Persephone: The Queen the Dead Addressed

In a grave at Hipponion, in what is now Calabria, excavators found a sheet of gold smaller than a playing card, buried with a woman around 400 BCE and inscribed with lines of hexameter verse. It is a set of directions. Avoid the first spring, by the white cypress; go on to the lake of Memory; say the right words to the guards. The Hipponion leaf ends at the court of the rulers below. Its cousins from Thurii and Pelinna name the queen outright: Persephone. Most retellings remember her as the girl seized while picking flowers. This file follows the other Persephone, the one the dead had to address.

Exhibit A: Homer’s “dread Persephone”

Homer never tells the abduction. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Persephone is already enthroned, and her usual epithet, epainē, means something like “dread” or “awe-inspiring”. In Iliad 9, old Phoenix recalls how his father cursed him, and how the gods made the curse good: “Zeus below the earth and dread Persephone” (our rendering). In the same book, Althaea beats the ground with her hands and calls on Hades and Persephone to bring death to her own son, Meleager. These are the powers one invokes when the matter is death.

The Odyssey gives her a landscape. Circe directs Odysseus to the edge of Ocean, where the groves of Persephone stand, tall poplars and willows that shed their fruit too soon. In the visit to the dead in Book 11, she is the one who sends up the shades of famous women, and later the one who scatters them. The scene ends with her power at its most unsettling. Odysseus hurries back to his ship, afraid that Persephone might send up out of Hades the head of the Gorgon. The monster that turns the living to stone is, in his mind, hers to dispatch; the Gorgon’s own record is in the Medusa file.

Exhibit B: The Hymn’s bargain

The abduction story belongs to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, usually dated to the seventh or sixth century BCE. Its outline is famous: Persephone picking flowers on the Nysian plain, the narcissus that Earth grew as bait at Zeus’s will, the ground splitting open, Hades in his golden chariot, Demeter’s nine days of searching with torches, the famine that nearly robs the gods of their sacrifices, and Hermes sent down to bring the girl back.

Read closely, though, the Hymn already defines a job. Before he lets her go, Hades makes her an offer.

Here you will be mistress of all that lives and moves, and hold the highest honours among the deathless gods; and those who wrong you will pay for it through all their days.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter (our rendering)

Then he slips her a pomegranate seed. Because she has eaten below, she must return for a third of every year. The Hymn closes by founding the Mysteries at Eleusis and pronouncing a blessing on those who have seen them: the uninitiated, it warns, will not share that lot once they are dead, down in the murk. The story of a stolen daughter ends with a promise about the afterlife, and the queen of that afterlife is the daughter.

Exhibit C: The queen in cult

At Eleusis she was worshipped with her mother as one of “the Two Goddesses”, and often called simply Kore, the Maiden; Athenians also used the old form Pherephatta. What the initiates saw in the Mysteries was kept secret so well that we still do not know it, but the Hymn makes clear what they hoped for: a better portion below, which only the queen of the dead could grant.

The poet Pindar, in a fragment preserved because Plato quotes it in the Meno, puts the same authority in plain terms. Those from whom Persephone accepts payment for an ancient grief, he says, she sends back up to the sun in the ninth year, and from them grow noble kings and men of great strength and wisdom. Persephone here decides who has paid and who returns. Pindar does not say what the ancient grief was. Many scholars connect it with an Orphic story in which the Titans killed Dionysus, Persephone’s child by Zeus, but that story survives in full only in much later writers, and the link is debated.

In the Greek west, she was the leading deity of Locri Epizephyrii in southern Italy. Her sanctuary there has yielded great numbers of painted clay plaques, mostly of the fifth century BCE, showing the abduction, the bringing of gifts, and Persephone enthroned beside Hades. Roman historians remembered the plundering of her temple treasury at Locri as a notorious sacrilege. In Latin poetry the same queen sets the rules: Virgil’s Aeneas must carry a golden bough as her tribute before he may enter, and in the Georgics it is Proserpina who lays down the condition that Orpheus breaks. The heroes Theseus and Pirithous, who went down to carry her off, ended up fixed to seats in the Underworld, which is the Hymn’s promise of punishment put into action.

Exhibit D: The gold leaves

The tablets from Hipponion, Thurii and Pelinna belong to a family of inscribed gold leaves found in graves from southern Italy to Thessaly and Crete, dating from about 400 BCE into the Roman period. Modern scholars call them Orphic, or Bacchic, or both; the texts never use a single label. They share a purpose: to give the dead the words they would need.

The Thurii leaves, from burial mounds of the fourth century BCE, speak in the first person. The dead claim to come pure from the pure, to belong to the blessed race of the gods, to have paid the penalty for unjust deeds and flown out of the heavy, grievous circle. One ends with the speaker presenting as a suppliant before holy Persephone, asking her to send them, in her kindness, to the seats of the pure. Another records the reply the speaker hopes for: blessed one, you shall be a god instead of a mortal. A strange formula recurs, “a kid, I fell into milk”, whose meaning is still argued over.

The two leaves from Pelinna in Thessaly, cut in the shape of ivy leaves, are blunter. Our rendering: “Now you have died and now you have been born, thrice blessed, on this very day. Tell Persephone that the Bacchic one himself has set you free.” Dionysus can release; Persephone must be told. Every route in these texts ends in front of her.

What the file shows

Put Homer, the Hymn, Pindar and the gold leaves in one drawer and a consistent figure emerges, very different from the passive girl of modern picture books. She sends the shades up and scatters them. She takes payment and decides who returns. She hears the claims of the initiated and admits the pure. The abduction is the start of her story, not the whole of it.

That is also why the singers and heroes who went below had to face her. For the most famous attempt to argue with the queen, see Orpheus and the Orphic tradition; for her family and fellow rulers of the dead, check the numbered rows in the Catalogue.