XLIV. Demeter and Persephone
DIONYSUS was not the only Greek deity whose tragic story and ritual
appear to reflect the decay and revival of vegetation. In another
form and with a different application the old tale reappears in the
myth of Demeter and Persephone. Substantially their myth is
identical with the Syrian one of Aphrodite (Astarte) and Adonis, the
Phrygian one of Cybele and Attis, and the Egyptian one of Isis and
Osiris. In the Greek fable, as in its Asiatic and Egyptian
counterparts, a goddess mourns the loss of a loved one, who
personifies the vegetation, more especially the corn, which dies in
winter to revive in spring; only whereas the Oriental imagination
figured the loved and lost one as a dead lover or a dead husband
lamented by his leman or his wife, Greek fancy embodied the same
idea in the tenderer and purer form of a dead daughter bewailed by
her sorrowing mother.
The oldest literary document which narrates the myth of Demeter and
Persephone is the beautiful Homeric _Hymn to Demeter,_ which critics
assign to the seventh century before our era.
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