CHAPTER II. DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE.

(M26) 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.

(M27) 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.(134) The object of the poem

is to explain the origin of the Eleusinian mysteries, and the complete

silence of the poet as to Athens and the Athenians, who in after ages took

a conspicuous part in the festival, renders it probable that the hymn was

composed in the far off time when Eleusis was still a petty independent

state, and before the stately procession of the Mysteries had begun to

defile, in bright September days, over the low chain of barren rocky hills

which divides the flat Eleusinian cornland from the more spacious

olive-clad expanse of the Athenian plain. Be that as it may, the hymn

reveals to us the conception which the writer entertained of the character

and functions of the two goddesses: their natural shapes stand out sharply

enough under the thin veil of poetical imagery. The youthful Persephone,

so runs the tale, was gathering roses and lilies, crocuses and violets,

hyacinths and narcissuses in a lush meadow, when the earth gaped and

Pluto, lord of the Dead, issuing from the abyss carried her off on his

golden car to be his bride and queen in the gloomy subterranean world. Her

sorrowing mother Demeter, with her yellow tresses veiled in a dark

mourning mantle, sought her over land and sea, and learning from the Sun

her daughter’s fate she withdrew in high dudgeon from the gods and took up

her abode at Eleusis, where she presented herself to the king’s daughters

in the guise of an old woman, sitting sadly under the shadow of an olive

tree beside the Maiden’s Well, to which the damsels had come to draw water

in bronze pitchers for their father’s house. In her wrath at her

bereavement the goddess suffered not the seed to grow in the earth but

kept it hidden under ground, and she vowed that never would she set foot

on Olympus and never would she let the corn sprout till her lost daughter

should be restored to her. Vainly the oxen dragged the ploughs to and fro

in the fields; vainly the sower dropped the barley seed in the brown

furrows; nothing came up from the parched and crumbling soil. Even the

Rarian plain near Eleusis, which was wont to wave with yellow harvests,

lay bare and fallow.(135) Mankind would have perished of hunger and the

gods would have been robbed of the sacrifices which were their due, if

Zeus in alarm had not commanded Pluto to disgorge his prey, to restore his

bride Persephone to her mother Demeter. The grim lord of the Dead smiled

and obeyed, but before he sent back his queen to the upper air on a golden

car, he gave her the seed of a pomegranate to eat, which ensured that she

would return to him. But Zeus stipulated that henceforth Persephone should

spend two thirds of every year with her mother and the gods in the upper

world and one third of the year with her husband in the nether world, from

which she was to return year by year when the earth was gay with spring

flowers. Gladly the daughter then returned to the sunshine, gladly her

mother received her and fell upon her neck; and in her joy at recovering

the lost one Demeter made the corn to sprout from the clods of the

ploughed fields and all the broad earth to be heavy with leaves and

blossoms. And straightway she went and shewed this happy sight to the

princes of Eleusis, to Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Diocles, and to the king

Celeus himself, and moreover she revealed to them her sacred rites and

mysteries. Blessed, says the poet, is the mortal man who has seen these

things, but he who has had no share of them in life will never be happy in

death when he has descended into the darkness of the grave. So the two

goddesses departed to dwell in bliss with the gods on Olympus; and the

bard ends the hymn with a pious prayer to Demeter and Persephone that they

would be pleased to grant him a livelihood in return for his song.(136)

(M28) It has been generally recognised, and indeed it seems scarcely open

to doubt, that the main theme which the poet set before himself in

composing this hymn was to describe the traditional foundation of the

Eleusinian mysteries by the goddess Demeter. The whole poem leads up to

the transformation scene in which the bare leafless expanse of the

Eleusinian plain is suddenly turned, at the will of the goddess, into a

vast sheet of ruddy corn; the beneficent deity takes the princes of

Eleusis, shews them what she has done, teaches them her mystic rites, and

vanishes with her daughter to heaven. The revelation of the mysteries is

the triumphal close of the piece. This conclusion is confirmed by a more

minute examination of the poem, which proves that the poet has given, not

merely a general account of the foundation of the mysteries, but also in

more or less veiled language mythical explanations of the origin of

particular rites which we have good reason to believe formed essential

features of the festival. Amongst the rites as to which the poet thus

drops significant hints are the preliminary fast of the candidates for

initiation, the torchlight procession, the all-night vigil, the sitting of

the candidates, veiled and in silence, on stools covered with sheepskins,

the use of scurrilous language, the breaking of ribald jests, and the

solemn communion with the divinity by participation in a draught of

barley-water from a holy chalice.(137)

(M29) But there is yet another and a deeper secret of the mysteries which

the author of the poem appears to have divulged under cover of his

narrative. He tells us how, as soon as she had transformed the barren

brown expanse of the Eleusinian plain into a field of golden grain, she

gladdened the eyes of Triptolemus and the other Eleusinian princes by

shewing them the growing or standing corn. When we compare this part of

the story with the statement of a Christian writer of the second century,

Hippolytus, that the very heart of the mysteries consisted in shewing to

the initiated a reaped ear of corn,(138) we can hardly doubt that the poet

of the hymn was well acquainted with this solemn rite, and that he

deliberately intended to explain its origin in precisely the same way as

he explained other rites of the mysteries, namely by representing Demeter

as having set the example of performing the ceremony in her own person.

Thus myth and ritual mutually explain and confirm each other. The poet of

the seventh century before our era gives us the myth—he could not without

sacrilege have revealed the ritual: the Christian father reveals the

ritual, and his revelation accords perfectly with the veiled hint of the

old poet. On the whole, then, we may, with many modern scholars,

confidently accept the statement of the learned Christian father Clement

of Alexandria, that the myth of Demeter and Persephone was acted as a

sacred drama in the mysteries of Eleusis.(139)

(M30) But if the myth was acted as a part, perhaps as the principal part,

of the most famous and solemn religious rites of ancient Greece, we have

still to enquire, What was, after all, stripped of later accretions, the

original kernel of the myth which appears to later ages surrounded and

transfigured by an aureole of awe and mystery, lit up by some of the most

brilliant rays of Grecian literature and art? If we follow the indications

given by our oldest literary authority on the subject, the author of the

Homeric hymn to Demeter, the riddle is not hard to read; the figures of

the two goddesses, the mother and the daughter, resolve themselves into

personifications of the corn.(140) At least this appears to be fairly

certain for the daughter Persephone. The goddess who spends three or,

according to another version of the myth, six months of every year with

the dead under ground and the remainder of the year with the living above

ground;(141) in whose absence the barley seed is hidden in the earth and

the fields lie bare and fallow; on whose return in spring to the upper

world the corn shoots up from the clods and the earth is heavy with leaves

and blossoms—this goddess can surely be nothing else than a mythical

embodiment of the vegetation, and particularly of the corn, which is

buried under the soil for some months of every winter and comes to life

again, as from the grave, in the sprouting cornstalks and the opening

flowers and foliage of every spring. No other reasonable and probable

explanation of Persephone seems possible.(142) And if the daughter goddess

was a personification of the young corn of the present year, may not the

mother goddess be a personification of the old corn of last year, which

has given birth to the new crops? The only alternative to this view of

Demeter would seem to be to suppose that she is a personification of the

earth, from whose broad bosom the corn and all other plants spring up, and

of which accordingly they may appropriately enough be regarded as the

daughters. This view of the original nature of Demeter has indeed been

taken by some writers, both ancient and modern,(143) and it is one which

can be reasonably maintained. But it appears to have been rejected by the

author of the Homeric hymn to Demeter, for he not only distinguishes

Demeter from the personified Earth but places the two in the sharpest

opposition to each other. He tells us that it was Earth who, in accordance

with the will of Zeus and to please Pluto, lured Persephone to her doom by

causing the narcissuses to grow which tempted the young goddess to stray

far beyond the reach of help in the lush meadow.(144) Thus Demeter of the

hymn, far from being identical with the Earth-goddess, must have regarded

that divinity as her worst enemy, since it was to her insidious wiles that

she owed the loss of her daughter. But if the Demeter of the hymn cannot

have been a personification of the earth, the only alternative apparently

is to conclude that she was a personification of the corn.

(M31) With this conclusion all the indications of the hymn-writer seem to

harmonise. He certainly represents Demeter as the goddess by whose power

and at whose pleasure the corn either grows or remains hidden in the

ground; and to what deity can such powers be so fittingly ascribed as to

the goddess of the corn? He calls Demeter yellow and tells how her yellow

tresses flowed down on her shoulders;(145) could any colour be more

appropriate with which to paint the divinity of the yellow grain? The same

identification of Demeter with the ripe, the yellow corn is made even more

clearly by a still older poet, Homer himself, or at all events the author

of the fifth book of the _Iliad_. There we read: “And even as the wind

carries the chaff about the sacred threshing-floors, when men are

winnowing, what time yellow Demeter sifts the corn from the chaff on the

hurrying blast, so that the heaps of chaff grow white below, so were the

Achaeans whitened above by the cloud of dust which the hoofs of the horses

spurned to the brazen heaven.”(146) Here the yellow Demeter who sifts the

grain from the chaff at the threshing-floor can hardly be any other than

the goddess of the yellow corn; she cannot be the Earth-goddess, for what

has the Earth-goddess to do with the grain and the chaff blown about a

threshing-floor? With this interpretation it agrees that elsewhere Homer

speaks of men eating “Demeter’s corn”;(147) and still more definitely

Hesiod speaks of “the annual store of food, which the earth bears,

Demeter’s corn,”(148) thus distinguishing the goddess of the corn from the

earth which bears it. Still more clearly does a later Greek poet personify

the corn as Demeter when, in allusion to the time of the corn-reaping, he

says that then “the sturdy swains cleave Demeter limb from limb.”(149) And

just as the ripe or yellow corn was personified as the Yellow Demeter, so

the unripe or green corn was personified as the Green Demeter. In that

character the goddess had sanctuaries at Athens and other places;

sacrifices were appropriately offered to Green Demeter in spring when the

earth was growing green with the fresh vegetation, and the victims

included sows big with young,(150) which no doubt were intended not merely

to symbolise but magically to promote the abundance of the crops.

