Persephone Ate One Seed. Ovid Says Seven.

Seven red grains get chewed in a garden under the earth, and one witness sees it happen. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, that is the moment Proserpine, the Roman Persephone, loses her way home. The oldest full telling of the story does not agree. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter she eats one seed, and it is not her idea. The two texts can't both be right about who chose the fruit, and that is the part worth reading closely.

The taking

The Hymn to Demeter runs to 495 lines of Greek and dates to around the late seventh or early sixth century BCE. Hesiod's Theogony mentions the abduction only briefly. The Hymn tells the whole story. In it, Zeus lets his brother Hades take the girl, because her mother would never agree. Persephone is gathering flowers with the Oceanids, Athena and Artemis when the earth opens. Hades comes up through the gap and carries her down. The Hymn sets this on a plain called Nysion, which is probably a mythical place rather than one you could find on a map. Local traditions moved it around. The Sicilians said it happened in the meadows near Enna, and Ovid's version of the search keeps coming back to Sicily.

Who told the mother

Ovid's Ceres searches a world that is too small for her grief. In the Project Gutenberg prose translation she reaches the pool of Cyane. Cyane saw everything, but she has been turned into water and has no mouth or tongue. So she shows Ceres instead: Proserpine's girdle is floating on the stream. The translator adds a footnote saying that young women wore the girdle until their wedding day. The belt is evidence of what was done to her.

Ceres turns her grief on the land. She breaks the ploughs of Sicily, kills the farmers and the oxen, and orders the soil to give nothing back. In most versions the famine has a clearer purpose: the hungry people cry out until Zeus has to act.

Next the sources disagree about who told Ceres where her daughter was. In the Metamorphoses it is the nymph Arethusa, who travels under the earth along the Stygian stream and saw Proserpine there, sad but still a queen. The translator's notes point out that in Book Four of the Fasti, Ovid gives the job to the Sun, following the Homeric account. In the Hymn, Helios is the witness. Apollodorus places the descent at Hermione, in the Peloponnese, and has the local people tell her. That makes three informants, and two of them come from the same poet.

Jupiter's condition

Ceres takes her case to Jupiter, and her opening line is bitter. She has found her daughter, she says, "if you call it finding to be more certain of one's loss" (Gutenberg prose translation). Jupiter answers like someone arranging a marriage. This was affection, he says, not injury, and the groom is Jupiter's own brother. Still, Proserpine may come back on one fixed condition: she must not have touched food below. Ovid's Jupiter says the law of the Destinies requires this. Behind it is a Greek taboo: anyone who tastes the food of the underworld belongs to it.

One seed, forced

Ovid answers straight away. The Fates do not allow it, because the girl has already broken her fast. "In her innocence" she was walking in a well-kept garden. She picked a pomegranate and chewed seven grains from the pale rind. Nobody gave them to her. Only Ascalaphus, son of the nymph Orphne and the river Acheron, saw her, and he "cruelly prevented her return by his discovery" (Gutenberg prose translation).

The Hymn has Persephone describe it herself, and her account is not Ovid's. Hades secretly put a pomegranate seed in her mouth and "forced me to taste against my will" (as quoted on Wikipedia). The scholar Timothy Gantz calls this a trick. The timing matters too. In the Hymn, Hades does it after Zeus has ordered her release, just before Hermes takes her up. So the older text has one seed, given by the husband at the last moment, against her will. Ovid has seven, eaten freely and well before anyone came for her. Ovid knew the Hymn, and scholars trace its influence through both the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. He changed the story anyway.

One, three, seven

Ovid doesn't even agree with himself. The translator's footnote on the seven grains says only that the Fasti gives three. Later retellings link the count to the calendar, six seeds for six months, but none of these texts says that.

The oldest count also came close to being lost. The Hymn to Demeter survived in a fifteenth-century manuscript that later went missing. It stayed unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei found it in a barn outside Moscow.

The informer and the bill

Someone has to pay for telling. In Ovid, Proserpine punishes Ascalaphus herself. She sprinkles him with water from Phlegethon, the burning river, and he becomes an owl with tawny wings, a swollen head and curved claws, a bird of bad omen. According to the translator's notes, Apollodorus gives the punishment to Ceres. She pins Ascalaphus under a rock, Hercules later frees him, and only then does she turn him into an owl. Wikipedia's summary calls Ascalaphus the custodian of Hades' orchard, which makes him look less like a spy and more like a gardener doing his job.

The sentence she serves also differs from text to text. The Hymn keeps Persephone below for a third of each year. The notes report that Apollodorus gives nine months to her mother and three to her husband. Ovid and Hyginus divide the year evenly. Ovid's Jupiter "divides the rolling year equally," and Ceres' face clears like the sun after rain. The Hymn ends somewhere Ovid never goes: mother and daughter meet near Eleusis, and Demeter founds her mysteries there. An Athenian vase from about 440 BCE has a different rescuer, Hecate with two torches leading the girl up. The notes add that the women of the Thesmophoria made a point of never tasting pomegranate.

What the count decides

The number of seeds matters less than whose hand is on the fruit. In the Hymn, Persephone is the victim of a trick. In Ovid she eats in innocence, and then she is the one who punishes the witness. Ovid's Arethusa already hinted at this when she said the girl was sad but still a queen. At Locri in southern Italy, Persephone was worshipped as a goddess of marriage, and Virgil could write that Proserpina did not care to follow her mother. Each source counts the seeds differently because each one has already decided who made the choice.

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