393 Here are the games of Ceres. There is no need for a pretext from a witness: it is evident that the public show of the goddess has been earned unaided.
395 To the first mortals, bread was the fresh plants which the Earth gave with no tampering. And just now they were gathering long-lived herbs from the turf, now dishes were the tips of tender leaves. Presently the acorn has grown: indeed, it was good when the acorn had been discovered, and the hardy oak has splendid resources. Ceres first changed this by calling humans to better nourishment. She exchanged acorns for useful food.
403 She gathered bulls together to lend their neck to the yoke: then the earth, having been upturned, saw its first sunlight. Copper was in vogue then, iron ore was unknown: alas, that stuff should be hidden forever! Ceres delights in peace. And tell us, farmers, about continuous peace and a peace-making commander. It is permitted that you might devote an offering, spelt and leaping grains, to the goddess, and that you might place grains of incense on the ancient hearths. And, if incense is unavailable, set a resinous pine torch alight! Little efforts, let them be only pious, are pleasing to kind Ceres.
413 Remove the armed attendants’ knives from the cow! Let the cow plough. Sacrifice the lazy sow! A neck suitable for the yoke must not be struck with a death blow: let her live and often work among the tough soil.
417 This very subject is examined; I will relate how the abduction of the girl happened. You will recognize most of it, and will be taught little:
419 The Sicilian land jutted out into the empty sea with three promontories, and from the position of its location, it has attained its name. It is a dear home for Ceres, and she occupies its many cities, among whom Henna is fertile with cultivated soil. Cold Arethusa had summoned the mothers of the gods, and the golden goddess had come to the holy feast. Her daughter, when accompanying her, was with her usual girls, and was wandering through her own meadows on bare feet. Next to the shady valley there is a place wet with a continuous spray of water leaping down from high above. So many colors, as many as nature contains, had been in that place, and the painted ground was shining with different flowers. As soon as she caught sight of this place, she said: “Ladies, come here and carry dress-skirts filled with flowers back home with me.”
433 Idle plunder entices their girlish thoughts and no exertion is experienced by the assiduous attendants. This girl fills baskets woven out of pliant willow. This girl fills her lap, that girl weighs down the loose folds. That girl gathers marigolds, violet beds are the concern of this girl. That girl clips poppy blooms with her fingernails. You, hyacinth, fascinate these girls; you, amaranth, might have entertained those girls. Part love thyme, part love the rose, part love yellow clover. Roses had been gathered the most, and there were flowers without a name. Persephone herself picked fine crocuses and white lilies. As she is gathering her flowers with enthusiasm, she is gradually walking further away, and by chance no attendant had been following her mistress.
445 Her father’s brother sees her, and having been aware of her, swiftly snatches her away, and on horses the color of dusk, he brings her into his own kingdoms. It is true she was crying out: “Ah! dearest mother, I am being stolen!” She herself had torn at her own voluminous clothes, but nevertheless a road is opened up out of the ground for Dis; for indeed his horses, unaccustomed to being above ground, experience daylight with difficulty.
451 Look now, the uniform troop of her attendants, with wicker baskets overloaded with flowers, shout: “Persephone! I’m back with your gifts!” When the girl they had been calling remains silent, they fill the mountain with wailing and strike their naked chests with sorrowful hands.
455 Ceres is astonished by the wailing (she had only just gotten to Henna), but without delay: “I am so distraught! Daughter!” she said. “Where are you?”
457 She is kidnapped. Ceres, in need of a purpose, rushes off hurriedly, pacing like those Thracian Bacchants we are used to hearing stories about, with her hair in disarray, groaning as a mother-cow does when her calf has been stolen from her udder, and searching for her offspring through every grove. Thus the goddess does not restrain her groaning, and she, deeply upset by running around, is hurried, and she begins her search in your fields, Henna. From there, she happened upon the footprints of a girlish sole. And she saw the earth had been stamped with a familiar weight. Perhaps that day would have been the last of her wandering, if pigs had not muddied the clues she had discovered.
