Persephone was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus, the goddess abducted by Hades to be queen of the dead, and the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most important religious festival of the ancient Greek world. Her name in Greek is Kore (Κόρη, “the Girl”), a title of the young unmarried daughter, and Persephone (Περσεφόνη) is a name whose etymology is debated but is probably pre-Greek. The Romans knew her as Proserpina. The story of her abduction and her return is the central myth of the cycle of the seasons, and the central rite of the most ancient continuous cult of Greece, the Mysteries of Eleusis, which were celebrated annually for almost two thousand years, from the Mycenaean period until the closing of the pagan temples in the late fourth century CE.
The Abduction
The earliest full account of the abduction of Persephone is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (seventh or sixth century BCE), a long poem of 495 lines that was recited annually at the Eleusinian festival. According to the hymn, Persephone was gathering flowers with the daughters of Oceanus in a meadow — the narcissus, the crocus, the rose, the lily, the hyacinth, the violet, the iris — when the earth opened and Hades, son of Cronus, came up in his chariot drawn by immortal horses, and took her by the waist and carried her down to the underworld, weeping and screaming. No one heard her but Hekate, who held a light in a cave, and Helios, the sun, who sees everything from the sky.
The hymn is striking on two points. First, the language: Persephone is taken “by the will of Zeus,” but the poem is at pains to make clear that Demeter did not consent, and that the act of Hades is an act of violence on a girl who was unwilling. Second, the geography: the place of the abduction is not specified in the hymn, and the later tradition localised it variously in Sicily, at Nysa, in Eleusis itself, and in the plain of Enna. The absence of a specific place is itself meaningful: the myth is one of universal scope, and the meadow could be any meadow.
The role of Zeus in the story is the central moral problem of the myth. In some versions, Zeus actively arranged the marriage; in others, he gave his tacit consent; in others, Hades acted on his own. The Eleusinian tradition managed the problem by focusing on the mother’s grief, the reunion, and the rituals that made the reunion possible. The hymn ends with Persephone’s return to the upper world, and the institution of the Mysteries in her honour at Eleusis by Demeter herself.
The Return
Zeus, seeing the disaster that Demeter’s grief had brought on the earth (the harvest failed, the seeds did not sprout, the cattle died, and humanity was on the verge of extinction), sent Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back. Hades agreed to release her, but — and this is the heart of the myth — he tricked her into eating a pomegranate seed before she left. The food of the dead is binding, and the seed meant that Persephone had to return to the underworld for part of each year. The number of seeds eaten varies in different sources (three, four, or seven), and the proportion of the year she spent below is variously given as a third, a half, or two-thirds. The standard Greek version is half the year in each.
The myth is a myth of explanation in the classic sense: it explains why the seasons change. The earth is fertile when Persephone is with her mother; it is barren when she is with Hades. The story is older than the Greek version we have, and parallels have been drawn with Near Eastern, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian myths of the dying and rising god. The Greek version, however, is distinctive in making the goddess’s return — not her death and resurrection, but her going and her coming — the central action. Persephone is not a dying-and-rising god in the same way as Osiris or Adonis or Attis; she is a goddess who is both alive and dead at once, and whose presence in the upper world is the source of life.
The Eleusinian Mysteries
The Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated annually at Eleusis near Athens, were the most important religious festival of the Greek world from at least the seventh century BCE to the late Roman period. They were the central cult of Demeter and Persephone, and they were open (in classical times) to all freeborn Greek-speakers, men and women, and eventually to Romans. The festival took place in late September or early October, and it ran for nine days, beginning with a procession from Athens to Eleusis and ending with a ritual meal and a series of acts performed by the initiates, the mystai, in the great hall (the Telesterion) at Eleusis.
