Ceres (mythology)

Ceres
Funerary statue of an unknown woman, depicted as Ceres holding wheat. On display at the Louvre in Paris, France
Goddess of grain, agricultural and human fertility, and motherly love
Parents	Saturn and Ops
Siblings	Vesta, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune and Pluto
Children	Proserpina, Liber?

In ancient Roman religion, Ceres was a goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility and motherly relationships. Her cult took many forms. She was the central deity in Rome's so-called plebeian or Aventine Triad, and was paired with her daughter Proserpina in what Romans described as "the Greek rites of Ceres". She played an essential role in Roman marriage and in funeral rites. Her seven-day April festival of Cerealia included the popular Ludi Ceriales (Ceres' games). She was honoured in the May lustration of fields at the Ambarvalia festival, and at harvest-time. Her functions and cults were held equivalent to those of the Greek goddess Demeter, whose mythology she came to share.

Etymology and origins

Ceres is linked to pastoral, agricultural and human fertility. Her name may derive from the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root "ker", meaning "to grow", which is also the root for the words "create" and "increase"; Roman etymologists thought her name derived from the Latin verb gerere, "to bear, bring forth, produce". Her cults were widespread throughout ancient Magna Graecia; Rome acknowledged Hanna, in Sicily, as her oldest, most authoritative cult centre. She is well-evidenced among regal Rome's neighbours, the ancient Latins, Oscans and Sabellians, less certainly among the Etruscans and Umbrians. An archaic Faliscan inscription of c.600 BC asks her to provide far (spelt wheat), a dietary staple of the Mediterranean world. Throughout the Roman era, Latin ceres was synonymous with grain and, by extension, with bread. ^[1]

Cult development

Archaic and regal eras

Ceres' eponymous festival, Cerealia, is usually dated to Rome's early regal era.^[2] Her affinity and joint cult with Tellus, also known as Terra Mater (Mother Earth) may have also developed at this time. Much later, during the early Imperial era, Ovid describes these goddesses as "partners in labour"; Ceres provides the "cause" for crops, Tellus provides them a place to grow.^[3]

Republican era

Ceres and the Aventine Triad

In 496 BC, against a background of famine in Rome, imminent war against the Latins and a threatened secession by Rome's plebs (citizen commoners), the dictator A. Postumius vowed a temple to Ceres, Liber and Libera on or near the Aventine Hill. The famine ended and Rome's plebeian citizen-soldiery co-operated in the conquest of the Latins. Postumius' vow was fulfilled in 493 BC: Ceres became the central deity of the new Triad, housed in a new-built Aventine temple.^[4] She was – or became – the patron goddess of Rome's plebeian class, who were directly involved in agriculture and whose business enterprise came to dominate the grain trade.

Writers of the late Roman Republic and early Empire describe Ceres' Aventine temple and rites as conspicuously Greek.^[5] In modern scholarship, this is taken as evidence of long-standing connections between the plebeians, Ceres and Magna Graecia; it also raises unanswered questions on the nature, history and character of these associations. Greek influence is evident among the Aventine Triad's precursors.^[6] The Triad itself may have been a self-consciously Roman formulation based on Greco-Italic cultic precedents; the character and details of its earliest cults are uncertain. The ritus graecius (Greek rite) of Ceres, known from later accounts, almost certainly refers to priestly rites in which the celebrant remained bareheaded before the deity. In most Roman cults, the officiant's head must remain covered.^[7]

Middle Republic

Ceres and Proserpina

Arnobius gives the introduction of an official, definitively Greek cult to Ceres and her daughter Proserpina as 205 BC,^[8] soon before the end of the Second Punic War. This new ritus graecia cereris (Greek rite to Ceres) was imported from southern Italy, along with Greek priestesses to serve it. The latter were given Roman citizenship and thus owed responsibility and allegiance to the Roman state, so that they could pray to the gods "with a foreign and external knowledge, but with a domestic and civil intention". Official cult to Ceres and Proserpina offered a morally acceptable, hierarchic, exclusively female form of mystery cult. It was installed in the Aventine temple, alongside Ceres' existing Triadic cult, whence it spread throughout the Roman world.^[9] While Ceres retained her former associations with Liber, Libera and the plebs, her new cult identified Libera with Proserpina, Roman equivalent to Greek Persephone. Imagery connected to the ritus graecia Cereris recalls Demeter's search for her daughter Persephone, raped and abducted to the underworld by Hades. Its reservation to female initiates distinguishes it from its Greek and Roman predecessors; it was hierarchic in structure, and fostered a sense of civic responsibility and traditional Roman morality among all classes of women, married and unmarried. Its initiates (initia cereris) were offered some form of religious mystery, most likely modeled on the Greek Thesmophoria to Demeter and Persephone, whose central myth was also the basis of the ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries.^[10]