467 Next, she passes at speed through Leotini and the Amenana River, as well as your banks, grassy Aci. She overtakes both Cyane and the source waters of gentle Anapus. And you Gela (one must not go near the whirlpools.) She had left Ortygia, and Megarea, and Pantagia, by whom the sea accepts the Symaethean Waters. She had been putting off the caves of the cyclopes, with their forges having been set just-so. That is the place which has the name of ‘the curved sickle’. Both Himera and Didymen, both Akraga and Tauromenus. And Melan, the cheerful pasture of the holy cows. From here she approaches Camerinan, and Thapson and Heloria Tempe, by whom Eryx is situated, forever exposed to the west wind. And next she had surveyed Peloriades and Lilybaea, then Pachynon, the Three Horns of Her own land.
481 She fills wherever she had walked, all regions, with her pitiful complaints, as the bird does when Itys has been lost. Now she cries “Persephone!” then “Daughter!” one after the other. She shouts and alternately calls one name and then the other. But neither does Persephone hear Ceres nor the daughter her mother, and alternately one name, then the other, fades away. She has one question, if perhaps she had seen a shepherd protecting his flock: “Has a girl hurried this way with anyone?”
489 By then one color stained reality, and everything is hidden by darkness, indeed even the watchful dogs became silent. Tall Mt. Etna is situated over the mouth of titanic Typhoeus, the ground of which is burned by his vomited fire. There she lights twin pine branches for torches (it is for this reason why nowadays pine torches are also devoted to the shrines of Ceres).
495 There is a rugged cave, constructed of worn-away pumice, a place which must not submit to man nor to beast, to which she came, and then, at once she harnessed bridled serpents to her chariots, and dry, she roams over the sea-waters. She escaped Syrtes, and you, Zanclean Charybdis, and you, Nisaean bitch-hounds, the shipwreck monsters. She extensively searched the open Adriatic and Corinth-between-two-seas: in this way she comes to your harbors, Attic country. Here, she sits, most sorrowful, for the first time, on a cold boulder (nowadays, the Athenians also call it the Sad Rock.)
505 In the open air, she waited, motionless, for many days, unyielding to both the moon and rain water. And luck is theirs in this place: because now it is named the Eleusis of Ceres, here were the estates of old Celeus. He carries acorns and berries knocked off the bramble bushes, and dry wood to be burned on the hearth. His young daughter was driving two she-goats from the mountain, and his delicate son was sick in his cradle.
513 “Mother!” says the girl (the goddess was startled by the name of ‘mother’) “What are you doing all by yourself in these lonely regions?” And the older man dawdled, although his burden presses him, and begs that she might go under the roof of his house, however small.
517 She refuses. She had impersonated an old woman, and she had wrapped her hair in a turban. She turns back to the insistent man and mentions the following: “And may you always be a lucky parent! My daughter has been stolen from me. Alas! your fortune is better than my fate!” She spoke, and a bright droplet like tears (for in fact, it is not possible for the gods to weep) fell into her warm skirt-lap. The sensitive girl and old man weep together with passion, after which there came these words from the proper old man: “Yes. May your daughter, who you search for and who has been snatched away from you, be safe and sound. Stand up, and do not disdain the roof of my little cottage!”
527 To whom the goddess says: “Lead me to it! You knew the words by which you might be able to compel me.” And she lifts herself from the rock and closely follows the old man. The leader tells his companion how his son may be sick: he would not experience sleep and would be kept awake by maladies.
531 She picks a sleepy poppy from the wild ground as they are about to enter the little house. As she gathers, it is said that she has tasted the seeds, with her judgement having been forgotten, and that, unthinking, she has undone her long fast. Because the beginning of the night has set aside her fast, the priests of her mysteries regard star-rise as the time for food.
537 When she has entered the house, she sees mourning filling everything: by then there was no hope of health in the boy. With the mother having been greeted (the mother is named Metanira), the childish mouth is considered worthy to join with her own. His pallor flees, and they see unexpected energy in his body. Such a great life-force comes from the mouth of the deity. The entire house is joyous, with him are mother and father and daughter: these three were the whole household. Afterwards, a feast is set out: rennet softened with milk, and fruits, and golden honey in its own waxy cells. Kind Ceres abstains and she gives poppy seeds, the cause of sleep, to you, boy, that must be drunk with lukewarm milk.
