Persephone: Her Mythical Return to Sicily Di Federica Mazzara
Persephone: her mythical return to Sicily di Federica Mazzara
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The focus of this study is the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and, in particular, lesser-known aspects of this mythological tale related to its setting in Sicily. Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of fertility. The myth tells about her rape by Hades, Lord of the Dead, who took her with him to the Underworld, where she was to be his wife. The rape takes place while Persephone is gathering flowers with her playmates. The rest of the myth tells about the desperate search of Demeter for her daughter and the agreement, in the end, with Hades to have Persephone live half of each year aboveground (Spring) and the other half (Winter) in the underworld. The first chapter of this work, that as a whole I will define as a “mythological journey”, deals generally with mythology. I refer to some authoritative scholars of mythology, such as Kerényi, Jung and Vernant, in order to underline its elusive nature and especially what, in my opinion, is its most important value, in other words, its continuing relevance in a modern context. As Kerényi affirms, the act of telling is what assures the survival of mythology, and I hope that this study too can help to maintain this tradition. The second chapter addresses the classical sources that have preserved the myth of Persephone and Demeter over time. These are the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is considered to be the first written record of this myth, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, and Claudian’s The
1 Rape of Proserpine. The aim of this second chapter is to show how from Ovid on a new tradition is pursued, a tradition that can be considered “Sicilian” and that has led to a different characterisation of themyth of Persephone, especially insofar as the setting is concerned. In order to sustain this thesis, I refer to the most authoritative source for it, Diodorus of Sicily, whose analysis is central in the third chapter of this text. The study of the classical sources, in other words, will bring to the fore some signs of what I develop later on and that deserve to be mentioned in tracing the path from the very beginning of this mythological journey. In the third chapter, my aim is to make the reader aware of the existence of this Sicilian tradition analysed in critical writings. These critics include Martorana, who in his Il Riso di Demetra analyses the myth of Persephone supporting the thesis of Diodorus, according to which the origin of the myth is Sicilian and not Greek, since the two goddesses, Demeter and Core, made their first appearance there. As a result, the setting of this myth started to be located in the Sicilian city of Enna, by the Lake of Pergusa, which has been identified with the site where therape of Persephone took place. Martorana further theorises that Persephone was originally an indigenous Sicilian deity of a spontaneous nature, who at that primordial time was not in a relation of interdependence with her mother Demeter, but rather was anindependent goddess. The rest of the myth, according to Martorana, therefore, was developed by the Greeks who must have absorbed the indigenous religious gods. According to this daring view, the Greek Persephone is the result of an incorporative process by the Greeks, which occurred after their arrival in Sicily. This explains the different characterisation of the myth depending on the tradition followed. In a Greek context there is a more elaborate mythology around Persephone that is probably due to the initiating nature of the myth. I refer to the cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries that is also integrated in this myth. In the Sicilian tradition, on the other hand, the mythology of Persephone is, one might say, more “humble”, due to the fact that it has been associated with simpler concepts. The analysis then turns to Corradini’s work Enna: Storia e Mitologia attraverso le Fonti Classiche, and several descriptions of this
2 charming place depicted by many writers in their literary works, among them Cicero’s The Verrine Orations, where the direct relationship between Persephone and Demeter with the island of Sicily becomes more evident. The fourth and last chapter closes the cycle of this writing with reference to the modern and updated versions of this myth. I will take into account some modern literary examples, in this case belonging to the theatrical genre, trying to single out in these texts the Sicilian tradition. In particular the description of the places that, as I will try to demonstrate, seem perfectly to continue Diodorus’s description. I focus my attention on Goethe’s monodrama Proserpina, on Mary Shelley’s Proserpine, on Robert Bridges’s Demeter, A Mask, and finally on the most Sicilian of all, Rosso di San Secondo’s Il Ratto di Proserpina, where the myth of Persephone is revised in modern key. In my opinion the latter represents somehow the return of Persephone to her own dimension, that indigenous Sicilian phase when she was the deity of an uncorrupted Eden that found a suitable setting in that mythical island for many known as Sicily.
3 An introduction to mythology Writing about myth and mythology (in this case I refer to Greek mythology) is a very difficult undertaking; due both to the complexity of the topic and to the impossibility of defining with precision such an elusive subject.Before starting the treatment of this topic we should, in fact, assume that when we deal with mythology we have not to look for explanations or for a unique interpretation that would reduce somehow the infinite material that is mythology. Instead, we should accept what K. Kerényi affirms rightly in his analysis of myth1, that we have just to listento the myth without wondering about its true origin that goes beyond what mortal minds can reach. Another definition of myth comes from Jean Pierre Vernant, who in his work The Universe, The Gods and the Myth2, explains that a myth is a kind of tale that comes from the mists of time and that existed even before a narrator would starts telling it. This to say, that the mythical tale derives neither from a personal invention nor from the creative fantasy, but rather from an act of mnemonic transmission. In order to clarify this concept I borrow again Kerényi’s words that explain perfectly the starting assumption, in dealing with mythology:
The stuff of mythology is composed of something that is greater than the story-teller and than all human beings -“as they are now”, said Homer - but always as something visible, perceptible or, at least, capable of being expressed in images, and never as the Godhead in abstracto, or even as the Godhead in concreto, if the latter is to be regarded as 3 unimaginable.
