Ceres

Ceres is the daughter of Saturn and Ops, and sister to Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto and Vesta. Her name is Italic and her festival, the Cerealia, belongs to the oldest Roman calendar: she is no loan. Yet in 496 BC, during a famine, the dictator Aulus Postumius consulted the Sibylline Books and vowed a temple to three deities together, Ceres, Liber and Libera, which the consul Spurius Cassius dedicated in 493. That triad is Greek: Demeter, Dionysus and Kore translated into Latin and celebrated in the Greek rite. Two layers of the same goddess have coexisted at Rome ever since, and Cicero still tells them carefully apart when he separates «this Liber born of Semele» from «the one our forefathers consecrated together with Ceres and Libera».

The temple of the triad, on the slope of the Aventine beside the turning-post of the Circus Maximus, was not merely a sanctuary: it was an institution of the Roman plebs. There the decrees of the senate were deposited in the keeping of the plebeian aediles, precisely so that the consuls could no longer suppress or falsify them as they had done at will. And there went the estate of anyone who dared harm a tribune, an aedile or a judge: his head was made sacred to Jupiter and his household sold at the temple of Ceres. The plebeian aediles also paid for the bronze statues of the three gods out of the fine money they themselves collected. None of this is mythology: it is Roman public law, and it explains why Ceres weighed far more at Rome than a goddess of wheat would.

Her festival was the Cerealia, which ran from 12 to 19 April, and the games that accompanied it were the ludi Cereales, staged by the aediles. They are not to be confused with the ludi plebeii, a different festival falling in November. The rite that set the Cerealia apart from every other is also the cruellest: on the last day foxes were loosed in the Circus Maximus with burning torches tied to their backs. Ovid recorded the explanation given at Carseoli. A boy caught the vixen that had been stealing his hens, wrapped her in straw and hay and set her alight; the animal escaped ablaze and burned the crops it ran through. Ever since, he says, a fox is burned at the Cerealia to punish the species in the very way it destroyed the harvest.

The central myth of Ceres is the loss of her daughter. Pluto seized Proserpina, and Ceres searched the world for her with a torch in either hand and serpents yoked to her chariot, and while she searched she left the earth without grain. Jupiter mediated and divided the year between mother and husband, and from that division come the seasons. It is worth knowing that the Latin sources themselves do not agree on how much fell to each: in the Fasti, Ovid says six months; in the Metamorphoses, by the same author, a third of the year. This entry does not choose on Ovid's behalf. And one saying sums up what Rome thought of this goddess better than any hymn: already in Terence's day it was proverbial that without Ceres and without Liber, that is without bread and wine, Venus goes cold.