I recently quipped “Persephone is the Reason for the Season” to a friend…and he said that Persephone actually visits Hades during the Summer, not during the Winter as I was always taught. I looked in Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” and she said Persephone must go away from Demeter for four months during the Winter. But my friend says that it’s the summer, not the winter, when crops don’t grow, because of the Mediterranean heat in Greece.
So: factual question 1: during which months was Persephone said to be lost to Demeter while visiting Hades?
2: Where did the story originate? Was it first in Hesiod? Or Homer? Or somebody else?
As a total hijack, I would mention that this myth is the inspiration for one of my all time favorites sculptures, which everyone should see if given the opportunity:
You can see it at the Borghese gallery in Rome (you need to buy tickets and schedule ahard of time, you can’t just show up like most museums). There’s also a pretty nice copy at Versailles.
Darth Panda: nifty! I’d seen pictures of that one before, but there were details in that link I hadn’t seen. Bernini is fantastic, eh? His bust of Medusa is haunting: the sheer amount of woe in that face is overwhelming.
(I have a reproduction of that on my bookshelf at home… Facing the wall, and only visible in a mirror behind it. Safety First!)
I think a big part of it is that is the story indicates that the Earth would greet her with flowers upon her return - hence, Spring. And if she’s showing up in Spring, she must have been gone in Winter, right?
My friend’s claim is that it was re-interpreted by northern Europeans. We English-speakers got it from English translations, and, in England, everyone knows that it’s the winter when nothing grows…
I thought he was full of bat-poo, but he seems to have been right about the basic claim, so, maybe we’ve been suckered by borealcentrism?
The interpretation that “nothing grows in the Summer on Mediterranean regions” is so wrong I can’t begin to describe it.
Summer is the time for ripening, the time when we get the best vegetables and the juiciest fruits (including early varieties of grapes). High summer is too hot for picking anything except in the earliest hours: my brother’s summer job picking fruit would have him getting up before the crack of dawn, because the idea was to be done with the daily 8 hours before the “hours of molten lead”. He’d be home in time for 2pm lunch (sunlight’s noon).
I don’t know what the original was, but whomever said that “things don’t grow (or are picked) in the Mediterranean basin during summer” was either full of manure or amazingly ignorant.
My fault for quoting my friend, who was, himself, hyperbolizing. He was basically emphasizing the summery conditions that led to the original myth portraying Demeter as sad and forlorn for the absence of her daughter.
Obviously, Greece does have a summer growing season. That’s why I thought the notion of Persephone being absent in summer was goofy. Greece may not have the same kinds of winters as England or Germany, but it does have winters!
Anyway, someone else said it was my fault for not reading Messner-Loebs’ and Kieth’s “Epicurus the Sage,” a hilarious graphic novel wherein Epicurus, aided by the young Alexander the Great (!) rescue Persephone from Hades (!!!) Ancient myths the way they should have been. (And it depicts the season of absence as winter.)
So, all the Theogony says about Persephone is that she and Hades rule over the land of the dead, she’s the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and that Hades abducted her because Zeus gave her to him. The whole thing about Demeter searching for her and cursing the earth, and Hades tricking her with the pomegranate so she’ll stay with him, that’s not in his stuff. It is, however, in the
Homeric Hymns.