Taking for granted that the mythological material is undefinable and unfathomable, I would rather concentrate on one of the basic aspects of the myth that concerns its being always valid and applicable: “Mythology [...]
1 Jung C. G., Kerényi K., Introduction to a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, London, Routledge-Kegan Paul, 1970. 2 Vernant J. P., l’Universo, gli dei e gli Uomini, il racconto del mito, Torino, Einaudi, 2000, p. 5. 3 Kerényi K., The Gods of the Greeks, London, Thames and Hidson, 1951, p. 3.
4 goes on singing even in death and from afar. In its lifetime, among the peoples where it was indigenous, it was not only sung like a kind of music, it was also lived”4. Today what remains is the possibility to live the effects of such mythology: we tell again and again those mythical tales of which an unchangeable pattern, common to all its variations, remains. In this regard, Vernant has spoken of the “vitality of myths”, referring to “the way they constantly become charged with new meanings and absorb commentaries, glosses and new interpretations that open them up to new dimensions of reality yet to be explored or rediscovered”5. The Greek word mythologìa, as Kerényi again helps us understand, “contains the sense not only of “stories” (mythoi), but also of “telling” (legein): a form of narration that originally was also echo-awakening, [...]”6. It is the “act” of telling, therefore, that assures the survival of the mythological world. Telling myths always requires some “changes”, some variations that the narrator chooses on the basis of some circumstances, his public or his personal preferences; therefore, where he can, he adds or modifies what considers necessary.7 But this does not threaten the preservation of the myths. Vernant in his work Myth and Society in Ancient Greece affirms: “If the myths can vary in this way fromone version to another without damaging the balance of the general system it must be because what matters is not the way the story is told, which can vary from one account to another, but rather the mental categories as a whole and by the intellectual organisation which underlines all the various versions”8. The subjectivity in telling mythologycannot be avoided, but it must be restrained through a fidelity to the tradition that each narrator inherits. In my study of the myth of Persephone and Demeter I will rely on to the deep analysis that Jung and Kerényi together have expounded in their
4 Jung C. G., Kerényi K., Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Cit., p. 5. 5 Vernant J. P., Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, London, Methuen & Co., 1982, p. 219. 6 Kerényi K., The Gods of the Greeks, Cit., p.4. 7 Vernant J. P., L’Universo, gli dei e gli uomini, Il racconto del Mito,. Cit., p. 7. 8 Vernant J. P., Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, Cit., p. 206.
5 Introduction to a Science of Mythology: the Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis,9 already mentioned, where the myth is analysed as a science. But before presenting the analysis that these two scholars have conducted about the concept of the “divine child” connected with the myth of Persephone and Demeter, it is convenient to introduce generally this myth, making reference to the classical sources, such as the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Claudian’s The Rape of Proserpine.
The classical sources Before venturing an analysis of the classical and modern literary records of the myth, in other terms what Walter Pater defines as the “poetical phase”, “in which the poets become the depositories of the vague instinctive product of the popular imagination, and handle it with a purely literary interest, fixing its outlines, and simplifying or developing its situation”10, we need to become acquainted with some important functions and symbols connected with the two goddesses, defining them in a more general sense. Demeter (called Ceres by the Romans) has been commonly considered to be the goddess of fertility. The same name “Demeter” means Mother-Earth and the ancient Greek world worshipped her as the goddess of vegetation. Demeter, as an earth-mother goddess, shares many characteristics with her mother Rhea (the Mother-Earth as primordial element), but there are some differences between them. First of all, the
9 Jung C. G., Kerényi C., Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Cit., p.6. 10 Pater W., Greek Studies, London, Macmillan and Co., 1910, p. 91. In his deep analysis of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, Pater. traces three different influences. The first phase he defines as a half-conscious or mystical phase, in which “under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place, there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the natural world”. He traces a second phase in the already mentioned poetical phase that is the conscious one, that precedes the third and last phase, the ethical one, “in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical narrative are realised as abstract symbols, intensely characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual conditions”. Even though, he retains thisto be a paradigm for all the myths, he finds it to be quite apparent in the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
6 strong tie of Demeter to the “grain” that becomes her most identifiable symbol. She was a mother,“not in its quality of universal mother as Rhea was, but as mother of the grain and of a mysterious daughter, whom one did not willingly name in the presence of the profane”11. Her legend spread, especially in the Mediterranean area (Sicily and the Eleusis plain in Greece) where wheat grew and she is usually represented as a fair-haired goddess, reminiscent of the colour of the wheat. The figure of Demeter is related to the Eleusinian Mysteries that were meant to free men from the threat of death, infusing them with confidence of a happy and eternal life after death.12 What completes, however, the mythology around Demeter and thus cannot be disregarded is her relationship with her daughter Persephone. Persephone (Proserpine in the Latin tradition) has been commonly identified as the Queen of the Underworld, but her attributes arealso very similar to those of her mother, Demeter. Unquestionably, she lives in the underworld during the winter but, as the myth tells us, she returns to the earth in that period that coincides with the spring.13 She is also considered