(M32) In Greek the various kinds of corn were called by the general name

of “Demeter’s fruits,”(151) just as in Latin they were called the “fruits

or gifts of Ceres,”(152) an expression which survives in the English word

cereals. Tradition ran that before Demeter’s time men neither cultivated

corn nor tilled the ground, but roamed the mountains and woods in search

of the wild fruits which the earth produced spontaneously from her womb

for their subsistence. The tradition clearly implies not only that Demeter

was the goddess of the corn, but that she was different from and younger

than the goddess of the Earth, since it is expressly affirmed that before

Demeter’s time the earth existed and supplied mankind with nourishment in

the shape of wild herbs, grasses, flowers and fruits.(153)

(M33) In ancient art Demeter and Persephone are characterised as goddesses

of the corn by the crowns of corn which they wear on their heads and by

the stalks of corn which they hold in their hands.(154) Theocritus

describes a smiling image of Demeter standing by a heap of yellow grain on

a threshing-floor and grasping sheaves of barley and poppies in both her

hands.(155) Indeed corn and poppies singly or together were a frequent

symbol of the goddess, as we learn not only from the testimony of ancient

writers(156) but from many existing monuments of classical art.(157) The

naturalness of the symbol can be doubted by no one who has seen—and who

has not seen?—a field of yellow corn bespangled thick with scarlet

poppies; and we need not resort to the shifts of an ancient mythologist,

who explained the symbolism of the poppy in Demeter’s hand by comparing

the globular shape of the poppy to the roundness of our globe, the

unevenness of its edges to hills and valleys, and the hollow interior of

the scarlet flower to the caves and dens of the earth.(158) If only

students would study the little black and white books of men less and the

great rainbow-tinted book of nature more; if they would more frequently

exchange the heavy air and the dim light of libraries for the freshness

and the sunshine of the open sky; if they would oftener unbend their minds

by rural walks between fields of waving corn, beside rivers rippling by

under grey willows, or down green lanes, where the hedges are white with

the hawthorn bloom or red with wild roses, they might sometimes learn more

about primitive religion than can be gathered from many dusty volumes, in

which wire-drawn theories are set forth with all the tedious parade of

learning.

(M34) Nowhere, perhaps, in the monuments of Greek art is the character of

Persephone as a personification of the young corn sprouting in spring

portrayed more gracefully and more truly than on a coin of Lampsacus of

the fourth century before our era. On it we see the goddess in the very

act of rising from the earth. “Her face is upraised; in her hand are three

ears of corn, and others together with grapes are springing behind her

shoulder. Complete is here the identification of the goddess and her

attribute: she is embowered amid the ears of growing corn, and like it

half buried in the ground. She does not make the corn and vine grow, but

she _is_ the corn and vine growing, and returning again to the face of the

earth after lying hidden in its depths. Certainly the artist who designed

this beautiful figure thoroughly understood Hellenic religion.”(159)

(M35) As the goddess who first bestowed corn on mankind and taught them to

sow and cultivate it,(160) Demeter was naturally invoked and propitiated

by farmers before they undertook the various operations of the

agricultural year. In autumn, when he heard the sonorous trumpeting of the

cranes, as they winged their way southward in vast flocks high overhead,

the Greek husbandman knew that the rains were near and that the time of

ploughing was at hand; but before he put his hand to the plough he prayed

to Underground Zeus and to Holy Demeter for a heavy crop of Demeter’s

sacred corn. Then he guided the ox-drawn plough down the field, turning up

the brown earth with the share, while a swain followed close behind with a

hoe, who covered up the seed as fast as it fell to protect it from the

voracious birds that fluttered and twittered at the plough-tail.(161) But

while the ordinary Greek farmer took the signal for ploughing from the

clangour of the cranes, Hesiod and other writers who aimed at greater

exactness laid it down as a rule that the ploughing should begin with the

autumnal setting of the Pleiades in the morning, which in Hesiod’s time

fell on the twenty-sixth of October.(162) The month in which the Pleiades

set in the morning was generally recognised by the Greeks as the month of

sowing; it corresponded apparently in part to our October, in part to our

November. The Athenians called it Pyanepsion; the Boeotians named it

significantly Damatrius, that is, Demeter’s month, and they celebrated a

feast of mourning because, says Plutarch, who as a Boeotian speaks with

authority on such a matter, Demeter was then in mourning for the descent

of Persephone.(163) Is it possible to express more clearly the true

original nature of Persephone as the corn-seed which has just been buried

in the earth? The obvious, the almost inevitable conclusion did not escape

Plutarch. He tells us that the mournful rites which were held at the time

of the autumn sowing nominally commemorated the actions of deities, but

that the real sadness was for the fruits of the earth, some of which at

that season dropped of themselves and vanished from the trees, while

others in the shape of seed were committed with anxious thoughts to the

ground by men, who scraped the earth and then huddled it up over the seed,

just as if they were burying and mourning for the dead.(164) Surely this

interpretation of the custom and of the myth of Persephone is not only

beautiful but true.

(M36) And just as the Greek husbandman prayed to the Corn Goddess when he

committed the seed, with anxious forebodings, to the furrows, so after he

had reaped the harvest and brought back the yellow sheaves with rejoicing

to the threshing-floor, he paid the bountiful goddess her dues in the form

of a thank-offering of golden grain. Theocritus has painted for us in

glowing colours a picture of a rustic harvest-home, as it fell on a bright

autumn day some two thousand years ago in the little Greek island of

Cos.(165) The poet tells us how he went with two friends from the city to

attend a festival given by farmers, who were offering first-fruits to

Demeter from the store of barley with which she had filled their barns.

The day was warm, indeed so hot that the very lizards, which love to bask

and run about in the sun, were slumbering in the crevices of the

stone-walls, and not a lark soared carolling into the blue vault of

heaven. Yet despite the great heat there were everywhere signs of autumn.

“All things,” says the poet, “smelt of summer, but smelt of autumn too.”

Indeed the day was really autumnal; for a goat-herd who met the friends on

their way to the rural merry-making, asked them whether they were bound

for the treading of the grapes in the wine-presses. And when they had

reached their destination and reclined at ease in the dappled shade of

over-arching poplars and elms, with the babble of a neighbouring fountain,

the buzz of the cicadas, the hum of bees, and the cooing of doves in their

ears, the ripe apples and pears rolled in the grass at their feet and the

branches of the wild-plum trees were bowed down to the earth with the

weight of their purple fruit. So couched on soft beds of fragrant lentisk

they passed the sultry hours singing ditties alternately, while a rustic

image of Demeter, to whom the honours of the day were paid, stood smiling

beside a heap of yellow grain on the threshing-floor, with corn-stalks and

poppies in her hands.

(M37) In this description the time of year when the harvest-home was

celebrated is clearly marked. Apart from the mention of the ripe apples,

pears, and plums, the reference to the treading of the grapes is decisive.

The Greeks gather and press the grapes in the first half of October,(166)

and accordingly it is to this date that the harvest-festival described by

Theocritus must be assigned. At the present day in Greece the

maize-harvest immediately precedes the vintage, the grain being reaped and

garnered at the end of September. Travelling in rural districts of Argolis

and Arcadia at that time of the year you pass from time to time piles of

the orange-coloured cobs laid up ready to be shelled, or again heaps of

the yellow grain beside the pods. But maize was unknown to the ancient

Greeks, who, like their modern descendants, reaped their wheat and barley

crops much earlier in the summer, usually from the end of April till

June.(167) However, we may conclude that the day immortalised by

Theocritus was one of those autumn days of great heat and effulgent beauty

which in Greece may occur at any time up to the very verge of winter. I

remember such a day at Panopeus on the borders of Phocis and Boeotia. It

was the first of November, yet the sun shone in cloudless splendour and

the heat was so great, that when I had examined the magnificent remains of

ancient Greek fortification-walls which crown the summit of the hill, it

was delicious to repose on a grassy slope in the shade of some fine

holly-oaks and to inhale the sweet scent of the wild thyme, which perfumed

all the air. But it was summer’s farewell. Next morning the weather had

completely changed. A grey November sky lowered sadly overhead, and grey

mists hung like winding-sheets on the lower slopes of the barren mountains

which shut in the fatal plain of Chaeronea.

(M38) Thus we may infer that in the rural districts of ancient Greece

farmers offered their first-fruits of the barley harvest to Demeter in

autumn about the time when the grapes were being trodden in the

wine-presses and the ripe apples and pears littered the ground in the

orchards. At first sight the lateness of the festival in the year is

surprising; for in the lowlands of Greece at the present day barley is

reaped at the end of April and wheat in May,(168) and in antiquity the

time of harvest would seem not to have been very different, for Hesiod

bids the husbandman put the sickle to the corn at the morning rising of

the Pleiades,(169) which in his time took place on the eleventh of

May.(170) But if the harvest was reaped in spring or early summer, why

defer the offerings of corn to the Corn Goddess until the middle of

autumn? The reason for the delay is not, so far as I am aware, explained

by any ancient author, and accordingly it must remain for us a matter of

conjecture. I surmise that the reason may have been a calculation on the

part of the practical farmer that the best time to propitiate the Corn

Goddess was not after harvest, when he had got all that was to be got out

of her, but immediately before ploughing and sowing, when he had

everything to hope from her good-will and everything to fear from her

displeasure. When he had reaped his corn, and the sheaves had been safely

garnered in his barns, he might, so to say, snap his fingers at the Corn

Goddess. What could she do for him on the bare stubble-field which lay

scorched and baking under the fierce rays of the sun all the long rainless

summer through? But matters wore a very different aspect when, with the

shortening and cooling of the days, he began to scan the sky for

clouds(171) and to listen for the cries of the cranes as they flew

southward, heralding by their trumpet-like notes the approach of the

autumnal rains. Then he knew that the time had come to break up the ground

that it might receive the seed and be fertilised by the refreshing water

of heaven; then he bethought him of the Corn Goddess once more and brought

forth from the grange a share of the harvested corn with which to woo her

favour and induce her to quicken the grain which he was about to commit to

the earth. On this theory the Greek offering of first-fruits was prompted

not so much by gratitude for past favours as by a shrewd eye to favours to

come, and perhaps this interpretation of the custom does no serious

injustice to the cool phlegmatic temper of the bucolic mind, which is more

apt to be moved by considerations of profit than by sentiment. At all

events the reasons suggested for delaying the harvest-festival accord

perfectly with the natural conditions and seasons of farming in Greece.

