Ceres was honoured with the Cerealia, a spring festival held in April with games in the Circus, at which, a peculiar rite, foxes were let loose with burning brands tied to their tails. From 496 BCE, at a time of famine, her cult was reshaped along Greek lines on the advice of the Sibylline Books, and thereafter she absorbed the myth of Demeter: her daughter Proserpina, the Roman Persephone, is carried off to the underworld, and Ceres's grief and search explain the barren season of the year until the girl's partial return. The Romans marked the loss with the solemn, women's rites of the sacrum anniversarium Cereris. In this way a plain old Italian corn-goddess became also the sorrowing mother of the Mediterranean grain myth, without ever losing her deep association with the plough and the poor.
In 1801 the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, observing from Palermo in Sicily, an island long sacred to Ceres as one of Rome's chief grain-producing provinces, discovered the first object of what would become the asteroid belt and named it Ceres in the goddess's honour; classified at various points as a planet, an asteroid and, since 2006, a dwarf planet, it remains the largest body in the belt and carries the Roman grain-goddess's name into modern astronomy much as her Greek counterpart Demeter's myth of loss and searching had once carried an older harvest goddess into a different island's soil.