11 Kerényi K., Eleusis, Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1967, pp. 28-29. 12 The Eleusinian Mysteries are probably some of the best-kept secrets in Greek ritualistic mythology. They were instituted in the city of Eleusis. The myth tells that they were founded by Demeter, who created the order as a remembrance of her lost daughter. Originally these rites were not so shrouded in mystery, but were linked to agricultural practices. Only later, did they assume characteristics of salvation. The rites and mysteries of Eleusis were kept secret and an initiate could reveal nothing of the celebration of Demeter. These feasts were celebrated every year. They lasted nine days and were called “the Big Mysteries” to be distinguished from the “Little” ones that lasted three days and were celebrated six months earlier. The latter had a function of purification, a sort of preliminary rite to the Big Mysteries. For each day, there was a prescribed series of ritual actions that initiates were expected to follow in the proper order. As Christianity began to spread, the Mysteries were condemned by the early Church fathers; yet the rites continued for hundreds of years more and exercised considerable influence on the formation of early Christian teachings and practices. A large temple was built in Eleusis in honour of the two goddesses. 13 The return of Persephone in Spring is undoubtedly the most trusted motif in all the ancient and modern literary versions, but some assert that this did not occur in the original version of this myth. According to Cornfold, Sicilians celebrate in May the rape of Persephone by
7 to be the goddess of vegetation and for this reason she shares some attributes with her mother. Her symbolism as a seasonal threshold renders her an ambiguous figure. Walter Pater has rightly defined her as: “[...] the last day of spring, or the first day of autumn. [...] She is a twofold goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized, [...]. A duality, an inherent opposition in the very conception of Persephone, runs all over her story, and is part of her ghostly power”14. It is because of this enigmatic nature that this goddess is commonly associated with concepts of duality, such as, summer and winter, life and death, world and underworld. The ambiguity of her figure is even stronger if we consider the relationship with her mother Demeter. This strong interdependence of Persephone with her mother is examined by Kerényi, who considers Persephone, to be the most perfect example of “Kore”:
The budlike quality of it is expressed in the name often given to its personification: Kore, which is simply the goddess “Maiden”. The Kore-goddess throws light on the old mythological idea in its budlike capacity to unfold and yet to contain a whole compact world 15 in itself.
Persephone distinguished herself from the other Kores:
Pluto and in Autumn her return and her reconciliation with her mother. Also, the rite of the Eleusinian Mysteries that celebrates the epiphany of Persephone seems to confirm this thesis, since they take place between September and October. On the basis of this information, it can be argued that Persephone spends the Summer in the underworld, for those months when the corn is absent from the ground, and not the wintertime, as we are commonly inclined to believe. Moreover, we know that Persephone is gathering flowers when she israped, so this would help to the hypothesis that her rape occurred during the Spring. It is significant to mention that “Plutarch, when he discussed the myth and functions of Demeter and Persephone in his De facie in orbe lunae (942 D ff,. 27) is interested mainly in ascribing Demeter’s domain to the earth (and corn) and that of Persephone to the moon, which he sees as the abode of the good after death”. (Griffiths J. G., Triads and Trinity, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1996, p. 299). 14 Pater W., Greek Studies, Cit., pp. 109-110. 15 Jung C. G., Kerényi C., Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Cit., pp. 147-148.
8 She is a Kore not because she is above all feminine connexions-with mother or husband-but because she embodies these connexions as two forms of being each carried to extremes and balanced against one other. One of the forms (daughter with mother) is life; 16 the other (young girl with husband) is death.
Kerényi considers mother and daughter as a double figure, and describes the existence of a “primordial identity”, as it was celebrated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, where the two goddesses represented the two aspects of the same divinity17:
The daughter as a goddess originally quite independent of her mother is unthinkable: but what is thinkable [...] is the original identity of mother and daughter. Persephone’s whole 18 being is summed up in an incident that is at once the story of Demeter’s own sufferings.
The figures of Demeter and Persephone, can be better discerned from a more attentive analysis of the sources that have contributed to the characterisation of these otherwise inseparable goddesses. “From the vague and fluctuating union, in which together they had represented the earth and its changes, the mother and the daughter define themselves with special functions, and with fixed, well-understood relationships, [...]”19. What follows is an examination of the classical sources that have fed this myth over time. The focus of my analysis is the “setting” of these sources, and in particular the “site” where the rape supposedly takes place. In so doing, I want to bring to the fore a process that we can define as “Sicilianisation” of the myth of Persephone and Demeter. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter20 represents the oldest and hence the most authoritative record of the myth of Persephone and Demeter. This
16 Ivi, p. 150. 17 Cottone M., Kore in <
9 ancient Greek poem was composed some time between 675 and 550 B.C. The context was probably one of those contests which took place on the seventh day of the Eleusinian festival, and in which ears of corn were the prize.21 Homer referred to both Demeter and Persephone respectively in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, but at that time Demeter was only the goddess of the fields and Persephone was not considered as a kore, but only as the Queen of Dead. The combination of these two contrasted figures, that allows the mythology of Demeter to grow, did not occur for the first time in the Hymn, but rather in Hesiod’s Theogony22, where the author tells in three lines of the abduction of Persephone by Aidoneus. But if the Homeric Hymn cannot be considered as the first version which mentions the story of these two goddesses, it remains the first full transcription of this mythological tale. As Filippo Cassola has rightly observed in his comment, in the Italian translation of the Hymns23, what is striking about the Homeric Hymn to Demeter is its apparent lack of a logical plot. After the rape of Persephone, the sorrowful Demeter, hearing the truth about the disappearance of her daughter, seems to give up looking for her. She decides for this reason to wander among the mortals:
[...] wroth thereafter was she with Cronion that hath dark clouds for his dwelling. She held apart from the gathering of the Gods and from tall Olympus, and disfiguring her form for many days she went among the cities and rich fields of men. Now no man knew her that looked on her, nor no deep-bosomed woman, till she came to the dwelling of Celeus, 24 who then was Prince of fragrant Eleusis.