For in that country the summer is practically rainless, and during the

long months of heat and drought the cultivation of the two ancient

cereals, barley and wheat, is at a standstill. The first rains of autumn

fall about the middle of October,(172) and that was the Greek farmer’s

great time for ploughing and sowing.(173) Hence we should expect him to

make his offering of first-fruits to the Corn Goddess shortly before he

ploughed and sowed, and this expectation is entirely confirmed by the date

which we have inferred for the offering from the evidence of Theocritus.

Thus the sacrifice of barley to Demeter in the autumn would seem to have

been not so much a thank-offering as a bribe judiciously administered to

her at the very moment of all the year when her services were most

urgently wanted.

(M39) When with the progress of civilisation a number of petty

agricultural communities have merged into a single state dependent for its

subsistence mainly on the cultivation of the ground, it commonly happens

that, though every farmer continues to perform for himself the simple old

rites designed to ensure the blessing of the gods on his crops, the

government undertakes to celebrate similar, though more stately and

elaborate, rites on behalf of the whole people, lest the neglect of public

worship should draw down on the country the wrath of the offended deities.

Hence it comes about that, for all their pomp and splendour, the national

festivals of such states are often merely magnified and embellished copies

of homely rites and uncouth observances carried out by rustics in the open

fields, in barns, and on threshing-floors. In ancient Egypt the religion

of Isis and Osiris furnishes examples of solemnities which have been thus

raised from the humble rank of rural festivities to the dignity of

national celebrations;(174) and in ancient Greece a like development may

be traced in the religion of Demeter. If the Greek ploughman prayed to

Demeter and Underground Zeus for a good crop before he put his hand to the

plough in autumn, the authorities of the Athenian state celebrated about

the same time and for the same purpose a public festival in honour of

Demeter at Eleusis. It was called the Proerosia, which signifies “Before

the Ploughing”; and as the festival was dedicated to her, Demeter herself

bore the name of Proerosia. Tradition ran that once on a time the whole

world was desolated by a famine, and that to remedy the evil the Pythian

oracle bade the Athenians offer the sacrifice of the Proerosia on behalf

of all men. They did so, and the famine ceased accordingly. Hence to

testify their gratitude for the deliverance people sent the first-fruits

of their harvest from all quarters to Athens.(175)

(M40) But the exact date at which the Proerosia or Festival before

Ploughing took place is somewhat uncertain, and enquirers are divided in

opinion as to whether it fell before or after the Great Mysteries, which

began on the fifteenth or sixteenth of Boedromion, a month corresponding

roughly to our September. Another name for the festival was Proarcturia,

that is, “Before Arcturus,”(176) which points to a date either before the

middle of September, when Arcturus is a morning star, or before the end of

October, when Arcturus is an evening star.(177) In favour of the earlier

date it may be said, first, that the morning phase of Arcturus was well

known and much observed, because it marked the middle of autumn, whereas

little use was made of the evening phase of Arcturus for the purpose of

dating;(178) and, second, that in an official Athenian inscription the

Festival before Ploughing (_Proerosia_) is mentioned immediately before

the Great Mysteries.(179) On the other hand, in favour of the later date,

it may be said that as the autumnal rains in Greece set in about the

middle of October, the latter part of that month would be a more suitable

time for a ceremony at the opening of ploughing than the middle of

September, when the soil is still parched with the summer drought; and,

second, that this date is confirmed by a Greek inscription of the fourth

or third century B.C., found at Eleusis, in which the Festival before

Ploughing is apparently mentioned in the month of Pyanepsion immediately

before the festival of the Pyanepsia, which was held on the seventh day of

that month.(180) It is difficult to decide between these conflicting

arguments, but on the whole I incline, not without hesitation, to agree

with some eminent modern authorities in placing the Festival before

Ploughing in Pyanepsion (October) after the Mysteries, rather than in

Boedromion (September) before the Mysteries.(181) However, we must bear in

mind that as the Attic months, like the Greek months generally, were

lunar,(182) their position in the solar year necessarily varied from year

to year, and though these variations were periodically corrected by

intercalation, nevertheless the beginning of each Attic month sometimes

diverged by several weeks from the beginning of the corresponding month to

which we equate it.(183) From this it follows that the Great Mysteries,

which were always dated by the calendar month, must have annually shifted

their place somewhat in the solar year; whereas the Festival before

Ploughing, if it was indeed dated either by the morning or by the evening

phase of Arcturus, must have occupied a fixed place in the solar year.

Hence it appears to be not impossible that the Great Mysteries,

oscillating to and fro with the inconstant moon, may sometimes have fallen

before and sometimes after the Festival before Ploughing, which apparently

always remained true to the constant star. At least this possibility,

which seems to have been overlooked by previous enquirers, deserves to be

taken into account. It is a corollary from the shifting dates of the lunar

months that the official Greek calendar, in spite of its appearance of

exactness, really furnished the ancient farmer with little trustworthy

guidance as to the proper seasons for conducting the various operations of

agriculture; and he was well advised in trusting to various natural

timekeepers, such as the rising and setting of the constellations, the

arrival and departure of the migratory birds, the flowering of certain

plants,(184) the ripening of fruits, and the setting in of the rains,

rather than to the fallacious indications of the public calendar. It is by

natural timekeepers, and not by calendar months, that Hesiod determines

the seasons of the farmer’s year in the poem which is the oldest existing

treatise on husbandry.(185)

(M41) Just as the ploughman’s prayer to Demeter, before he drove the share

through the clods of the field, was taken up and reverberated, so to say,

with a great volume of sound in the public prayers which the Athenian

state annually offered to the goddess before the ploughing on behalf of

the whole world, so the simple first-fruits of barley, presented to the

rustic Demeter under the dappled shade of rustling poplars and elms on the

threshing-floor in Cos, were repeated year by year on a grander scale in

the first-fruits of the barley and wheat harvest, which were presented to

the Corn Mother and the Corn Maiden at Eleusis, not merely by every

husbandman in Attica, but by all the allies and subjects of Athens far and

near, and even by many free Greek communities beyond the sea. The reason

why year by year these offerings of grain poured from far countries into

the public granaries at Eleusis, was the widespread belief that the gift

of corn had been first bestowed by Demeter on the Athenians and afterwards

disseminated by them among all mankind through the agency of Triptolemus,

who travelled over the world in his dragon-drawn car teaching all peoples

to plough the earth and to sow the seed.(186) In the fifth century before

our era the legend was celebrated by Sophocles in a play called

_Triptolemus_, in which he represented Demeter instructing the hero to

carry the seed of the fruits which she had bestowed on men to all the

coasts of Southern Italy,(187) from which we may infer that the cities of

Magna Graecia were among the number of those that sent the thank-offering

of barley and wheat every year to Athens. Again, in the fourth century

before our era Xenophon represents Callias, the braggart Eleusinian

Torchbearer, addressing the Lacedaemonians in a set speech, in which he

declared that “Our ancestor Triptolemus is said to have bestowed the seed

of Demeter’s corn on the Peloponese before any other land. How then,” he

asked with pathetic earnestness, “can it be right that you should come to

ravage the corn of the men from whom you received the seed?”(188) Again,

writing in the fourth century before our era Isocrates relates with a

swell of patriotic pride how, in her search for her lost daughter

Persephone, the goddess Demeter came to Attica and gave to the ancestors

of the Athenians the two greatest of all gifts, the gift of the corn and

the gift of the mysteries, of which the one reclaimed men from the life of

beasts and the other held out hopes to them of a blissful eternity beyond

the grave. The antiquity of the tradition, the orator proceeds to say, was

no reason for rejecting it, but quite the contrary it furnished a strong

argument in its favour, for what many affirmed and all had heard might be

accepted as trustworthy. “And moreover,” he adds, “we are not driven to

rest our case merely on the venerable age of the tradition; we can appeal

to stronger evidence in its support. For most of the cities send us every

year the first-fruits of the corn as a memorial of that ancient benefit,

and when any of them have failed to do so the Pythian priestess has

commanded them to send the due portions of the fruits and to act towards

our city according to ancestral custom. Can anything be supported by

stronger evidence than by the oracle of god, the assent of many Greeks,

and the harmony of ancient legend with the deeds of to-day?”(189)

(M42) This testimony of Isocrates to the antiquity both of the legend and

of the custom might perhaps have been set aside, or at least disparaged,

as the empty bombast of a wordy rhetorician, if it had not happened by

good chance to be amply confirmed by an official decree of the Athenian

people passed in the century before Isocrates wrote. The decree was found

inscribed on a stone at Eleusis and is dated by scholars in the latter

half of the fifth century before our era, sometime between 446 and 420

B.C.(190) It deals with the first-fruits of barley and wheat which were

offered to the Two Goddesses, that is, to Demeter and Persephone, not only

by the Athenians and their allies but by the Greeks in general. It

prescribes the exact amount of barley and wheat which was to be offered by

the Athenians and their allies, and it directs the highest officials at

Eleusis, namely the Hierophant and the Torchbearer, to exhort the other

Greeks at the mysteries to offer likewise of the first-fruits of the corn.

The authority alleged in the decree for requiring or inviting offerings of

first-fruits alike from Athenians and from foreigners is ancestral custom

and the bidding of the Delphic oracle. The Senate is further enjoined to

send commissioners, so far as it could be done, to all Greek cities

whatsoever, exhorting, though not commanding, them to send the

first-fruits in compliance with ancestral custom and the bidding of the

Delphic oracle, and the state officials are directed to receive the

offerings from such states in the same manner as the offerings of the

Athenians and their allies. Instructions are also given for the building

of three subterranean granaries at Eleusis, where the contributions of

grain from Attica were to be stored. The best of the corn was to be

offered in sacrifice as the Eumolpids might direct: oxen were to be bought

and sacrificed, with gilt horns, not only to the two Goddesses but also to

the God (Pluto), Triptolemus, Eubulus, and Athena; and the remainder of

the grain was to be sold and with the produce votive offerings were to be

dedicated with inscriptions setting forth that they had been dedicated

from the offerings of first-fruits, and recording the names of all the

Greeks who sent the offerings to Eleusis. The decree ends with a prayer

that all who comply with these injunctions or exhortations and render

their dues to the city of Athens and to the Two Goddesses, may enjoy

prosperity together with good and abundant crops. Writing in the second

century of our era, under the Roman empire, the rhetorician Aristides

records the custom which the Greeks observed of sending year by year the

first-fruits of the harvest to Athens in gratitude for the corn, but he

speaks of the practice as a thing of the past.(191)