The acts performed in the Telesterion were the aporrheta, the things not to be spoken of, and the Greek tradition is consistent in not describing them. We know, from Christian and pagan sources, that the initiates fasted, drank a ritual drink (kykeon, barley, water, and pennyroyal), saw a great fire, were shown a sheaf of grain, witnessed a sacred drama, and saw a great light. They were promised a better lot in the afterlife: the dead who had been initiated had a place in the Elysian Fields, while the uninitiate wandered in the Asphodel Meadows. The promise of the Mysteries was, in the standard scholarly reading, the most important single source of Greek belief in personal immortality, and the participation of figures from Cicero to Hadrian to Julian the Apostate attests to its centrality.
Persephone in the Visual Arts
Persephone is one of the most frequently depicted figures in Greek and Roman art. The abduction is one of the canonical subjects of Attic red-figure vase painting in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and the standard image — Hades in his chariot, Persephone struggling, the earth opening — is one of the most common iconographic formulae in the surviving corpus. The Bernini Apollo and Daphne is not of Persephone, but the late-Baroque Roman Proserpina group by Bernini (1621–22, in the Galleria Borghese) is works of Baroque sculpture, and it captures the moment of the abduction in three dimensions: Pluto, the Latin Hades, grabs Proserpina by the thigh, and her hand pushes back at his face.
Persephone in the Roman and Christian Worlds
In Rome, Persephone was identified with the Italic goddess of the spring, Proserpina, and the abduction was placed at the grove of Nemi in the Alban Hills, the site of the famous cult of Diana Nemorensis that J.G. Frazer made the title of his The Golden Bough (1890). The story of Proserpina became one of the standard allegories of the soul’s descent and return in late-antique and early-Christian thought, and the rapta Proserpina of Claudian (c. 400 CE) is one of the major Latin poems of the late empire.
In the Christian appropriation, Persephone was read as a figure of the soul’s descent into the underworld, and the Eleusinian Mysteries were read as an early form of the Christian promise of resurrection. The appropriation is not unproblematic: the Mysteries were not a resurrection cult in the Christian sense, and the modern scholarly consensus is that they were a fertility cult that gradually became a salvation cult, with the promise of a better afterlife developing only in the classical period. The Christianity–Eleusis parallel is, however, persistent, and it is the source of the most famous modern treatment of the myth, the 2021 webtoon Lore Olympus, which retells the Persephone–Hades story as a romance in the present day.
Persephone in Modern Literature
The Persephone myth has been retold in the modern period in a series of works that take her seriously as a figure of female power, of the soul’s descent, and of the underworld as a place. The list is long: Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866), where the goddess is the symbol of the old pagan order yielding to the new Christian one; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine (1874), one of the major Pre-Raphaelite paintings; Sylvia Plath’s “Two Sisters and a Voice” and other Persephone poems; Margaret Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning,” which uses the myth to explore grief. The most-read modern version is Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), in which Persephone appears as a young goddess of the underworld, and Miller’s later The Song of Achilles (2011) uses the underworld myth of Patroclus and Achilles as one of its central scenes. The Netflix series Kaos (2024) retells the myth as a satire of the gods, with Persephone as one of the central figures.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Persephone myth is one of the cleanest cases on this site of how a myth changes meaning across time. The Homeric hymn is a story of divine violence, female grief, and the institution of a cult; the Eleusinian tradition is a cult of seasonal regeneration and of personal salvation; the Orphic tradition makes Persephone the mother of Dionysus Zagreus, killed and eaten by the Titans; the Christian fathers read her as a pagan figure of the soul’s descent; the modern readers read her as a figure of female agency, of the return of the self, of the underworld as a place of transformation. Each of these readings is true to the texts it draws on, and the modern Persephone is as much a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings (Neoplatonism, romanticism, Jung, feminist theology) as of the original Greek cult. The page that follows on the Demeter-Persephone story tells the older, simpler version. This page tells the longer one.
For more, see our profile of Demeter, the Demeter-Persephone story, the Hades profile, and the Eleusinian Mysteries section of the Demeter page.