She reaches Eleusis and here follows a quite long episode during which Demeter cares for Demophoon, Metaneira’s son, and which seems
21 Ivi, p. 82. 22 Hesiod, Theogony, 912-914. 23 Cassola F., (ed.), Inni Omerici, Milano, Mondadori, 1975. 24 Hymn to Demeter: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. English translation by A. Lang, The Homeric Hymns, London, George Allen, 1899, pp.188-189.
10 unrelated with the central issue of the hymn — the rape of Persephone. This episode, however, as Cassola has pointed out, has a function relating to the rite of the Mysteries that otherwise could not be incorporated into the plot. When Metaneira stops Demeter from placing her son in the fire, the offended goddess decides to punish the ignorant mortals by suspending the growing of the corn.She orders the Eleusinians to build her a temple, promising to teach them the rites through which they can soothe her rage, but for the moment she postpones this project. This occurs as a kind of revenge of the goddess for the loss of her beloved daughter, but the reason why this happens so long afar the real moment of the rape is quite obscure. Some have conjectured that the incoherence of this hymn is due to subsequent interpolations. It is also possible that the author of the Hymn was not very well acquainted with the Eleusinian traditions, and that he used the episode of Demophoon simply to include the doctrine of the Mysteries in the hymn, but, as Cassola notes, he did so without paying attention to the flow of the events.25 In any case, the intended relation between the episode of Demophoon and the disappearance of Persephone remains unclear. The passage that refers to the adventure of Demophoon is, though, used by the author of the Hymn to depict a very strong image of Demeter as Lady of Sorrows26, and her sense of motherhood comes out in all its power. As Pater has rightly observed:
The whole episode of the fostering of Demophoon, [...], is an excellent example of 27 the sentiment of pity in literature.
Some other aspects of this hymn worth mentioning, such as the skilful description of natural beauties, will be analysed later on by the comparison with the other classical sources. The comparison that follows
25 Inni Omerici, Cit., 33-34. 26 Pater W., Greek Studies, Cit., p. 114. 27 Ibid.
11 will have a topographical focus on the places related to the myth. This kind ofenquiry has a precise aim that is to show how from Ovid on the myth of Demeter and Persephone developed differently from the Hellenistic Hymn. In the latter, we are told that Persephone’s abduction takes place in the Nysan plain28:
Then the maiden marvelled, and stretched forth both her hands to seize the fair plaything, but the wide-wayed earth gaped in the plain of Nysian plain, and up rushed the 29 Prince, the host of many guests, the many-names son of Cronos, with his immortal horses.
The rest of the story occurs in Eleusis.
In some subsequent versions of this myth30, we will see how the setting changes, and how this does not happen casually, but rather as a consequence of different influences. Ovid treats the rape of Persephone more than once in his writings, respectively in the Fasti31 and The Metamorphosis.32 For the analysis of both these Ovidian sources I will refer to the work by Stephen Hinds, who in his text The Metamorphosis of Persephone33, analyses the two Ovidian
28 Here the poet refers to avery old tradition not yet influenced by the discoveries of the sanctuaries. It is probable that he considered Nysa, commonly identified with the land of the nymphs, as a place beyond every boundary. There were many places called Nysa in the ancient world, the only one that may be associated with the myth, as described by Homer is Nysa in Caria. 29 Hymn to Demeter: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. English translation by A. Lang The Homeric Hymns, op. cit., p. 184. 30 There are several versions of the story of Persephone, for instance, it has been a subject of interest of the so called Orphic literature that “in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought [...] a tide of mystical ideas into the Greek religion, sometimes, doubtless, confusing the clearness and naturalness of its original outlines, but also sometimes imparting to them a new and peculiar grace” (Pater W., Greek Studies, Cit., p. 128). 31 Ovid, The Fasti, IV, vv. 389-620. 32 Ovid, The Metamorphoses. The story of Persephone occurs in the book V, vv. 341-571, pp. 262-277. 33 Hinds S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1987.