(M43) We may suspect that the tribute of corn ceased to flow from far

countries to Athens, when, with her falling fortunes and decaying empire,

her proud galleys had ceased to carry the terror of the Athenian arms into

distant seas. But if the homage was no longer paid in the substantial

shape of cargoes of grain, it continued down to the latest days of

paganism to be paid in the cheaper form of gratitude for that inestimable

benefit, which the Athenians claimed to have received from the Corn

Goddess and to have liberally communicated to the rest of mankind. Even

the Sicilians, who, inhabiting a fertile corn-growing island, worshipped

Demeter and Persephone above all the gods and claimed to have been the

first to receive the gift of the corn from the Corn Goddess,(192)

nevertheless freely acknowledged that the Athenians had spread, though

they had not originated, the useful discovery among the nations. Thus the

patriotic Sicilian historian Diodorus, while giving the precedence to his

fellow-countrymen, strives to be just to the Athenian pretensions in the

following passage.(193) “Mythologists,” says he, “relate that Demeter,

unable to find her daughter, lit torches at the craters of Etna(194) and

roamed over many parts of the world. Those people who received her best

she rewarded by giving them in return the fruit of the wheat; and because

the Athenians welcomed her most kindly of all, she bestowed the fruit of

the wheat on them next after the Sicilians. Wherefore that people honoured

the goddess more than any other folk by magnificent sacrifices and the

mysteries at Eleusis, which for their extreme antiquity and sanctity have

become famous among all men. From the Athenians many others received the

boon of the corn and shared the seed with their neighbours, till they

filled the whole inhabited earth with it. But as the people of Sicily, on

account of the intimate relation in which they stood to Demeter and the

Maiden, were the first to participate in the newly discovered corn, they

appointed sacrifices and popular festivities in honour of each of the two

goddesses, naming the celebrations after them and signifying the nature of

the boons they had received by the dates of the festivals. For they

celebrated the bringing home of the Maiden at the time when the corn was

ripe, performing the sacrifice and holding the festivity with all the

solemnity and zeal that might be reasonably expected of men who desired to

testify their gratitude for so signal a gift bestowed on them before all

the rest of mankind. But the sacrifice to Demeter they assigned to the

time when the sowing of the corn begins; and for ten days they hold a

popular festivity which bears the name of the goddess, and is remarkable

as well for the magnificence of its pomp as for the costumes then worn in

imitation of the olden time. During these days it is customary for people

to rail at each other in foul language, because when Demeter was mourning

for the rape of the Maiden she laughed at a ribald jest.”(195) Thus

despite his natural prepossession in favour of his native land, Diodorus

bears testimony both to the special blessing bestowed on the Athenians by

the Corn Goddess, and to the generosity with which they had imparted the

blessing to others, until it gradually spread to the ends of the earth.

Again, Cicero, addressing a Roman audience, enumerates among the benefits

which Athens was believed to have conferred on the world, the gift of the

corn and its origin in Attic soil; and the cursory manner in which he

alludes to it seems to prove that the tradition was familiar to his

hearers.(196) Four centuries later the rhetorician Himerius speaks of

Demeter’s gift of the corn and the mysteries to the Athenians as the

source of the first and greatest service rendered by their city to

mankind;(197) so ancient, widespread, and persistent was the legend which

ascribed the origin of the corn to the goddess Demeter and associated it

with the institution of the Eleusinian mysteries. No wonder that the

Delphic oracle called Athens “the Metropolis of the Corn.”(198)

(M44) From the passage of Diodorus which I have quoted we learn that the

Sicilians celebrated the festival of Demeter at the beginning of sowing,

and the festival of Persephone at harvest. This proves that they

associated, if they did not identify, the Mother Goddess with the

seed-corn and the Daughter Goddess with the ripe ears. Could any

association or identification be more easy and obvious to people who

personified the processes of nature under the form of anthropomorphic

deities? As the seed brings forth the ripe ear, so the Corn Mother Demeter

gave birth to the Corn Daughter Persephone. It is true that difficulties

arise when we attempt to analyse this seemingly simple conception. How,

for example, are we to divide exactly the two persons of the divinity? At

what precise moment does the seed cease to be the Corn Mother and begins

to burgeon out into the Corn Daughter? And how far can we identify the

material substance of the barley and wheat with the divine bodies of the

Two Goddesses? Questions of this sort probably gave little concern to the

sturdy swains who ploughed, sowed, and reaped the fat fields of Sicily. We

cannot imagine that their night’s rest was disturbed by uneasy meditations

on these knotty problems. It would hardly be strange if the muzzy mind of

the Sicilian bumpkin, who looked with blind devotion to the Two Goddesses

for his daily bread, totally failed to distinguish Demeter from the seed

and Persephone from the ripe sheaves, and if he accepted implicitly the

doctrine of the real presence of the divinities in the corn without

discriminating too curiously between the material and the spiritual

properties of the barley or the wheat. And if he had been closely

questioned by a rigid logician as to the exact distinction to be drawn

between the two persons of the godhead who together represented for him

the annual vicissitudes of the cereals, Hodge might have scratched his

head and confessed that it puzzled him to say where precisely the one

goddess ended and the other began, or why the seed buried in the ground

should figure at one time as the dead daughter Persephone descending into

the nether world, and at another as the living Mother Demeter about to

give birth to next year’s crop. Theological subtleties like these have

posed longer heads than are commonly to be found on bucolic shoulders.

(M45) The time of year at which the first-fruits were offered to Demeter

and Persephone at Eleusis is not explicitly mentioned by ancient

authorities, and accordingly no inference can be drawn from the date of

the offering as to its religious significance. It is true that at the

Eleusinian mysteries the Hierophant and Torchbearer publicly exhorted the

Greeks in general, as distinguished from the Athenians and their allies,

to offer the first-fruits in accordance with ancestral custom and the

bidding of the Delphic oracle.(199) But there is nothing to shew that the

offerings were made immediately after the exhortation. Nor does any

ancient authority support the view of a modern scholar that the offering

of the first-fruits, or a portion of them, took place at the Festival

before Ploughing (_Proerosia_),(200) though that festival would no doubt

be an eminently appropriate occasion for propitiating with such offerings

the goddess on whose bounty the next year’s crop was believed to depend.

(M46) On the other hand, we are positively told that the first-fruits were

carried to Eleusis to be used at the Festival of the Threshing-floor

(_Haloa_).(201) But the statement, cursorily reported by writers of no

very high authority, cannot be implicitly relied upon; and even if it

could, we should hardly be justified in inferring from it that all the

first-fruits of the corn were offered to Demeter and Persephone at this

festival. Be that as it may, the Festival of the Threshing-floor was

intimately connected with the worship both of Demeter and of Dionysus, and

accordingly it deserves our attention. It is said to have been sacred to

both these deities;(202) and while the name seems to connect it rather

with the Corn Goddess than with the Wine God, we are yet informed that it

was held by the Athenians on the occasion of the pruning of the vines and

the tasting of the stored-up wine.(203) The festival is frequently

mentioned in Eleusinian inscriptions, from some of which we gather that it

included sacrifices to the two goddesses and a so-called Ancestral

Contest, as to the nature of which we have no information.(204) We may

suppose that the festival or some part of it was celebrated on the Sacred

Threshing-floor of Triptolemus at Eleusis;(205) for as Triptolemus was the

hero who is said to have diffused the knowledge of the corn all over the

world, nothing could be more natural than that the Festival of the

Threshing-floor should be held on the sacred threshing-floor which bore

his name. As for Demeter, we have already seen how intimate was her

association with the threshing-floor and the operation of threshing;

according to Homer, she is the yellow goddess who parts the yellow grain

from the white chaff at the threshing, and in Cos her image with the

corn-stalks and the poppies in her hands stood on the

threshing-floor.(206) The festival lasted one day, and no victims might be

sacrificed at it;(207) but special use was made, as we have seen, of the

first-fruits of the corn. With regard to the dating of the festival we are

informed that it fell in the month Poseideon, which corresponds roughly to

our December, and as the date rests on the high authority of the ancient

Athenian antiquary Philochorus,(208) and is, moreover, indirectly

confirmed by inscriptional evidence,(209) we are bound to accept it. But

it is certainly surprising to find a Festival of the Threshing-floor held

so late in the year, long after the threshing, which in Greece usually

takes place not later than midsummer, though on high ground in Crete it is

sometimes prolonged till near the end of August.(210) We seem bound to

conclude that the Festival of the Threshing-floor was quite distinct from

the actual threshing of the corn.(211) It is said to have included certain

mystic rites performed by women alone, who feasted and quaffed wine, while

they broke filthy jests on each other and exhibited cakes baked in the

form of the male and female organs of generation.(212) If the latter

particulars are correctly reported we may suppose that these indecencies,

like certain obscenities which seem to have formed part of the Great

Mysteries at Eleusis,(213) were no mere wanton outbursts of licentious

passion, but were deliberately practised as rites calculated to promote

the fertility of the ground by means of homoeopathic or imitative magic. A

like association of what we might call indecency with rites intended to

promote the growth of the crops meets us in the Thesmophoria, a festival

of Demeter celebrated by women alone, at which the character of the

goddess as a source of fertility comes out clearly in the custom of mixing

the remains of the sacrificial pigs with the seed-corn in order to obtain

a plentiful crop. We shall return to this festival later on.(214)

(M47) Other festivals held at Eleusis in honour of Demeter and Persephone

were known as the Green Festival and the Festival of the Cornstalks.(215)

Of the manner of their celebration we know nothing except that they

comprised sacrifices, which were offered to Demeter and Persephone. But

their names suffice to connect the two festivals with the green and the

standing corn. We have seen that Demeter herself bore the title of Green,

and that sacrifices were offered to her under that title which plainly

aimed at promoting fertility.(216) Among the many epithets applied to

Demeter which mark her relation to the corn may further be mentioned

“Wheat-lover,”(217) “She of the Corn,”(218) “Sheaf-bearer,”(219) “She of

the Threshing-floor,”(220) “She of the Winnowing-fan,”(221) “Nurse of the

Corn-ears,”(222) “Crowned with Ears of Corn,”(223) “She of the Seed,”(224)

“She of the Green Fruits,”(225) “Heavy with Summer Fruits,”(226)

“Fruit-bearer,”(227) “She of the Great Loaf,” and “She of the Great Barley

Loaf.”(228) Of these epithets it may be remarked that though all of them

are quite appropriate to a Corn Goddess, some of them would scarcely be

applicable to an Earth Goddess and therefore they add weight to the other

arguments which turn the scale in favour of the corn as the fundamental

attribute of Demeter.

