Ceres is the Roman goddess of grain, of the growth of crops and of the fertility of the fields, and her name survives in the English word cereal. However fully she was later identified with the Greek Demeter, her Roman roots are distinct: she was one of the most ancient of the native Italian deities, invoked at every stage of ploughing and sowing, and above all she was the goddess of the common people. Her great temple on the Aventine hill, dedicated early in the fifth century BCE, was the religious centre of the plebeians in their long struggle with the patrician order; she formed there a triad with Liber and Libera, and the temple served as an archive for the decrees of the plebs and a refuge whose violation carried a terrible penalty.
Ceres was formally counted among the twelve major Roman gods later listed by the poet Ennius as the di consentes, the Roman set roughly paired with the Greek Twelve Olympians, and her priestess, the sacerdos Cereris, was by long custom brought from the Greek cities of southern Italy, Naples or Elea, specifically to perform the rites of Ceres graeco ritu, in the Greek manner, a detail Cicero records; Rome deliberately imported and preserved a foreign style of worship for her rather than fully Latinising it, treating the Greek form of the cult as more efficacious than any native alternative for this particular goddess.