12 references in comparison with the Homeric Hymn, focusing especially on the setting. The Ovidian version of the myth both in the Metamorphosis and in the Fasti follows a more coherent plot. The Metamorphoses is considered to be one of the best classical sources for the Greek myths. This work inspired many European writers from Dante to Shakespeare. Ovid himself claimed, though, not to have written an anthology of myths, but one continuos epic. Here, the rape by Hades does not occur as the result of a request from Hades to Zeus to take Persephone as his wife. Rather, it is something that happens more casually. After an account of the punishment of Typhoeus, who now is imprisoned beneath Mount Etna, Ovid tells about the fear of Dis (another name used for Hades) for the rage of Typhoeus:
Then the earth quakes, and even the king of the silent land is afraid lest the crust of the earth split open in wide seams and lest the light of day be let in and affright the trembling shades. Fearing this disaster, the king of the lower world had left his gloomy realm and, drawn in his chariot [...], was traversing the land of Sicily, carefully examined its 34 foundations.
Nothing seems to be planned. It is Venus, who seeing Dis wandering around the Island, decides to instruct her son, Cupid, to shoot the God of the underworld with his arrows in order to couple him with Ceres’daughter, Persephone. The sorrowful Ceres, during her search for her abducted daughter, wanders desperately for many days as in the Hymn, but, in this case, she does not yet know the truth about the disappearance of Persephone. After many days searching, Ceres comes to the fountain Cyane, where Dis entered with the abducted Persephone to reach the underworld.35 There is no naiad to tell her what had happened, but the goddess finds Persephone’s girdle floating on the surface of the pool. When Ceres realises what happened to her daughter she gets angry and decides
34 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, book V, 355-362, p. 263. 35 The episode of the nymph Cyane, according to which she was transformed by Hades into a spring with the same name, confirms the fact that Ovid follows the Sicilian tradition, being this fountain located in Sicily.
13 to punish all the earth by denying it fertility especially in Sicily where the rape is supposed to have taken place. Although there are many other detailed differences between the Homeric version and the Ovidian one and even if a more attentive examination could help us to better understand them, I want to approach the real argument of my work that concerns the setting of the worship of the two goddesses that has effects on the identification of the site of the rape and whose analysis will be central in the third chapter. While the Homeric Hymn was undoubtedly a source for Ovid, both in the Metamorphoses and in the Fasti, he nonetheless follows a tradition that, as Hinds affirms: “prevailed in later Greek and in Roman writings, making its first definitive appearance in extant literature in the fourth century BC.”36. I refer to the Sicilian tradition that locates the myth of Persephone in Sicily. The site of the abduction, as described in the Metamorphoses, has been identified with the lake of Pergus close to Enna.37 Ovid portrays very skilfully this setting:
Not far from Henna’s walls there is a deep pool of water, Pergus by name. Not Cayster on its gliding waters hears more songs of swans than does this pool. A wood crowns the heights around its waters on every side, and with its foliage as with an awning keeps off the sun’s hot rays. The branches afford a pleasing coolness, and the well-watered ground 38 bears bright coloured flowers. The spring is everlasting.
The Sicilian setting for the rape of Persephone can be traced, for the first time, to two pre-Ovidian accounts by Diodorus39 and Cicero40. These two versions of the myth will be analysed more accurately later on, in order
36 Hinds S., The Metamorphoses of Persephone, Ovid and the self-conscious Muse, Cit., p. 53. 37 It was on a ‘grand tour’ in his youth taking in Asia as well as Sicily that Ovid visited Enna. 38 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, op. cit., book V, 386-391; As Hinds has noted, Ovid seems to be responsible for the introduction of swans to Enna: neither Cicero nor Diodorus mention any. (Hinds S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone, Cit., p. 149). 39 Diodorus of Sicily, Biblioteca Storica, 5, 2-5. 40 Cicero, The Verrine Orations, 2.4.106ff.
14 to support the pre-Hellenic origin of the Sicilian myth of Demeter and Persephone.41 The focus here, however, is on the reasons that could have led Ovid to apply this Sicilian tradition rather than the Hellenistic one. As remarked, there is more than one element in the Metamorphoses that is absolutely foreign to the Homeric version; for instance, all the episodes involving metamorphoses that refer to Cyane, Ascalaphus, the Sirens, Arethusa and so on. But all these variations can be easily justified by the different nature of the poems. On the other hand, there are many other components that imply a direct Homeric influence, such as the circumstance of the rape, or the famine that Ceres delivers at the end of the story. Nevertheless, the stress on the Sicilian location, that represents the strongest element of contrast with the Hymn and that occurs throughout the poem, is not just a passing detail. Rather, it marks significant issue that maintains its importance in the characterisation of the myth as told by Ovid.42 As a result, the figure of Persephone, for instance, acquires a different connotation. In the Metamorphoses, she is depicted as a childish and simple maiden, an element already present in the Hymn, but that is emphasised more in Ovid. This comes out clearly at the end of the poem, in the crucial act of the eating of the pomegranate’s seeds. In the Hymn, Persephone is forced by Hades to take some seeds of this infernal fruit. In the Metamorphoses, on the other hand, the goddess herself plucks the pomegranate from a tree in the underworld, as an ingenuous Eve. This sense of instinctiveness that pervades the Ovidian version can be attributed to the style itself of the Metamorphoses that emphasises active emotions, such as sudden love or sudden anger. But this does not exclude the influence of a different tradition followed by Ovid that is also connected with the differences in the worship