(M48) How deeply implanted in the mind of the ancient Greeks was this

faith in Demeter as goddess of the corn may be judged by the circumstance

that the faith actually persisted among their Christian descendants at her

old sanctuary of Eleusis down to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

For when the English traveller Dodwell revisited Eleusis, the inhabitants

lamented to him the loss of a colossal image of Demeter, which was carried

off by Clarke in 1802 and presented to the University of Cambridge, where

it still remains. “In my first journey to Greece,” says Dodwell, “this

protecting deity was in its full glory, situated in the centre of a

threshing-floor, amongst the ruins of her temple. The villagers were

impressed with a persuasion that their rich harvests were the effect of

her bounty, and since her removal, their abundance, as they assured me,

has disappeared.”(229) Thus we see the Corn Goddess Demeter standing on

the threshing-floor of Eleusis and dispensing corn to her worshippers in

the nineteenth century of the Christian era, precisely as her image stood

and dispensed corn to her worshippers on the threshing-floor of Cos in the

days of Theocritus. And just as the people of Eleusis last century

attributed the diminution of their harvests to the loss of the image of

Demeter, so in antiquity the Sicilians, a corn-growing people devoted to

the worship of the two Corn Goddesses, lamented that the crops of many

towns had perished because the unscrupulous Roman governor Verres had

impiously carried off the image of Demeter from her famous temple at

Henna.(230) Could we ask for a clearer proof that Demeter was indeed the

goddess of the corn than this belief, held by the Greeks down to modern

times, that the corn-crops depended on her presence and bounty and

perished when her image was removed?

(M49) In a former part of this work I followed an eminent French scholar

in concluding, from various indications, that part of the religious drama

performed in the mysteries of Eleusis may have been a marriage between the

sky-god Zeus and the corn-goddess Demeter, represented by the hierophant

and the priestess of the goddess respectively.(231) The conclusion is

arrived at by combining a number of passages, all more or less vague and

indefinite, of late Christian writers; hence it must remain to some extent

uncertain and cannot at the best lay claim to more than a fair degree of

probability. It may be, as Professor W. Ridgeway holds, that this dramatic

marriage of the god and goddess was an innovation foisted into the

Eleusinian Mysteries in that great welter of religions which followed the

meeting of the East and the West in the later ages of antiquity.(232) If a

marriage of Zeus and Demeter did indeed form an important feature of the

Mysteries in the fifth century before our era, it is certainly remarkable,

as Professor Ridgeway has justly pointed out, that no mention of Zeus

occurs in the public decree of that century which regulates the offerings

of first-fruits and the sacrifices to be made to the gods and goddesses of

Eleusis.(233) At the same time we must bear in mind that, if the evidence

for the ritual marriage of Zeus and Demeter is late and doubtful, the

evidence for the myth is ancient and indubitable. The story was known to

Homer, for in the list of beauties to whom he makes Zeus, in a burst of

candour, confess that he had lost his too susceptible heart, there occurs

the name of “the fair-haired Queen Demeter”;(234) and in another passage

the poet represents the jealous god smiting with a thunderbolt the

favoured lover with whom the goddess had forgotten her dignity among the

furrows of a fallow field.(235) Moreover, according to one tradition,

Dionysus himself was the offspring of the intrigue between Zeus and

Demeter.(236) Thus there is no intrinsic improbability in the view that

one or other of these unedifying incidents in the backstairs chronicle of

Olympus should have formed part of the sacred peep-show in the Eleusinian

Mysteries. But it seems just possible that the marriage to which the

Christian writers allude with malicious joy may after all have been of a

more regular and orthodox pattern. We are positively told that the rape of

Persephone was acted at the Mysteries;(237) may that scene not have been

followed by another representing the solemnisation of her nuptials with

her ravisher and husband Pluto? It is to be remembered that Pluto was

sometimes known as a god of fertility under the title of Subterranean

Zeus. It was to him under that title as well as to Demeter, that the Greek

ploughman prayed at the beginning of the ploughing;(238) and the people of

Myconus used to sacrifice to Subterranean Zeus and Subterranean Earth for

the prosperity of the crops on the twelfth day of the month Lenaeon.(239)

Thus it may be that the Zeus whose marriage was dramatically represented

at the Mysteries was not the sky-god Zeus, but his brother Zeus of the

Underworld, and that the writers who refer to the ceremony have confused

the two brothers. This view, if it could be established, would dispose of

the difficulty raised by the absence of the name of Zeus in the decree

which prescribes the offerings to be made to the gods of Eleusis; for

although in that decree Pluto is not mentioned under the name of

Subterranean Zeus, he is clearly referred to, as the editors of the

inscription have seen, under the vague title of “the God,” while his

consort Persephone is similarly referred to under the title of “the

Goddess,” and it is ordained that perfect victims shall be sacrificed to

both of them. However, if we thus dispose of one difficulty, it must be

confessed that in doing so we raise another. For if the bridegroom in the

Sacred Marriage at Eleusis was not the sky-god Zeus, but the earth-god

Pluto, we seem driven to suppose that, contrary to the opinion of the

reverend Christian scandal-mongers, the bride was his lawful wife

Persephone and not his sister and mother-in-law Demeter. In short, on the

hypothesis which I have suggested we are compelled to conclude that the

ancient busybodies who lifted the veil from the mystic marriage were

mistaken as to the person both of the divine bridegroom and of the divine

bride. In regard to the bridegroom I have conjectured that they may have

confused the two brothers, Zeus of the Upper World and Zeus of the Lower

World. In regard to the bride, can any reason be suggested for confounding

the persons of the mother and daughter? On the view here taken of the

nature of Demeter and Persephone nothing could be easier than to confuse

them with each other, for both of them were mythical embodiments of the

corn, the mother Demeter standing for the old corn of last year and the

daughter Persephone standing for the new corn of this year. In point of

fact Greek artists, both of the archaic and of later periods, frequently

represent the Mother and Daughter side by side in forms which resemble

each other so closely that eminent modern experts have sometimes differed

from each other on the question, which is Demeter and which is Persephone;

indeed in some cases it might be quite impossible to distinguish the two

if it were not for the inscriptions attached to the figures.(240) The

ancient sculptors, vase-painters, and engravers must have had some good

reason for portraying the two goddesses in types which are almost

indistinguishable from each other; and what better reason could they have

had than the knowledge that the two persons of the godhead were one in

substance, that they stood merely for two different aspects of the same

simple natural phenomenon, the growth of the corn? Thus it is easy to

understand why Demeter and Persephone may have been confused in ritual as

well as in art, why in particular the part of the divine bride in a Sacred

Marriage may sometimes have been assigned to the Mother and sometimes to

the Daughter. But all this, I fully admit, is a mere speculation, and I

only put it forward as such. We possess far too little information as to a

Sacred Marriage in the Eleusinian Mysteries to be justified in speaking

with confidence on so obscure a subject.

(M50) One thing, however, which we may say with a fair degree of

probability is that, if such a marriage did take place at Eleusis, no date

in the agricultural year could well have been more appropriate for it than

the date at which the Mysteries actually fell, namely about the middle of

September. The long Greek summer is practically rainless and in the

fervent heat and unbroken drought all nature languishes. The river-beds

are dry, the fields parched. The farmer awaits impatiently the setting-in

of the autumnal rains, which begin in October and mark the great season

for ploughing and sowing. What time could be fitter for celebrating the

union of the Corn Goddess with her husband the Earth God or perhaps rather

with her paramour the Sky God, who will soon descend in fertilising

showers to quicken the seed in the furrows? Such embraces of the divine

powers or their human representatives might well be deemed, on the

principles of homoeopathic or imitative magic, indispensable to the growth

of the crops. At least similar ideas have been entertained and similar

customs have been practised by many peoples;(241) and in the legend of

Demeter’s love-adventure among the furrows of the thrice-ploughed

fallow(242) we seem to catch a glimpse of rude rites of the same sort

performed in the fields at sowing-time by Greek ploughmen for the sake of

ensuring the growth of the seed which they were about to commit to the

bosom of the naked earth. In this connexion a statement of ancient writers

as to the rites of Eleusis receives fresh significance. We are told that

at these rites the worshippers looked up to the sky and cried “Rain!” and

then looked down at the earth and cried “Conceive!”(243) Nothing could be

more appropriate at a marriage of the Sky God and the Earth or Corn

Goddess than such invocations to the heaven to pour down rain and to the

earth or the corn to conceive seed under the fertilising shower; in Greece

no time could well be more suitable for the utterance of such prayers than

just at the date when the Great Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated, at

the end of the long drought of summer and before the first rains of

autumn.

(M51) Different both from the Great Mysteries and the offerings of

first-fruits at Eleusis were the games which were celebrated there on a

great scale once in every four years and on a less scale once in every two

years.(244) That the games were distinct from the Mysteries is proved by

their periods, which were quadriennial and biennial respectively, whereas

the Mysteries were celebrated annually. Moreover, in Greek epigraphy, our

most authentic evidence in such matters, the games and the Mysteries are

clearly distinguished from each other by being mentioned separately in the

same inscription.(245) But like the Mysteries the games seem to have been

very ancient; for the Parian Chronicler, who wrote in the year 264 B.C.,

assigns the foundation of the Eleusinian games to the reign of Pandion,

the son of Cecrops. However, he represents them as of later origin than

the Eleusinian Mysteries, which according to him were instituted by

Eumolpus in the reign of Erechtheus, after Demeter had planted corn in

Attica and Triptolemus had sown seed in the Rarian plain at Eleusis.(246)

This testimony to the superior antiquity of the Mysteries is in harmony

with our most ancient authority on the rites of Eleusis, the author of the

_Hymn to Demeter_, who describes the origin of the Eleusinian Mysteries,

but makes no reference or allusion to the Eleusinian Games. However, the

great age of the games is again vouched for at a much later date by the

rhetorician Aristides, who even declares that they were the oldest of all

Greek games.(247) With regard to the nature and meaning of the games our

information is extremely scanty, but an old scholiast on Pindar tells us

that they were celebrated in honour of Demeter and Persephone as a

thank-offering at the conclusion of the corn-harvest.(248) His testimony

is confirmed by that of the rhetorician Aristides, who mentions the

institution of the Eleusinian games in immediate connexion with the

offerings of the first-fruits of the corn, which many Greek states sent to

Athens;(249) and from an inscription dated about the close of the third

century before our era we learn that at the Great Eleusinian Games

sacrifices were offered to Demeter and Persephone.(250) Further, we gather

from an official Athenian inscription of 329 B.C. that both the Great and

the Lesser Games included athletic and musical contests, a horse-race, and

a competition which bore the name of the Ancestral or Hereditary Contest,

and which accordingly may well have formed the original kernel of the

games.(251) Unfortunately nothing is known about this Ancestral Contest.

