together they went to Helios, who revealed that Zeus had given Persephone to his brother Hades. Furious, Demeter left the company of the gods. Disguised as an old woman, she came to Eleusis and sat by the Maiden Well (Parthenion) under an olive. The daughters of King Celeus found her; she called herself Doso and sought work as a nurse. Metaneira, Celeus’s wife, hired her to rear the late-born son Demophon.
In the house Demeter sat in silent grief until Iambe’s jests made her smile. She refused wine and drank the *kykeon*—barley, water, and pennyroyal. By night she anointed Demophon with ambrosia and hid him in the fire to burn away his mortality. Metaneira spied, screamed, and ruined the plan. Demeter revealed her divinity in blazing beauty, laid the child on the floor, prophesied Demophon’s mortal fate and lasting honor, and commanded a temple and altar above the well Callichoron. The Eleusinians built it. Demeter withdrew into the temple and withheld the seed: the earth bore no harvest; ploughs worked in vain; humankind faced extinction and the gods the loss of sacrifice.
Zeus sent Iris, then all the gods, with offers of honors; Demeter refused until she saw her daughter. Zeus then sent Hermes to Erebus. Hades smiled and agreed, but secretly made Persephone eat a pomegranate seed so that she could not remain forever with Demeter. Hermes brought her up; mother and child reunited. Persephone confessed the forced seed. The settlement, confirmed by Zeus through Rhea, was that Persephone would spend one-third of each circling year below in mist and gloom and two-thirds with her mother and the other immortals. Demeter restored the crops on the Rarian plain, taught the sacred rites to Celeus, Triptolemus, Diocles, and Eumolpus, and returned with Persephone to Olympus. Hecate became Persephone’s attendant thereafter. The Hymn thus joins the etiology of the seasons to the foundation of the Eleusinian Mysteries.