41 It bears mention, however, that both Diodorus and Cicero relied on the Sicilian historian Timaeus of the late fourth and early third centuries B. C. (Ibid.) 42 “Cicero’s depiction of Enna was, as noted above, one of the great set-piece descriptions of Roman literature, and Ovid could not be unaware of that as he inserted his Enna set-piece into his narrative”. (Hinds S., The Metamorphoses of Persephone, Cit., p. 42)
15 of the two goddesses respectively in Eleusis and Enna. Even if the substratum is the same, agricultural in both the Hellenistic and Sicilian versions of the rite, in Eleusis the type of worship was more one of “initiation”, as it related to the Mysteries. In Sicily, and particularly, in Enna the figures of the two goddesses have always been associated with more domestic concepts such as the cyclical alternating of the seasons or the concept of fertility in general. These divergent approaches to the myth and the worship of Demeter and Persephone, that will be examined more closely later on, can, therefore, offer an explanationof the different characterisations of the figure of Persephone. The two versions of the myth, the Homeric one and the Ovidian one can be seen, in other words, as literary records of different traditions. According to this view, Persephone’s childish behaviour in the Ovidian version might be understood as an expression of the more humble Sicilian custom. The depiction of Proserpine in the Metamorphoses seems to reflect also the charm of the setting. She is as alluring as the Sicilian site, idyllically described by Ovid: a place without space and time, where spring is the only season, the eternal one, and where everything seems to be magical. Ovid portrays a setting of paradisiacal and uncorrupted beauty. This oneiric dimension is abruptly interrupted by thesudden arrival of Hades:
And while with girlish eagerness she was filling her basket and her bosom, and striving to surpass her mates in gathering, almost in one act did Pluto see and love and carry 43 her away: so precipitate was his love.
This contrast reflects the inherent duality of Proserpine, in her being both a virgin who gathers flowers in this uncorrupted place, and the queen of the underworld, connected with concepts of death and mystery.44
As has already been mentioned, Ovid treats the myth of Persephone not only in the Metamorphoses, but also in the Fasti. The Fasti is a sort of
43 Ovid, Metamorphoses, book V., 393-397. 44 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Enna, Papiro, 1991, p. 26.
16 Roman Calendar and Ovid tells the story of the myth of Persephone for the seventh of April, the day of the games of Ceres. Even though the Ovidian consideration of this myth reaches its apotheosis in the Metamorphosis, in the Fasti he already sets things moving towards a new tendency that sees “Sicily” as one of the central issues centrally related to Persephone. As Corradini has observed: “Having evidently been conceived in parallel, Ovid’s Persephones demand appreciation in parallel”45. The story of Persephone, as told in the Fasti, presents more similarities and a stronger engagement with the Homeric Hymn than the Metamorphoses do. There are some elements that are taken up directly from the Homeric Hymn such as: “the circumstances of the rape itself, the hospitality and nursing of the child at Eleusis and the resolution of the crisis”46. But, as in the Metamorphoses, in the Fasti, the divergence with the Hymn can be discerned in the Sicilian scene of the abduction:
The Trinacrian land, [...] It is a habitation Delightful to Ceres; there possesses she many a city, among which is the fruitful Henna, with its well-tilled soil. [...] There were as many tints there as nature. Possesses, and the ground was beauteous, decked with flowers 47 Of diversified hue.
As Hinds has observed, it is as if Ovid “Sicilianised”48, the myth of Persephone infusing some elements of that Sicilian characterisation that has its own origin in a deeply rooted tradition. It is enough to mention the detail of the torches used by Ceres during the search for her daughter that occurs in both the Ovidian versions. Ceres, as Ovid tells us, lights a pair of torches from the fire spouted forth from Etna by Typhoeus. This detail comes from an incontestable source for Ovid, Diodorus of Sicily, who states in his Biblioteca Storica that:
45 Hinds S., The Metamorphoses of Persephone, Cit., p. 77. 46 Ivi, p. 57. 47 Ovid, The Fasti,. book IV, vv. 421-432, pp. 152-53. English translation by G. H. Hallam, The Fasti of Ovid, Macmillan and Co., London, 1929. book IV, vv. 334-336, 363-364, pp. 103-104. 48 Ivi, p.63.
17 The myth goes on to recount, Demeter, being unable to find her daughter, kindled 49 torches in the craters of Mt. Aetna and visited many parts of the inhabited world.
What follows, in completion of this first part of the study, is the analysis of the third and last classical source, the Rape of Proserpine (396- 402) by Claudian, that represents the longest work connected with the story of the two goddesses and that, as Pater informs us, closes the classical phase of this myth. This version deserves attention for many reasons, but mainly because of its emphasis on the Sicilian setting that fits perfectly with that tradition already pursued by Ovid. For instance, Claudian describes brilliantly the place where, one supposes, the temple of Ceres stood:
They reached the place where shone Ceres’ palace, firm-built by the Cyclopes’ hands; [...]. Neither Pyragmon nor Steropes e’er builded a Work with toil so great as that,[...]. The hall was walled with Ivory; the roof strengthened with beams of bronze and 50 supported by lofty columns of electron.
