Kore and the Queen: Two Names for One Goddess

Persephone is worshipped under two aspects that Greek religion kept in tension. As Kore, the Maiden, she is the daughter gathering flowers, the spring growth, the girl beside her mother in the Eleusinian story; as Persephone proper she is the dread queen of the underworld, named with caution, whom Homer calls the iron-hearted. The pomegranate seeds that bind her below for part of each year are the hinge between the two, tying her seasonal return to the death and rebirth of the crops and, at Eleusis, to the initiate's hope of a blessed afterlife. Her Roman name is Proserpina.

The exact terms of Persephone's annual return are not fixed even within ancient sources. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter has her eat only a few pomegranate seeds and spend a third of the year below, while the Roman poet Ovid, retelling the myth centuries later in the Metamorphoses, gives her seven seeds and splits her time in half between the two worlds, a divergence that shows the myth was never a single canonical text but a living story retold with different arithmetic by different poets to fit their own seasonal reckoning. Later mythographers sometimes tried to reconcile the versions rather than choosing between them, treating the discrepancy as evidence of how loosely even a central Greek myth could be transmitted.