Ceres and Magna Mater

A year after the import of the ritus cereris, patrician senators imported cult to the Greek goddess Cybele and established her as Magna Mater (The Great Mother) within Rome's sacred boundary, facing the Aventine Hill. Cybele had mythological ties to Troy, and thus to the Trojan prince Aeneas, ancestor of Rome's founding father and first patrician Romulus. The establishment of her Roman cult coincided with the start of a new saeculum (cycle of years), and was followed by Hannibal's defeat, the war's end and an exceptionally good harvest. Rome's recovery could therefore be credited to Magna Mater and patrician piety; the patricians claimed her as theirs, and dined her and each other at her festival banquets. In similar fashion, the plebeians and their nobility claimed Ceres. When certain prodigies were interpreted as evidence of her displeasure, she and her plebeian proteges were appeased by the official foundation of a new festival in her honour, the ieiunium Cereris. The relationships between the traditional, plebeian cults to Aventine Ceres and the all-female, patrician-sponsored ritus graecius cereris are unclear but the older form of Ceres' Aventine cult would seem the more likely focus for plebeian political identity and opposition to patrician domination.^[11]

In the wake of popular unrest following the murder (133 BC) of politician and land reformist Tiberius Gracchus, the Roman senate sent the quindecimviri to Ceres' ancient cult centre at Henna in Sicily, at the behest of the Sibylline oracle. Some kind of religious consultation or propitiation was made at the goddess' supposed place of origin and earthly home: this may have intended to expiate the murder of Gracchus or justify it as official and lawful.^[12]

Late Republic

In Late Republican politics, aristocratic traditionalists and popularists laid competing claims to Ceres' favour. Traditionalists and patricians appealed to her divine agency in fostering social unity. Popularists used her name and attributes to appeal their guardianship of plebeian interests, particularly the annona and frumentarium, and plebeian nobles and aediles used the same to point out their ancestral connection with plebeian commoners. Towards the end of the Republic, in the decades of Civil War that ushered in the Empire, such images and dedications proliferate on Rome's coinage: Julius Caesar, his opponents, his assassins and his heirs alike claimed Ceres' favour and plebeian support, with coins that show Ceres with Libertas (liberty) and Victoria (victory).^[13]

Imperial era

Imperial theology conscripted Rome's traditional cults as upholders of Imperial order and Pax (peace). The emperor Augustus began the restoration of Ceres' Aventine Temple; his successor Tiberius completed it.^[14] Cerean symbols and attributes are associated with several figures on the Augustan Ara Pacis; one of these doubles as a portrait of the Empress Livia, another has been variously identified in modern scholarship as Tellus, Venus, Pax and Ceres, or in Spaeth's analysis, a deliberately broad composite of them all. Images of Ceres are found on Imperial coins and monuments throughout the Imperial era.^[15] Various emperors are shown wearing her corona spicea. She is sometimes named Ceres Augusta, jointly responsible with the ruling princeps for agricultural prosperity and the provision of grain.^[16] A coin of Nerva (reigned AD 96 - 98) evinces the continued reliance of the urban plebs on the princeps' gift of frumentio (corn dole).^[17]

Public and private cults to Ceres remained an important feature of urban and rural life. During the early Imperial era Pliny the Younger restored an ancient, "old and narrow" temple to Ceres, sited on his rural property near Como. It contained an ancient wooden cult statue of the goddess, which he replaced. Though this was unofficial, private cult (sacra privata) its annual feast on the Ides of September, the same day as the Epulum Jovis, was attended by pilgrims from all over the region.^[18] An initiate of Ceres' cult is attested in the 5th century AD, after the official abolition of all non-Christian cults.^[19]

Cults and cult themes

Agricultural fertility

Ceres was credited with the discovery of spelt wheat, the yoking of oxen and ploughing, the sowing, protection and nourishing of the young seed, and the gift of agriculture to humankind; before this, it was said, man had subsisted on acorns, and wandered without settlement or laws. Ceres was first to "break open the earth", and the most ancient of her festivals marked the most important times and activities of the agricultural cycle. She held the power to fertilise, multiply and fructify plant and animal seed. Their offspring were thus the physical incarnations of her power: in religious law, they were hers.