Like Ovid, Claudian locates the rape by the Pergus Lake, close to Enna. Also in this case, Enna is described as a charming place:
Even more lovely than the flowers is the country. The plain, with gentle swell and gradual slopes, rose Into a hill; issuing from the living rock gushing Streams bedewed their grassy banks. With the Shade of its branches a wood tempers the sun’s fierce Heat and at summer’s height makes for itself the cold of winter. [...] Not far from here lies a lake called by the Sicani Pergus, girt with a cincture of leafy woods close around its pallid waters. Deep down therein the eye of whoso would can see, and the Everywhere transparent water invites 51 an untram-melled gaze into its pellucid gulfs.
Anna Maria Corradini has observed that the Claudian description of the place must be very close to the real one,52 in the sense that if we take for granted that the rape of Persephone actually occurred in Sicily, then its
49 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, book V, Cambridge, Harward UP, 1939, p.106. 50 Caudian, The Rape of Proserpine, book I, v. 235-245, p. 311. 51 Ivi, book II, 101-117, pp. 325-327. 52 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., p.35.
18 location must not have been so different from that one described by Claudian in his work. The Rape of Proserpine is particularly important to this enquiry because of its references to Sicily and its landscape. It is in the Claudian poem that we have the first complete description of Mount Aetna:
But though it boils and bursts forth with Such great heat yet it knows how to observe a Truce with the snow, and together with glowing Ashes the ice grows hard, protected from the great Heat and secured by indwelling cold, so that the Harmless flame licks the neighbouring frost with Breath that keeps its compact. What huge engine hurls those 53 rocks.
There would be many other things to mention about the classical sources analysed above and about their brilliant way of depicting the myth of Persephone, each in its own way, and all of them able to “launch” the reader into a dimension without time and space. But, as mentioned, it is especially to the “mythical” setting of this tale that our analysis will keep on leading us, a place that many have continued to identify with Sicily.
Sicily: A mythical setting After generally presenting in the previous chapter the development of the myth of Demeter and Persephone through the most authoritative classical sources, the focus of this chapter will be on the Sicilian dimension of this myth and on a supposed pre-Hellenistic origin of the figure of Persephone. The thesis here doen’t simply suggest that in Sicily there was a cult of the two goddesses Demeter and Core, but rather, that in Sicily their worship existed earlier than in Greece. When the Greeks arrived in Sicily in the eighth century, they brought with them a complex cultural heritage that they maintained and enlivened thanks to commercial relationships between the two countries. This explains the typical Hellenistic character of ancient Sicily’s religion. Moreover, the written history of Sicily began with the Greek
53 Claudian, The Rape of Proserpine, book I, vv. 166-170, p. 305.
19 colonisation, and the writers who first wrote about this island, belonged to these Greek colonies. All this makes difficult the identification, in the religion of ancient Sicily, of some local elements thatthe Greeks may have found in the island at the time of colonisation and with which theirs overlapped. Nevertheless there is a distinct possibility that this occurred and that the religion of the local people might have influenced the Greek one, perhaps leading to its Sicilianisation. The most powerful source supporting this thesis is Diodorus of Sicily54, who in his Biblioteca Storica, sought to prove the existence of an original Sicilian historiography. In this regard, he refers especially to the myth of Demeter and Core that, he suggests, has an indigenous origin that precedes the arrival of the Greeks.
The first island we shall speak about will be Sicily [...] which holds first place in respect of the great age of the myths related concerning it. [...]. The Siceliotae who dwell in the island have received the tradition from their ancestors, [...], that the island is sacred to Demeter and Core. [...]. That the ancient inhabitants of Sicily, the Sicani, were indigenous, is stated by the best authorities among historians, and also that the goddesses we have mentioned made their first appearance on this Island, and that it was the first, because of 55 the fertility of the soil, to bring forth the fruit of the corn, [...].
This last aspect, related to the fertility of the island, has to be taken into account, as strong support for the thesis that the worship of Demeter and Core existed in Sicily in a pre-Hellenistic time. Since ancient time, agriculture has been central to life on the island. The volcanic rich subsoil has always been attributed to the power of its volcanic forces. Myths and worship, related to this subterranean vigour,
54 Very few we know about him. He lived during the Cesar’s age and travelled a lot. He is still remembered for his historical work the Biblioteca Storica that, as he has affirmed, he wrote because, “since all men are inhabitants of the world, we need to know the history to live wisely”. His work is divided in 40 Books, the fifth of which refers to the Greeks and to the other European peoples. (Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., pp.110-111) 55 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, Cit., pp. 99-101.
20 seem to have flourished in Sicily before the arrival of the Greeks.56 One could presume that since primordial times the indigenous people invoked the Gods for the protection of their fields. This could lead to the consequent identification of a local goddess that later on might have been associated with the Eleusinian Demeter. This assimilation must have been simplified from a common substratum, but there are also some cultural differences we have to deal with to better understand the evolution of this worship in Sicily. Giuseppe Martorana, in his Il Riso di Demetra57, supports the thesis of Diodorus about the priority of the worship of Demeter in Sicily. He makes a comparison between the worship ofDemeter and Core in Eleusis and in Sicily in order to underline how, in reality, they evolved differently, and how this has influenced the characterisation of the myth itself. His assumption is that in Sicily the myth of Demeter and Core was not mysticallike in Eleusis. In the Island, in fact, the panegyris of Demeter is a feast that all the inhabitants celebrate, and this is nothing more than the interval between the end and the beginning of the new agricultural year.58 He dwells, especially, on one element of the myth that differs between Eleusis and Sicily, and this is the “laugh” of the goddess Demeter that occurs in the myth as a resolution of her grief. He considers Diodorus’s account the feast celebrated in the island in honour of Demeter’s grief:
[...] It is their custom during these days to indulge in coarse language as they associate one with another, the reason being that by such coarseness the goddesses, grieved 59 though she was at the Rape of Core, burst into laughter.
