Proserpina

Proserpina is the daughter of Ceres and Jupiter, and her myth is the myth of the rape. What is distinctively Roman is not the event, which is Greek, but the place: not some vague meadow but the grove of Henna, in the middle of Sicily. Cicero takes it as common knowledge when prosecuting Verres, saying that the whole island is consecrated to Ceres and Libera and that it was from the grove of the people of Henna that «they carried off Libera, whom they also call Proserpina». Ovid tells the episode twice, in Metamorphoses V and in Fasti IV: the girl was gathering flowers, the earth opened, and Pluto took her away in his chariot. That the rape has a postal address is the Roman contribution. For a Sicilian, Henna was not a symbol: it was the next town over.

What kept her below was not force but food: she tasted the pomegranate of the underworld, and whoever eats there belongs there. Jupiter mediated and split the year between mother and husband. How much fell to each half the Latin sources do not settle, and both are by the same poet: in the Fasti Ovid says six months; in the Metamorphoses, a third of the year. This entry does not choose on Ovid's behalf. Her return is spring and her going winter, which is why in art her pomegranate is always split open, the seeds in view. She should not be reduced to an agricultural allegory: at Rome she was not a metaphor for sowing, she was a goddess people prayed to.

Proserpina's most Roman passage is not a myth of hers but a key. In Aeneid VI the Sibyl warns Aeneas that he will not go down to the underworld without first tearing off a bough of golden leaves and pliant stem, hidden in a shady tree and «sacred to the infernal Juno», who is she. Virgil specifies that Proserpina herself ordained that this tribute be brought to her, and that when one is torn away another golden one springs up in its place. In that scene Proserpina does not appear: she commands. She owns the toll, and the condition she sets is what structures the most famous descent in Latin literature. Nor should that bough be confused with the modern readings that turned it into a universal symbol of sacred kingship: in Virgil it is a concrete object with a concrete owner.

There is a knot worth untying, because the Latin sources leave it tied. Libera, the third of the Aventine triad alongside Ceres and Liber, is identified with Proserpina by Cicero without any hesitation. But Varro makes her the female counterpart of Liber in the distribution of seed and identifies her with Venus, while Ovid turns her into Ariadne deified. That is: Libera has her own cult, her own function, and an identity each author settles differently, and one of those settlements is that she is Proserpina. This encyclopedia treats them as two entries and says so here, not because the rape is told twice, but because the goddess of the plebeian triad and the queen of the underworld do not do the same thing even when they sometimes share a name.