In January, along with Tellus, Ceres was offered spelt wheat and a pregnant sow at the movable Feriae Sementivae, which was almost certainly held before the annual sowing of grain: the divine portion of sacrifice was the intestines (exta) presented to the goddess in an olla (earthenware pot).^[20] In a rural context, Cato the Elder describes the offer to Ceres of a porca praecidanea (a pig, offered before the sowing).^[21] A priest of Ceres, possibly the flamen cerealis invoked the goddess and a further twelve minor deities as her assistants in the agricultural cycle: they are listed by Servius (On Vergil, 1.21).^[22]

Ceres' major festival, Cerealia, was held from mid to late April. Its original form is unknown; it may have been founded during the regal era. It was organised by the plebeian aediles, included ludi circenses (circus games) and opened with a horse race in the Circus Maximus, whose starting point lay just below the Aventine Temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera.^[23] In a nighttime ritual after the race, live foxes has blazing torches tied to their tails, and were released into the Circus. The origin and purpose of this ritual are unknown; it may have been intended to cleanse the growing crops and seek their protection from disease and vermin, or to add warmth and vitality to their growth.^[24] From c.175 BC, Cerealia included ludi scaenici (theatrical religious events), held through April 12 to 18.^[25] Various rural and urban festivals were held at harvest-time. Before the harvest, Ceres was offered a propitiary grain sample (praementium).^[26]

Human fertility, marriage and nourishment

Several of Ceres' ancient Italic precursors are connected to human fertility and motherhood; the Roman goddess Angerona (associated with childbirth) has been identified with the Pelignan goddess Angitia Cerealis.^[27] In the late 2nd century AD, Festus describes a wedding ceremony, during which a torch is carried in honour of Ceres; Pliny the Elder "notes that the most auspicious wood for wedding torches came from the spina alba, the may tree, which bore many fruits and hence symbolised fertility". This practice may represent the continuation of a much earlier identification or conflation of Ceres with Tellus (as Terra Mater), a personification of the fertile earth itself, who was invoked in the auspices at Roman weddings. Tellus was offered sacrifice by the bride; a sow is the most likely victim. Varro describes the sacrifice of a pig as "a worthy mark of weddings" because "our women, and especially nurses" call the female genitalia porcus (pig). Spaeth (1996) believes Ceres may have been included in the sacrificial dedication, because she is closely identified with Tellus and "bears the laws" of marriage. The cult to Ceres and Proserpina reinforced and formalised Ceres' connection with traditional Roman ideals of female virtue, motherhood and its attendant duties: promotion of her cult is associated with the development of a plebeian nobility, a fall in the patrician birthrate and a rise in the birthrate among plebeian commoners.^[28] The late Republican Ceres Mater (Mother Ceres) is genetrix (progenitress) and alma (nourishing) and in the early Imperial era she receives joint cult with Ops Augusta, Ceres' own mother in Imperial guise and a bountiful genetrix in her own right.^[29]

Laws and liminality

Ceres was patron and protector of plebeian laws, rights and Tribunes. Her Aventine temple served the plebeians as cult centre, treasury, and archive for their records and laws. It may also have served as sanctuary or asylum for the needy, or for those threatened with arrest by patrician magistrates.^[30] The foundation of her Aventine cult was contemporaneous with the passage of the Lex Sacrata, which established the office and person of plebeian aediles and plebeian tribunes as inviolate representatives of the Roman people. A tribune was immune to arrest or threat; the life and property of any who violated this law were forfeit to Ceres. The Lex Hortensia of 287 BC extended plebeian law to all Roman citizens. At the same time, the official decrees of the Senate (senatus consulta) were placed under the guardianship of Ceres and her plebeian aediles. Livy puts the reason bluntly: the consuls could no longer seek advantage by arbitrarily tampering with the laws of Rome. Fines against those who offended "Ceres' laws" were technically her property and were stored in her Aventine Temple treasury. Her aediles sold any goods distrained as part of capital penalty or in lieu of fines and used the proceeds to fund Ceres' temple and cult.^[31] Ceres' role as protector of laws continues throughout the Republican era; those who approved the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC justified his death as punishment for his offense against the Lex sacrata of the goddess Ceres.

