Demeter

For now you hear what they say of Demeter and Aphrodite and Eos;

And once one of the desperate and dishonoured men — one who, when the city was enslaved and under a tyranny, had done everything against her — reviled Epaminondas in the assembly, and said many harsh things;

She it was, too, who made the ancient race of your forebears, the autochthonous and earliest Athenians, who boast the earth as their mother, Demeter as their nurse, and Athena as their namesake and ally.

As the breezes sport with the chaff upon some goodly threshing-floor, when men are winnowing - while yellow Demeter blows with the wind to sift [ krinô] the chaff from the grain, and the chaff- heaps grow whiter and whiter - even so did the Achaeans whiten in the dust which the horses' hoofs raised to the firmament of heaven, as their drivers turned them back to battle, and they bore down with might upon the foe.

Great Ajax son of Telamon will yield to no man who is in mortal mold and eats the grain of Demeter, if bronze and great stones can overthrow him.

There was queen Demeter again, and lovely Leto, and yourself - but with none of these was I ever so much enamored as I now am with you.

By Demeter, the point is well taken.

we shall see then if Demeter will mete them out any wheat.

We fast as though it were the festival of Demeter.

Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, a Nereid with Aeacus, Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, Pherephatta with Adonis.

Or is it plain that these, and those more honoured than they, the great demons — Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, Zeus himself?

"Demeter endured it, and the famed Lame-god endured it, and Poseidon endured it, and Apollo of the silver bow endured to serve a mortal man for a year;

The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus are the rulers of the lower world.

They said that later this king went down alive to what the Greeks call Hades and there played dice with Demeter, and after winning some and losing some, came back with a gift from her of a golden hand towel.

they themselves go back, but this priest with his eyes bandaged is guided (they say) by two wolves to Demeter 's temple, a distance of three miles from the city, and led back again from the temple by the wolves to the same place.

But Rhea was subject in love to Cronos and bore splendid children, Hestia, Demeter, and gold-shod Hera and strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth, and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, and wise Zeus, father of gods and men, by whose thunder the wide earth is shaken.

Demeter, bright goddess, was joined in sweet love with the hero Iasion in a thrice-ploughed fallow in the rich land of Crete, and bore Plutus, a kindly god who goes everywhere over land and the sea's wide back, and he makes rich the man who finds him and into whose hands he comes, bestowing great wealth upon him.

Also he came to the bed of all-nourishing Demeter, and she bore white-armed Persephone whom Aidoneus carried off from her mother;

Pray to Zeus of the Earth and to pure Demeter to make Demeter's holy grain sound and heavy, when first you begin ploughing, when you hold in your hand the end of the plough-tail and bring down your stick on the backs of the oxen as they draw on the pole-bar by the yoke-straps.

But do you at any rate, always remembering my charge, work, high-born Perses, that Hunger may hate you, and venerable Demeter richly crowned may love you and fill your barn with food;

Little concern has he with quarrels and courts who has not a year's victuals laid up betimes, even that which the earth bears, Demeter's grain.

And Leon, who treated of the gods of Egypt, says that Isis is called Demeter by the Greeks, who comes in the time of Lynceus, in the eleventh generation later than Moses.

The juror shall swear by Zeus, Poseidon, and Demeter, and shall invoke destruction upon himself and his household if he in any way transgress this oath, and shall pray that his prosperity may depend upon his loyal observance thereof.

(and by Zeus and Apollo and Demeter, I shall make no false statement to you, men of the jury, but shall relate to you what I heard from my father)— You have a chance, he continued, to do a good turn to me, and no harm to yourself.

As for the affidavit of refusal, there is an entry in the record-office at the Temple of Demeter, of which the public caretaker is in charge, and a decree in which he is mentioned by name.

the goddess Demeter—she is the earth, but call her whatever name you wish;

Do they sow Demeter’s grain, or on what do they live?

and the goddesses of twofold name, Persephone and the kindly goddess Demeter the queen of all, Earth the nurse of all, won it for themselves;

Maid of Demeter, Life of fruits and corn,

And here at the holy altars of the twain goddesses, Demeter and her daughter, I wait, holding these sprays of foliage, a bond that bindeth not, in compassion for these childless mothers, hoary with age, and from reverence for the sacred fillets.

O Demeter, guardian of this Eleusinian land, and ye servants of the goddess who attend her fane, grant happiness to me and my son Theseus, to the city of Athens and the country of Pittheus, wherein my father reared me, Aethra, in a happy home, and gave me in marriage to Aegeus, Pandion’s son, according to the oracle of Loxias.

—The Temple of Demeter at Eleusis.

Also there was a wide cornland, and some men were reaping with sharp hooks the stalks which bended with the weight of the ears—as if they were reaping Demeter's grain:

So again when Demeter fell in love with Iasion, and yielded to him in a thrice ploughed fallow field, Zeus came to hear of it before so long and killed Iasion with his thunder-bolts.

I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter, awful goddess —of her and her trim-ankled daughter whom Aidoneus rapt away, given to him by all-seeing Zeus the loud-thunderer.

And all-seeing Zeus sent a messenger to them, rich-haired Rhea, to bring dark-cloaked Demeter to join the families of the gods:

First he sent golden-winged Iris to call rich-haired Demeter, lovely in form.

So grateful was Theseus to Peirithos, his partner in the abduction, that when Peirithos wished to woo Persephon, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and summoned him to the descent into Hades to obtain her, when Theseus found that he could not by his warnings dissuade his friend, although the danger was manifest he nevertheless accompanied him, for he was of opinion that he owed this debt of gratitu …

When Demeter came to our land, in her wandering after the rape of Kore, and, being moved to kindness towards our ancestors by services which may not be told save to her initiates, gave these two gifts, the greatest in the world—the fruits of the earth, which have enabled us to rise above the life of the beasts, and the holy rite which inspires in those who partake of it sweeter hopes regarding bot …

The mystic rite we continue even now, each year, to reveal to the initiates;

The right course, indeed, would have been for us not to take up arms against one another in the beginning, since the tradition is that the first strangers to whom Triptolemus, our ancestor, revealed the mystic rites of Demeter and Core were Heracles, your state’s founder, and the Dioscuri, your citizens;