We might be tempted to identify it with the Ancestral Contest included in

the Eleusinian Festival of the Threshing-floor,(252) which was probably

held on the Sacred Threshing-floor of Triptolemus at Eleusis.(253) If the

identification could be proved, we should have another confirmation of the

tradition which connects the games with Demeter and the corn; for

according to the prevalent tradition it was to Triptolemus that Demeter

first revealed the secret of the corn, and it was he whom she sent out as

an itinerant missionary to impart the beneficent discovery of the cereals

to all mankind and to teach them to sow the seed.(254) On monuments of

art, especially in vase-paintings, he is constantly represented along with

Demeter in this capacity, holding corn-stalks in his hand and sitting in

his car, which is sometimes winged and sometimes drawn by dragons, and

from which he is said to have sowed the seed down on the whole world as he

sped through the air.(255) At Eleusis victims bought with the first-fruits

of the wheat and barley were sacrificed to him as well as to Demeter and

Persephone.(256) In short, if we may judge from the combined testimony of

Greek literature and art, Triptolemus was the corn-hero first and

foremost. Even beyond the limits of the Greek world, all men, we are told,

founded sanctuaries and erected altars in his honour because he had

bestowed on them the gift of the corn.(257) His very name has been

plausibly explained both in ancient and modern times as “Thrice-ploughed”

with reference to the Greek custom of ploughing the land thrice a

year,(258) and the derivation is said to be on philological principles

free from objection.(259) In fact it would seem as if Triptolemus, like

Demeter and Persephone themselves, were a purely mythical being, an

embodiment of the conception of the first sower. At all events in the

local Eleusinian legend, according to an eminent scholar, who has paid

special attention to Attic genealogy, “Triptolemus does not, like his

comrade Eumolpus or other founders of Eleusinian priestly families,

continue his kind, but without leaving offspring who might perpetuate his

priestly office, he is removed from the scene of his beneficent activity.

As he appeared, so he vanishes again from the legend, after he has

fulfilled his divine mission.”(260)

(M52) However, there is no sufficient ground for identifying the Ancestral

Contest of the Eleusinian games with the Ancestral Contest of the

Threshing-festival at Eleusis, and accordingly the connexion of the games

with the corn-harvest and with the corn-hero Triptolemus must so far

remain uncertain. But a clear trace of such a connexion may be seen in the

custom of rewarding the victors in the Eleusinian games with measures of

barley; in the official Athenian inscription of 329 B.C., which contains

the accounts of the superintendents of Eleusis and the Treasurers of the

Two Goddesses, the amounts of corn handed over by these officers to the

priests and priestesses for the purposes of the games is exactly

specified.(261) This of itself is sufficient to prove that the Eleusinian

games were closely connected with the worship of Demeter and Persephone.

The grain thus distributed in prizes was probably reaped on the Rarian

plain near Eleusis, where according to the legend Triptolemus sowed the

first corn.(262) Certainly we know that the barley grown on that plain was

used in sacrifices and for the baking of the sacrificial cakes,(263) from

which we may reasonably infer that the prizes of barley, to which no doubt

a certain sanctity attached in the popular mind, were brought from the

same holy fields. So sacred was the Rarian plain that no dead body was

allowed to defile it. When such a pollution accidentally took place, it

was expiated by the sacrifice of a pig,(264) the usual victim employed in

Greek purificatory rites.

(M53) Thus, so far as the scanty evidence at our disposal permits us to

judge, the Eleusinian games, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, would seem to

have been primarily concerned with Demeter and Persephone as goddesses of

the corn. At least that is expressly affirmed by the old scholiast on

Pindar and it is borne out by the practice of rewarding the victors with

measures of barley. Perhaps the Ancestral Contest, which may well have

formed the original nucleus of the games, was a contest between the

reapers on the sacred Rarian plain to see who should finish his allotted

task before his fellows. For success in such a contest no prize could be

more appropriate than a measure of the sacred barley which the victorious

reaper had just cut on the barley-field. In the sequel we shall see that

similar contests between reapers have been common on the harvest fields of

modern Europe, and it will appear that such competitions are not purely

athletic; their aim is not simply to demonstrate the superior strength,

activity, and skill of the victors; it is to secure for the particular

farm the possession of the blooming young Corn-maiden of the present year,

conceived as the embodiment of the vigorous grain, and to pass on to

laggard neighbours the aged Corn-mother of the past year, conceived as an

embodiment of the effete and outworn energies of the corn.(265) May it not

have been so at Eleusis? may not the reapers have vied with each other for

possession of the young corn-spirit Persephone and for avoidance of the

old corn-spirit Demeter? may not the prize of barley, which rewarded the

victor in the Ancestral Contest, have been supposed to house in the ripe

ears no less a personage than the Corn-maiden Persephone herself? And if

there is any truth in these conjectures (for conjectures they are and

nothing more), we may hazard a guess as to the other Ancestral Contest

which took place at the Eleusinian Festival of the Threshing-floor.

Perhaps it in like manner was originally a competition between threshers

on the sacred threshing-floor of Triptolemus to determine who should

finish threshing his allotted quantity of corn before the rest. Such

competitions have also been common, as we shall see presently, on the

threshing-floors of modern Europe, and their motive again has not been

simple emulation between sturdy swains for the reward of strength and

dexterity; it has been a dread of being burdened with the aged and outworn

spirit of the corn conceived as present in the bundle of corn-stalks which

receives the last stroke at threshing.(266) We know that effigies of

Demeter with corn and poppies in her hands stood on Greek

threshing-floors.(267) Perhaps at the conclusion of the threshing these

effigies, as representatives of the old Corn-spirit, were passed on to

neighbours who had not yet finished threshing the corn. At least the

supposition is in harmony with modern customs observed on the

threshing-floor.

(M54) It is possible that the Eleusinian games were no more than a popular

merrymaking celebrated at the close of the harvest. This view of their

character might be supported by modern analogies; for in some parts of

Germany it has been customary for the harvesters, when their work is done,

to engage in athletic competitions of various kinds, which have at first

sight no very obvious connexion with the business of harvesting. For

example, at Besbau near Luckau great cakes were baked at the

harvest-festival, and the labourers, both men and women, ran races for

them. He or she who reached them first received not only a cake, but a

handkerchief or the like as a prize. Again, at Bergkirchen, when the

harvest was over, a garland was hung up and the harvesters rode at it on

horseback and tried to bring it down with a stab or a blow as they

galloped past. He who succeeded in bringing it down was proclaimed King.

Again, in the villages near Fürstenwald at harvest the young men used to

fetch a fir-tree from the wood, peel the trunk, and set it up like a mast

in the middle of the village. A handkerchief and other prizes were

fastened to the top of the pole and the men clambered up for them.(268)

Among the peasantry of Silesia, we are told, the harvest-home broadened

out into a popular festival, in which athletic sports figured prominently.

Thus, for example, at Järischau, in the Strehlitz district, a scythe, a

rake, a flail, and a hay-fork or pitchfork were fastened to the top of a

smooth pole and awarded as prizes, in order of merit, to the men who

displayed most agility in climbing the pole. Younger men amused themselves

with running in sacks, high jumps, and so forth. At Prauss, near Nimptsch,

the girls ran a race in a field for aprons as prizes. In the central parts

of Silesia a favourite amusement at harvest was a race between girls for a

garland of leaves or flowers.(269) Yet it seems probable that all such

sports at harvest were in origin not mere pastimes, but that they were

serious attempts to secure in one way or another the help and blessing of

the corn-spirit. Thus in some parts of Prussia, at the close of the

rye-harvest, a few sheaves used to be left standing in the field after all

the rest of the rye had been carted home. These sheaves were then made up

into the shape of a man and dressed out in masculine costume, and all the

young women were obliged to run a race, of which the corn-man was the

goal. She who won the race led off the dancing in the evening.(270) Here

the aim of the foot-race among the young women is clearly to secure the

corn-spirit embodied in the last sheaf left standing on the field; for, as

we shall see later on, the last sheaf is commonly supposed to harbour the

corn-spirit and is treated accordingly like a man or a woman.(271)

(M55) If the Ancestral Contest at the Eleusinian games was, as I have

conjectured, a contest between the reapers on the sacred barley-field, we

should have to suppose that the games were celebrated at barley-harvest,

which in the lowlands of Greece falls in May or even at the end of April.

This theory is in harmony with the evidence of the scholiast on Pindar,

who tells us that the Eleusinian games were celebrated after the

corn-harvest.(272) No other ancient authority, so far as I am aware,

mentions at what time of the year these games were held. Modern

authorities, arguing from certain slight and to some extent conjectural

data, have variously assigned them to Metageitnion (August) and to

Boedromion (September), and those who assign them to Boedromion

(September) are divided in opinion as to whether they preceded or followed

the Mysteries.(273) However, the evidence is far too slender and uncertain

to allow of any conclusions being based on it.

