Behind the Mysteries stood Demeter's plainer identity as the goddess of the cultivated grain, and her worship tracked the agricultural year across the Greek world. The women-only autumn festival of the Thesmophoria, among the most widespread of all Greek festivals, enacted the fertility of the fields and the seed-corn stored for the next sowing; her title Thesmophoros, the law-bringer, tied agriculture to settled, lawful life, the two being understood as one gift. The Romans identified her with Ceres, an old Italic grain goddess whose name survives in the word cereal and whose temple on the Aventine became a centre of the Roman plebs. Sacred to Demeter were wheat, the poppy that grows among it, the torch of her nocturnal search, and the pig sacrificed at the Thesmophoria.
Sicily held an especially deep attachment to Demeter and her daughter, since Greek tradition placed the abduction of Persephone at the lake of Enna in the island's interior; Cicero, prosecuting the corrupt governor Verres for looting Sicilian temples, calls Enna's sanctuary of the two goddesses the most ancient and sacred of all such shrines and describes the whole island as consecrated to Ceres and Libera above every other place on earth. The historian Diodorus Siculus, himself Sicilian, likewise treats the island's special devotion to Demeter and Persephone as a matter of local pride, evidence that a single Panhellenic myth of loss and searching could take root as an intensely local and even patriotic cult far from Eleusis itself.