Proserpina

Proserpina's most distinctly Roman honor is not a temple but a manner of worship imported wholesale from Greek southern Italy. Rome kept a priestess of Ceres, the sacerdos Cereris, drawn by long custom from the Greek cities of Naples or Elea specifically to perform the rites graeco ritu, in the Greek manner, and those rites addressed Ceres and Proserpina together as the mother and the carried off daughter, following the model of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis rather than any older native Italian pattern. Cicero, who knew the priesthood at first hand, praised the mysteries of Ceres as among the finest things Greece ever gave to the wider world, and Rome's own version, centered on Proserpina's descent and return, kept Greek liturgical language and Greek personnel rather than translating the cult into ordinary Latin custom.

A separate and older strand of her Roman cult addressed her jointly with Dis Pater rather than with her mother. In 249 BCE, after the Sibylline Books were consulted following a run of bad omens during the First Punic War, Rome established an altar to Dis Pater and Proserpina in the Tarentum, a low ground on the Campus Martius, and held nocturnal games there, the Ludi Tarentini, later folded into the recurring Ludi Saeculares that marked the passing of a Roman generation. Where the Ceres based rite ran through a Greek priestess speaking Greek, the Tarentum altar and its games were a Roman state institution addressing the underworld pair directly in Roman terms. Proserpina therefore reached Roman religious life through two distinct channels at once, one borrowed intact from Magna Graecia and one native to Roman civic religion, meeting only in the goddess herself.

Ovid told Proserpina's abduction twice, in two different poems written for two different purposes, and the gap between the tellings is itself informative. The Metamorphoses version, in book five, is narrated inside a contest of song, dense with landscape and transformation, and it ends with the compromise brokered between Ceres and Jupiter that divides Proserpina's year between the upper world and the realm of Dis. The Fasti version, in book four, is calendar poetry, written to explain why the Cerealia falls when it does and what a Roman celebrant was actually doing on that day, and it lingers on details the Metamorphoses passes over: Ceres's nine nights of torchlit search, her arrival at Eleusis, the hospitality of Celeus, and the specific observances the festival asks Romans to keep in memory of the goddess's grief.

The calendar meaning is the whole point of the second telling. The Cerealia, held in mid April, falls at exactly the season when Italian grain sown the previous autumn is visibly greening in the fields, so Proserpina's return from below reads, in Roman practice, as an explanation timed to the agricultural year rather than a story told for its own sake. Ovid has Roman women carry lit torches through the observance in memory of Ceres's own search by torchlight, and he has celebrants dress in white and set aside certain foods for its duration, a kind of ritual mourning that lifts only once the goddess's daughter is restored. The myth is not decoration laid over the festival; in Ovid's own account the festival's actions are literally reenactments of what Ceres is said to have done, so an ordinary Roman farmer's calendar carried Proserpina's story forward every spring, whether or not he ever set foot inside a temple of Ceres.