(M56) But there is a serious difficulty in the way of connecting the

Eleusinian games with the goddesses of the corn. How is the quadriennial

or the biennial period of the games to be reconciled with the annual

growth of the crops? Year by year the barley and the wheat are sown and

reaped; how then could the games, held only every fourth or every second

year, have been regarded as thank-offerings for the annual harvest? On

this view of their nature, which is the one taken by the old scholiast on

Pindar, though the harvest was received at the hands of the Corn Goddess

punctually every year, men thanked her for her bounty only every second

year or even only every fourth year. What were her feelings likely to be

in the blank years when she got no thanks and no games? She might

naturally resent such negligence and ingratitude and punish them by

forbidding the seed to sprout, just as she did at Eleusis when she mourned

the loss of her daughter. In short, men could hardly expect to reap crops

in years in which they offered nothing to the Corn Goddess. That would

indeed appear to be the view generally taken by the ancient Greeks; for we

have seen that year by year they presented the first-fruits of the barley

and the wheat to Demeter, not merely in the solemn state ritual of

Eleusis, but also in rustic festivals held by farmers on their

threshing-floors. The pious Greek husbandman would no doubt have been

shocked and horrified at a proposal to pay the Corn Goddess her dues only

every second or fourth year. “No offerings, no crops,” he would say to

himself, and would anticipate nothing but dearth and famine in any year

when he failed to satisfy the just and lawful demands of the divinity on

whose good pleasure he believed the growth of the corn to be directly

dependent. Accordingly we may regard it as highly probable that from the

very beginning of settled and regular agriculture in Greece men annually

propitiated the deities of the corn with a ritual of some sort, and

rendered them their dues in the shape of offerings of the ripe barley and

wheat. Now we know that the Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated every

year, and accordingly, if I am right in interpreting them as essentially a

dramatic representation of the annual vicissitudes of the corn performed

for the purpose of quickening the seed, it becomes probable that in some

form or another they were annually held at Eleusis long before the

practice arose of celebrating games there every fourth or every second

year. In short, the Eleusinian mysteries were in all probability far older

than the Eleusinian games. How old they were we cannot even guess. But

when we consider that the cultivation of barley and wheat, the two cereals

specially associated with Demeter, appears to have been practised in

prehistoric Europe from the Stone Age onwards,(274) we shall be disposed

to admit that the annual performance of religious or magical rites at

Eleusis for the purpose of ensuring good crops, whether by propitiating

the Corn Goddess with offerings of first-fruits or by dramatically

representing the sowing and the growth of the corn in mythical form,

probably dates from an extremely remote antiquity.

(M57) But in order to clear our ideas on this subject it is desirable to

ascertain, if possible, the reason for holding the Eleusinian games at

intervals of two or four years. The reason for holding a harvest festival

and thanksgiving every year is obvious enough; but why hold games only

every second or every fourth year? The reason for such limitations is by

no means obvious on the face of them, especially if the growth of the

crops is deemed dependent on the celebration. In order to find an answer

to this question it may be well at the outset to confine our attention to

the Great Eleusinian Games, which were celebrated only every fourth year.

That these were the principal games appears not only from their name, but

from the testimony of Aristotle, or at least of the author of _The

Constitution of Athens_, who notices only the quadriennial or, as in

accordance with Greek idiom he calls it, the penteteric celebration of the

games.(275) Now the custom of holding games at intervals of four years was

very common in Greece; to take only a few conspicuous examples the Olympic

games at Olympia, the Pythian games at Delphi, the Panathenaic games at

Athens, and the Eleutherian games at Plataea(276) were all celebrated at

quadriennial or, as the Greeks called them, penteteric periods; and at a

later time when Augustus instituted, or rather renewed on a more splendid

scale, the games at Actium to commemorate his great victory, he followed a

well-established Greek precedent by ordaining that they should be

quadriennial.(277) Still later the emperor Hadrian instituted quadriennial

games at Mantinea in honour of his dead favourite Antinous.(278) But in

regard to the two greatest of all the Greek games, the Olympian and the

Pythian, I have shewn reasons for thinking that they were originally

celebrated at intervals of eight instead of four years; certainly this is

attested for the Pythian games,(279) and the mode of calculating the

Olympiads by alternate periods of fifty and forty-nine lunar months,(280)

which added together make up eight solar years, seems to prove that the

Olympic cycle of four years was really based on a cycle of eight years,

from which it is natural to infer that in the beginning the Olympic, like

the Pythian, games may have been octennial instead of quadriennial.(281)

Now we know from the testimony of the ancients themselves that the Greeks

instituted the eight-years’ cycle for the purpose of harmonising solar and

lunar time.(282) They regulated their calendar primarily by observation of

the moon rather than of the sun; their months were lunar, and their

ordinary year consisted of twelve lunar months. But the solar year of

three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days exceeds the lunar year of

twelve lunar months or three hundred and fifty-four days by eleven and a

quarter days, so that in eight solar years the excess amounts to ninety

days or roughly three lunar months. Accordingly the Greeks equated eight

solar years to eight lunar years of twelve months each by intercalating

three lunar months of thirty days each in the octennial cycle; they

intercalated one lunar month in the third year of the cycle, a second

lunar month in the fifth year, and a third lunar month in the eighth

year.(283) In this way they, so to say, made the sun and moon keep time

together by reckoning ninety-nine lunar months as equivalent to eight

solar years; so that if, for example, the full moon coincided with the

summer solstice in one year, it coincided with it again after the

revolution of the eight years’ cycle, but not before. The equation was

indeed not quite exact, and in order to render it so the Greeks afterwards

found themselves obliged, first, to intercalate three days every sixteen

years, and, next, to omit one intercalary month in every period of one

hundred and sixty years.(284) But these corrections were doubtless

refinements of a later age; they may have been due to the astronomer

Eudoxus of Cnidus, or to Cleostratus of Tenedos, who were variously, but

incorrectly, supposed to have instituted the octennial cycle.(285) There

are strong grounds for holding that in its simplest form the octennial

cycle of ninety-nine lunar months dates from an extremely remote antiquity

in Greece; that it was in fact, as a well-informed Greek writer tell

us,(286) the first systematic attempt to bring solar and the lunar time

into harmony. Indeed, if the Olympiads were calculated, as they appear to

have been, on the eight years’ cycle, this of itself suffices to place the

origin of the cycle not later than 776 B.C., the year with which the

reckoning by Olympiads begins. And when we bear in mind the very remote

period from which, judged by the wonderful remains of Mycenae, Tiryns,

Cnossus and other cities, civilisation in Greek lands appears to date, it

seems reasonable to suppose that the octennial cycle, based as it was on

very simple observations, for which nothing but good eyes and almost no

astronomical knowledge was necessary,(287) may have been handed down among

the inhabitants of these countries from ages that preceded by many

centuries, possibly by thousands of years, the great period of Greek

literature and art. The supposition is confirmed by the traces which the

octennial cycle has left of itself in certain ancient Greek customs and

superstitions, particularly by the evidence which points to the conclusion

that at two of the oldest seats of monarchy in Greece, namely Cnossus and

Sparta, the king’s tenure of office was formerly limited to eight

years.(288)

(M58) We are informed, and may readily believe, that the motive which led

the Greeks to adopt the eight years’ cycle was religious rather than

practical or scientific: their aim was not so much to ensure the punctual

despatch of business or to solve an abstract problem in astronomy, as to

ascertain the exact days on which they ought to sacrifice to the gods. For

the Greeks regularly employed lunar months in their reckonings,(289) and

accordingly if they had dated their religious festivals simply by the

number of the month and the day of the month, the excess of eleven and a

quarter days of the solar over the lunar year would have had the effect of

causing the festivals gradually to revolve throughout the whole circle of

the seasons, so that in time ceremonies which properly belonged to winter

would come to be held in summer, and on the contrary ceremonies which were

only appropriate to summer would come to be held in winter. To avoid this

anomaly, and to ensure that festivals dated by lunar months should fall at

fixed or nearly fixed points in the solar year, the Greeks adopted the

octennial cycle by the simple expedient of intercalating three lunar

months in every period of eight years. In doing so they acted, as one of

their writers justly pointed out, on a principle precisely the reverse of

that followed by the ancient Egyptians, who deliberately regulated their

religious festivals by a purely lunar calendar for the purpose of allowing

them gradually to revolve throughout the whole circle of the seasons.(290)

(M59) Thus at an early stage of culture the regulation of the calendar is

largely an affair of religion: it is a means of maintaining the

established relations between gods and men on a satisfactory footing; and

in public opinion the great evil of a disordered calendar is not so much

that it disturbs and disarranges the ordinary course of business and the

various transactions of civil life, as that it endangers the welfare or

even the existence both of individuals and of the community by

interrupting their normal intercourse with those divine powers on whose

favour men believe themselves to be absolutely dependent. Hence in states

which take this view of the deep religious import of the calendar its

superintendence is naturally entrusted to priests rather than to

astronomers, because the science of astronomy is regarded merely as

ancillary to the deeper mysteries of theology. For example, at Rome the

method of determining the months and regulating the festivals was a secret

which the pontiffs for ages jealously guarded from the profane vulgar; and

in consequence of their ignorance and incapacity the calendar fell into

confusion and the festivals were celebrated out of their natural seasons,

until the greatest of all the Roman pontiffs, Julius Caesar, remedied the

confusion and placed the calendar of the civilised world on the firm

foundation on which, with little change, it stands to this day.(291)

(M60) On the whole, then, it appears probable that the octennial cycle,

based on considerations of religion and on elementary observations of the

two great luminaries, dated from a very remote period among the ancient

Greeks; if they did not bring it with them when they migrated southwards

from the oakwoods and beechwoods of Central Europe, they may well have

taken it over from their civilised predecessors of different blood and

different language whom they found leading a settled agricultural life on

the lands about the Aegean Sea. Now we have seen reasons to hold that the

two most famous of the great Greek games, the Pythian and the Olympian,

were both based on the ancient cycle of eight years, and that the

quadriennial period at which they were regularly celebrated in historical

times was arrived at by a subdivision of the older octennial cycle. It is

hardly rash, therefore, to conjecture that the quadriennial period in

general, regarded as the normal period for the celebration of great games

and festivals, was originally founded on elementary religious and

astronomical considerations of the same kind, that is, on a somewhat crude

attempt to harmonise the discrepancies of solar and lunar time and thereby

to ensure the continued favour of the gods. It is, indeed, certain or

probable that some of these quadriennial festivals were celebrated in

honour of the dead;(292) but there seems to be nothing in the beliefs or

customs of the ancient Greeks concerning the dead which would suggest a

quadriennial period as an appropriate one for propitiating the ghosts of

the departed. At first sight it is different with the octennial period;

for according to Pindar, the souls of the dead who had been purged of

their guilt by an abode of eight years in the nether world were born again

on earth in the ninth year as glorious kings, athletes, and sages.(293)

Now if this belief in the reincarnation of the dead after eight years were

primitive, it might certainly furnish an excellent reason for honouring

the ghosts of great men at their graves every eight years in order to

facilitate their rebirth into the world. Yet the period of eight years

thus rigidly applied to the life of disembodied spirits appears too

arbitrary and conventional to be really primitive, and we may suspect that

in this application it was nothing but an inference drawn from the old

octennial cycle, which had been instituted for the purpose of reconciling

solar and lunar time. If that was so, it will follow that the quadriennial

period of funeral games was, like the similar period of other religious

festivals, obtained through the bisection of the octennial cycle, and

hence that it was ultimately derived from astronomical considerations

rather than from any beliefs touching a quadriennial revolution in the

state of the dead. Yet in historical times it may well have happened that

these considerations were forgotten, and that games and festivals were

instituted at quadriennial intervals, for example at Plataea(294) in

honour of the slain, at Actium to commemorate the great victory, and at

Mantinea in honour of Antinous,(295) without any conscious reference to

the sun and moon, and merely because that period had from time immemorial

been regarded as the proper and normal one for the celebration of certain

solemn religious rites.