Crimes against fields and harvest were crimes against the people and their protective deity. Landowners who allowed their flocks to graze on public land were fined by the plebeian aediles, on behalf of Ceres and the people of Rome. Ancient laws of the Twelve Tables forbade the magical charming of field crops from a neighbour's field into one's own, and invoked the death penalty for the illicit removal of field boundaries.^[32] An adult who damaged or stole field-crops should be hanged "for Ceres".^[33] Any youth guilty of the same offense was to be whipped or fined double the value of damage.^[34]

In modern scholarship, Ceres is categorised as a liminal deity; she determined and presided over transitions, boundaries and rites of passage such as birth, marriage and death. Her first plough-furrow opened the earth (Tellus' realm) to the world of men and created the first fields; she thus determined the course of settled, lawful, civilised life. She mediated and stabilised the balance of interest between plebeian and patrician factions. She oversaw the transition of women from girlhood to womanhood, from married to unmarried life and motherhood; and the growth of infants into childhood. Despite her chthonic connections to Tellus, she was not an underworld deity. Rather, she maintained the boundaries between the living and the dead. At funerals, the spirit of the deceased should pass from life to an afterlife as an underworld shade (Di Manes), or else might remain among the living as a wandering, vengeful ghost. To secure this transition and consecrate the tomb, well-off families offered Ceres sacrifice of a pig. The poor could offer wheat, flowers, and a libation.^[35] The expectations of afterlife for female initiates in the sacra Cereris may have been somewhat different, as they were offered "a method of living" and of "dying with better hope".^[36]

The mundus of Ceres

The mundus cerealis (literally "the world" of Ceres) was a pit at the site of Rome's Comitium. According to Roman tradition, it was dug and sealed by Romulus as part of Rome's foundation rites; this links Ceres to the establishment of cities. The mundus cerealis was ritually opened on three State occasions annually, on days identified in some records as C(omitiales) (days when the Comitia met) but in others as dies religiosus, when it would be irreligious to perform any official work. When opened, the mundus served as a cache for offerings to underworld deities, including Ceres as goddess of the fruitful earth and guardian of its underworld portals. According to Festus, the opened mundus offered a portal for the spirits of the dead to roam freely among the living; its sealing banished them once more to the realms of the dead. The shape of the mundus was said to be a reflection or inversion of the dome of the upper heavens.^[37]

Expiations

In Roman theology, prodigies were abnormal phenomena that manifested divine anger at human impiety. In Roman histories, prodigies are clustered around perceived or actual threats to the equilibrium of the Roman state, in particular, famine, war and social disorder. Prodigies could not be dealt with through ordinary, calendrical forms of cult; they were expiated through urgent, appropriate religious action. The establishment of Ceres' Aventine cult has been interpreted as expiation after crop failure and consequent famine. In Livy's history, Ceres is among the deities placated after a remarkable series of prodigies that accompanied the disasters of the Second Punic War: during the same conflict,a lighting strike at her temple was expiated. A fast in her honour is recorded for 191 BC, to be repeated at 5-year intervals.^[38] After 206, she was offered at least 11 further official expiations, the last known being in 64 AD. Many were connected to famine and manifestations of plebeian unrest, rather than war. From the Middle Republic onwards, expiation was increasingly addressed to her as mother to Proserpina.^[39]

Images of Ceres

Images of Ceres show her varied identities and attributes. Some late Republican images recall the myth of Ceres and Proserpine, and what little is known of the nocturnal ritus cereres: Ceres rides in a chariot, sometimes drawn by snakes; she bears a torch in her search for Proserpina, or sits on the sacred kiste (chest) that conceals the objects of her mystery rites. In some Augustan reliefs she emerges plant-like from the earth, her arms entwined by snakes, poppies and wheat in her outstretched hands: or rising from the earth, crowned with fruits and vines. In statuary, she commonly wears a crown of wheat. Most often, she holds a wheat spray that almost certainly represents her praemetium. Moneyers of the Republican era use Ceres' image, wheat ears and garlands to advertise their connections with prosperity, the annona and the popular interest. Similar coin images depict important female members of the Imperial family as Ceres, or with some of her attributes.