549 It was the middle of the night and there was the silence of mellow sleep. She lifted Triptolemus into her own lap. Three times she gently rubbed him with her hand, she sang three incantations, verses that must not be repeated with mortal sounds. And she buried the body of the boy in the hearth, among the surviving embers, so that the fire might remove the burden of his mortality. Foolishly, his devoted mother was roused from sleep and frantic, she exclaims: “What are you doing?!” and snatches his limbs from the fire. The goddess said to her: “While you are not wicked, you have done harmful things: my gifts are made useless by maternal anxiety. Certainly, that very child will be mortal, but he will be the first to plough, and to sow seed and to build up a profit from cultivating the land.”
561 She spoke and departing, she drags down a cloud and goes over to her serpents. Ceres is lifted up on her wingèd chariot. With her departure she forsakes exposed Sunion and the safe Piraean harbors, and the coast which lies to the right of its entrance. From here she enters the Aegean Sea, in which she sees all the Cyclades, and she wanders through the Ionic Sea, and the greedy Icarian Sea. She quests through the cities of Asia, the vast Hellespontus Sea, and in these regions she, high above, roams a back-and-forth course. For just now she looks down on the incense-gathering Arabs, then the Indus River. From here Libya, from there Meroe, the dry land is underneath her. Now she approaches the west: the Rhine, and Rhone, and Po Rivers, and you, Tiber, parent-to-be of a powerful water.
573 By what am I conducted? It is impossible to list all the lands she wandered through: there is no place in the world neglected by Ceres.
575 And she wanders among the heavens, and the places free of the flowing sea. She addresses the nearest constellation in the frosty pole.
577 “Arcadian stars (for indeed you are able to know all things since you never sink beneath the sea waters), show my daughter Persephone to me, a miserable parent!” she had said, to whom the Great Bear brings the following words:
581 “Night is free from fault; consult the Sun, he who sees far and wide the things done in the daytime, about your stolen girl!”
583 The Sun, having been approached by Ceres, says: “I know what you seek. Your distress is not in vain: she, having been married to the brother of Jupiter, commands the Third Realm.”
585 She wailed with herself for a long while.
585 She addressed the Thunderer as follows: there were the greatest signs of suffering on her face: “If you remember from whom my daughter Persephone might have come, she ought to have half of your concern. By wandering through the world, I have learned of only the injustice of the act that was done: her rapist gets to have the reward of marriage. And neither is Persephone deserving of a conjugal thief, nor should our son-in-law be provided to us in this manner. What worse would I, captured by Gyges the conqueror, have endured than what I have now suffered in the kingdom of the sky with you in charge? Let the truth move on, unpunished, we, unavenged, will endure these things; but let him return her and correct his previous actions with new ones.”
597 Jupiter calms her, and excuses what has been done with love: “That son-in-law should not be shameful for us,” he says. “I am not more high-born than he is: my kingdom exists in the sky, another occupies the waters, and the last the empty chaos. But if, by chance, your heart is not changeable and stands to break the bonds of a wedding bed having been joined but once, by this, too, let us try: if indeed she has continued fasting; if not, she will be the wife of an underground spouse.”
605 Mercury Caducifer, having been commanded, approaches the infernal regions having taken up his wings. And with hope, he more swiftly returns, and reports the fixed things he saw:
607 “The abducted girl,” he said, “has dissolved her hunger with three seeds that the purple-Carthaginian fruit hides with a flexible rind.”
609 She has not felt less grief than if the girl might have just been stolen. The parent in mourning, having been scarcely restored, takes a long pause, and she said as follows: “Heaven is not habitable to us. You command me, too, to be received by the Taenarian Valley.”
613 And she was about to do it, unless Jupiter might make a bargain, so that her girl might live for two-times-three months in heaven. Only then does Ceres regain both countenance and spirit and has placed the corn wreathes in her hair. And a plentiful harvest has appeared in the fallow fields; and the threshing-ground can hardly take hold of the collected riches. White clothes are fitting for Ceres: don white attire for the Cerialia: now the use of a dusky fleece is avoided.