(M61) If we enquire why the Greeks so often bisected the old octennial

period into two quadriennial periods for purposes of religion, the answer

can only be conjectural, for no positive information appears to be given

us on the subject by ancient writers. Perhaps they thought that eight

years was too long a time to elapse between the solemn services, and that

it was desirable to propitiate the deities at shorter intervals. But it is

possible that political as well as religious motives may have operated to

produce the change. We have seen reason to think that at two of the oldest

seats of monarchy in Greece, namely Cnossus and Sparta, kings formerly

held office for periods of eight years only, after which their sovereignty

either terminated or had to be formally renewed. Now with the gradual

growth of that democratic sentiment, which ultimately dominated Greek

political life, men would become more and more jealous of the kingly power

and would seek to restrict it within narrower limits, and one of the most

obvious means of doing so was to shorten the king’s tenure of office. We

know that this was done at Athens, where the dynasty of the Medontids was

reduced from the rank of monarchs for life to that of magistrates holding

office for ten years only.(296) It is possible that elsewhere the king’s

reign was cut down from eight years to four years; and if I am right in my

explanation of the origin of the Olympic games this political revolution

actually took place at Olympia, where the victors in the chariot-race

would seem at first to have personated the Sun-god and perhaps held office

in the capacity of divine kings during the intervals between successive

celebrations of the games.(297) If at Olympia and elsewhere the games were

of old primarily contests in which the king had personally to take part

for the purpose of attesting his bodily vigour and therefore his capacity

for office, the repetition of the test at intervals of four instead of

eight years might be regarded as furnishing a better guarantee of the

maintenance of the king’s efficiency and thereby of the general welfare,

which in primitive society is often supposed to be sympathetically bound

up with the health and strength of the king.

(M62) But while many of the great Greek games were celebrated at intervals

of four years, others, such as the Nemean and the Isthmian, were

celebrated at intervals of two years only; and just as the quadriennial

period seems to have been arrived at through a bisection of the octennial

period, so we may surmise that the biennial period was produced by a

bisection of the quadriennial period. This was the view which the

admirable modern chronologer L. Ideler took of the origin of the

quadriennial and biennial festivals respectively,(298) and it appears far

more probable than the contrary opinion of the ancient chronologer

Censorinus, that the quadriennial period was reached by doubling the

biennial, and the octennial period by doubling the quadriennial.(299) The

theory of Censorinus was that the Greeks started with a biennial cycle of

twelve and thirteen lunar months alternately in successive years for the

purpose of harmonising solar and lunar time.(300) But as the cycle so

produced exceeds the true solar time by seven and a half days,(301) the

discrepancy which it leaves between the two great celestial clocks, the

sun and moon, was too glaring to escape the observation even of simple

farmers, who would soon have been painfully sensible that the times were

out of joint, if they had attempted to regulate the various operations of

the agricultural year by reference to so very inaccurate an almanac. It is

unlikely, therefore, that the Greeks ever made much use of a biennial

cycle of this sort.

(M63) Now to apply these conclusions to the Eleusinian games, which

furnished the starting-point for the preceding discussion. Whatever the

origin and meaning of these games may have been, we may surmise that the

quadriennial and biennial periods at which they were held were originally

derived from astronomical considerations, and that they had nothing to do

directly either with the agricultural cycle, which is annual, nor with the

worship of the dead, which can scarcely be said to have any cycle at all,

unless indeed it be an annual one. In other words, neither the needs of

husbandry nor the superstitions relating to ghosts furnish any natural

explanation of the quadriennial and biennial periods of the Eleusinian

games, and to discover such an explanation we are obliged to fall back on

astronomy or, to be more exact, on that blend of astronomy with religion

which appears to be mainly responsible for such Greek festivals as exceed

a year in their period. To admit this is not to decide the question

whether the Eleusinian games were agricultural or funereal in character;

but it is implicitly to acknowledge that the games were of later origin

than the annual ceremonies, including the Great Mysteries, which were

designed to propitiate the deities of the corn for the very simple and

practical purpose of ensuring good crops within the year. For it cannot

but be that men observed and laid their account with the annual changes of

the seasons, especially as manifested by the growth and maturity of the

crops, long before they attempted to reconcile the discrepancies of solar

and lunar time by a series of observations extending over several years.

(M64) On the whole, then, if, ignoring theories, we adhere to the evidence

of the ancients themselves in regard to the rites of Eleusis, including

under that general term the Great Mysteries, the games, the Festival

before Ploughing (_proerosia_), the Festival of the Threshing-floor, the

Green Festival, the Festival of the Cornstalks, and the offerings of

first-fruits, we shall probably incline to agree with the most learned of

ancient antiquaries, the Roman Varro, who, to quote Augustine’s report of

his opinion, “interpreted the whole of the Eleusinian mysteries as

relating to the corn which Ceres (Demeter) had discovered, and to

Proserpine (Persephone), whom Pluto had carried off from her. And

Proserpine herself, he said, signifies the fecundity of the seeds, the

failure of which at a certain time had caused the earth to mourn for

barrenness, and therefore had given rise to the opinion that the daughter

of Ceres, that is, fecundity itself, had been ravished by Pluto and

detained in the nether world; and when the dearth had been publicly

mourned and fecundity had returned once more, there was gladness at the

return of Proserpine and solemn rites were instituted accordingly. After

that he says,” continues Augustine, reporting Varro, “that many things

were taught in her mysteries which had no reference but to the discovery

of the corn.”(302)

(M65) Thus far I have for the most part assumed an identity of nature

between Demeter and Persephone, the divine mother and daughter

personifying the corn in its double aspect of the seed-corn of last year

and the ripe ears of this, and I pointed out that this view of the

substantial unity of mother and daughter is borne out by their portraits

in Greek art, which are often so alike as to be indistinguishable. Such a

close resemblance between the artistic types of Demeter and Persephone

militates decidedly against the view that the two goddesses are mythical

embodiments of two things so different and so easily distinguishable from

each other as the earth and the vegetation which springs from it. Had

Greek artists accepted that view of Demeter and Persephone, they could

surely have devised types of them which would have brought out the deep

distinction between the goddesses. That they were capable of doing so is

proved by the simple fact that they regularly represented the Earth

Goddess by a type which differed widely both from that of Demeter and from

that of Persephone.(303) Not only so, but they sometimes set the two types

of the Earth Goddess and the Corn Goddess (Demeter) side by side as if on

purpose to demonstrate their difference. Thus at Patrae there was a

sanctuary of Demeter, in which she and Persephone were portrayed standing,

while Earth was represented by a seated image;(304) and on a vase-painting

the Earth Goddess is seen appropriately emerging from the ground with a

horn of plenty and an infant in her uplifted arms, while Demeter and

Persephone, scarcely distinguishable from each other, stand at full height

behind her, looking down at her half-buried figure, and Triptolemus in his

wheeled car sits directly above her.(305) In this instructive picture,

accordingly, we see grouped together the principal personages in the myth

of the corn: the Earth Goddess, the two Goddesses of the old and the new

corn, and the hero who is said to have been sent forth by the Corn Goddess

to sow the seed broadcast over the earth. Such representations seem to

prove that the artists clearly distinguished Demeter from the Earth

Goddess.(306) And if Demeter did not personify the earth, can there be any

reasonable doubt that, like her daughter, she personified the corn which

was so commonly called by her name from the time of Homer downwards? The

essential identity of mother and daughter is suggested, not only by the

close resemblance of their artistic types, but also by the official title

of “the Two Goddesses” which was regularly applied to them in the great

sanctuary at Eleusis without any specification of their individual

attributes and titles,(307) as if their separate individualities had

almost merged in a single divine substance.(308)

(M66) Surveying the evidence as a whole, we may say that from the myth of

Demeter and Persephone, from their ritual, from their representations in

art, from the titles which they bore, from the offerings of first-fruits

which were presented to them, and from the names applied to the cereals,

we are fairly entitled to conclude that in the mind of the ordinary Greek

the two goddesses were essentially personifications of the corn, and that

in this germ the whole efflorescence of their religion finds implicitly

its explanation. But to maintain this is not to deny that in the long

course of religious evolution high moral and spiritual conceptions were

grafted on this simple original stock and blossomed out into fairer

flowers than the bloom of the barley and the wheat. Above all, the thought

of the seed buried in the earth in order to spring up to new and higher

life readily suggested a comparison with human destiny, and strengthened

the hope that for man too the grave may be but the beginning of a better

and happier existence in some brighter world unknown. This simple and

natural reflection seems perfectly sufficient to explain the association

of the Corn Goddess at Eleusis with the mystery of death and the hope of a

blissful immortality. For that the ancients regarded initiation in the

Eleusinian mysteries as a key to unlock the gates of Paradise appears to

be proved by the allusions which well-informed writers among them drop to

the happiness in store for the initiated hereafter.(309) No doubt it is

easy for us to discern the flimsiness of the logical foundation on which

such high hopes were built.(310) But drowning men clutch at straws, and we

need not wonder that the Greeks, like ourselves, with death before them

and a great love of life in their hearts, should not have stopped to weigh

with too nice a hand the arguments that told for and against the prospect

of human immortality. The reasoning that satisfied Saint Paul(311) and has

brought comfort to untold thousands of sorrowing Christians, standing by

the deathbed or the open grave of their loved ones, was good enough to

pass muster with ancient pagans, when they too bowed their heads under the

burden of grief, and, with the taper of life burning low in the socket,

looked forward into the darkness of the unknown. Therefore we do no

indignity to the myth of Demeter and Persephone—one of the few myths in

which the sunshine and clarity of the Greek genius are crossed by the

shadow and mystery of death—when we trace its origin to some of the most

familiar, yet eternally affecting aspects of nature, to the melancholy

gloom and decay of autumn and to the freshness, the brightness, and the

verdure of spring.