Priesthoods

Ceres was served by several public priesthoods. Her senior priest was male, the flamen cerialis who also served Tellus and was usually plebeian by ancestry or adoption. As Rome's legendary second King, Numa was thought to have instituted the flamines, Ceres' service by a flamen cerialis suggested her Roman cult as one of great antiquity. Her public cult at the Ambarvalia, or "perambulation of fields" identified her with Dea Dia, and was led by the Arval Brethren ("The Brothers of the Fields"); rural versions of these rites were led as private cult by the heads of households. An inscription at Capua names a male sacerdos Cerialis mundalis, a priest dedicated to Ceres' rites of the mundus.^[40] The plebeian aediles had minor or occasional priestly functions at Ceres' Aventine Temple and were responsible for its management and financial affairs including collection of fines, the organisation of ludi Cerealia and probably the Cerealia itself. Their cure (care and jurisdiction) included , or came to include, the grain supply (annona) and later the plebeian grain doles (frumentationes), any official games and the fabric of Rome's streets and public buildings.^[41] In Rome and throughout Italy, as at her ancient sanctuaries of Henna and Catena, Ceres' Greek cult (ritus graecia) and her joint cult with Proserpina were invariably led by female sacerdotes, drawn from women of local and Roman elites. It was the only public priesthood attainable by Roman matrons and was held in great honour.^[42][43]

Myths and theology

Ceres with cereals

The complex and multi-layered origins of the Aventine Triad and Ceres herself allowed multiple interpretations of their relationships; Cicero's asserts Ceres as mother to both Liber and Libera, consistent with her role as a mothering deity. Varro's more complex theology groups her functionally with Tellus, Terra, Venus (and thus Victoria) and with Libera as a female aspect of Liber.^[44] According to interpretatio romana, which sought the equivalence of Roman to Greek deities, Ceres was the daughter of Saturn and Ops, sister of Jupiter, mother of Proserpina by Jupiter and sister of Juno, Vesta, Neptune and Pluto. No native Roman myths of Ceres are known; her later mythology is largely indistinguishable from that of Demeter.

Ceres had strong mythological and cult connections with Sicily, especially Henna, on whose "miraculous plain" flowers bloomed throughout the year. Enna was the site of Proserpina's rape and abduction to the underworld and of Ceres' most ancient Sanctuary.^[45] According to legend, she begged Jupiter that Sicily be placed in the heavens. The result, because the island is triangular in shape, was the constellation Triangulum, an early name of which was Sicilia.

Legacy

The word cereals derives from Ceres, commemorating her association with edible grains. Statues of Ceres top the domes of the Missouri State Capitol and the Vermont State House serving as a reminder of the importance of agriculture in the states' economies and histories. There is also a statue of her on top of the Chicago Board of Trade Building, which conducts trading in agricultural commodities.

The dwarf planet Ceres (discovered 1801), is named after this goddess. And in turn, the chemical element cerium (discovered 1803) was named after the dwarf planet. A poem about Ceres and humanity features in Dmitri's confession to his brother Alexei in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Part 1, Book 3, Chapter 3.

Ceres appears as a character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1611).

An aria in praise of Ceres is sung in Act 4 of the opera The Trojans by Hector Berlioz.

The goddess Ceres is one of the three goddess offices held in the Grange or Patrons of Husbandry. The other goddesses are Pomona, and Flora.

Ceres is depicted on the Seal of New Jersey as a symbol of prosperity.

Notes and references

See also

• Consus

Roman mythology and religion Deities Apollo · Bona Dea · Castor and Pollux · Ceres · Cupid · Diana · Dis Pater · Faunus · Genius · Hercules · Janus · Juno · Jupiter · Lares · Liber · Mars · Mercury · Minerva · Orcus · Neptune · Penates · Pluto · Priapus · Proserpina · Quirinus · Saturn · Silvanus · Sol · Venus · Vesta · Vulcan See also List of Roman deities Abstract deities Concordia · Fides · Fortuna · Pietas · Spes · Roma · Terra Legendary founders Aeneas · Romulus and Remus · Numa Pompilius · Servius Tullius · Ancus Marcius Texts Vergil, Aeneid · Ovid, Metamorphoses and Fasti · Propertius, Elegies Book 4 · Apuleius, Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass) Concepts and practices Religion in ancient Rome · Festivals · interpretatio graeca · Imperial cult · Temples See also Glossary of ancient Roman religion · Greek mythology · myth and ritual