The coarse language used during these feasts represents disorder, but, at the same time, it had a special mythical-ritual function, because, causing the laugh of the goddess, her grief ceased and hence the land was freed from the famine she had imposed. In other words the “laugh”,
56 Ciaceri E., Culti e miti nella storia dell’antica Sicilia, Catania, Clio, 1993, pp. 1-2. 57 Martorana G., Il riso di Demetra, Palermo, Sellerio, 1985. 58 Ivi, p. 48. 59 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, Cit., p. 109.
21 Martorana notes, represents the cyclical restoration of order60, a sacral function that reveals itself in agricultural life. So far, Martorana’s analysis seems to overlook the differences in the worship of the two goddesses and, in particular, the pre-Hellenistic nature of the Sicilian tradition. However, later on, he introduces the argument affirming that he has no doubt that in Sicily, Demeter and Core are Greek interpretations that hide, in reality, the names of indigenous goddesses. He does not deny, though, the existence of a common substratum between the two traditions that he identifies, precisely, in that suspension of Demeter’ grief through course language.61 The divergence, in this case, concerns the “way” in which this was ritualised in Sicily and in Eleusis. As Martorana has rightly observed, in Sicily the “obscene” was embodied by the people, while, in Eleusis it was represented by a single figure, Iambe or Baubò. This variation can be explained by the different nature of the Sicilian myth. The Eleusinian version of the myth of Demeter and Core seems to be a sort of “elaboration” of the Sicilian one. The latter, in fact, is strictly connected with the seasonal rhythm of the growth. The Eleusinian variation shares this aspect of the myth, but at the same time, reveals a different development that enriches the myth with new elements related to the mystery of
60 Martorana G., Il riso di Demetra, Cit., p. 53. It seems that Aristotle, who forbade the use of indecent language on stage, allowed its use only in those cases that concerned the myth of Demeter and Core. The phenomenon of the “laugh” that occurs in the myth of Demeter and Persephone seems to find a suitable explanation in the idea of ‘carnivalisation’ advanced by Bakhtin in his work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, according to which the carnival attitude “is an attitude toward the world which liberates from fear, brings the world close to man and man close to his fellow man [...], and with its joy of change and its jolly relativity, counteracts the gloomy, one-sided official seriousness which is born of fear, is dogmatic and inimical to evolution and change, and seeks to absolutize the given conditions of existence and the social order. The carnival attitude liberated man from precisely this sort of seriousness. But there is no grain of nihilism in carnival, nor, of course, a grain of shallow frivolity or trivially vulgar bohemian individualism” (Bakhtin M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Ardis, Ann Arbor 1973, p. 133). 61 Martorana G., Il riso di Demetra, Cit., p. 56.
22 initiation.62 This mystery found expression in the individual hope in an afterlife. In Sicily, on the contrary, the expectations were only connected with the agricultural rhythm, and they were not personal but rather of the community. In the Sicilian myth, in other words, there was no trace of the mystery and of individual hope. The only mystery that Demeter conceded to the Sicilians was related tothe agricultural life and to its cyclical repetition.63 The analysis of Martorana underlines the more archaic nature of the Sicilian myth that justifies the Sicilians’ conviction, mentioned by Diodorus, that they were the first to benefit from the goddess’s gift, corn. Before moving into the examination of the specific Sicilian places related to the myth of Persephone, I want to focus on the theory of a pre- Hellenistic distinction between the two goddesses, identifying a sort of pre- Demetric condition, where the virgin Core represented an independent deity. According to Martorana, the Diodorus’s description of Persephone, gives prominence to one aspect of the goddess, her virginity:
And both Athena and Artemis, the myth goes on to say, who had made the same choice of maidenhood as had Core and were reared together with her, joined with her in 64 gathering the flowers, and all of them together wove the robe for their father Zeus.
At this stage Core is the virgin par excellence. This mythical episode would point out especially the older and independent dimension of Core in the Sicilian phase. In Diodorus’s account, it is possible, in fact, to discern some aspects of a deity that is closely related to Sicily. A sort of local goddess that later might overlap with the Greek Persephone and who, at that age, was still independent from her mother. Another reference to Diodorus’s account confirms this connection between Core and Sicily:
[...] at the marriage of Pluton and Persephone Zeus gave this island as a wedding 65 present to the bride.
62 Ivi, p. 56-57. 63 Ibid. 64 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, Cit., p. 103.
23 The description of the place in Diodorus’ account, that can be identified with Enna and that we will analyse in more detail next, brings out the characterisation of this goddess in her sacred relationship with the self- sown flowers. We are in a sort of pre-Demetric dimension, where the earth’s goods are still spontaneous. Core is here identified with an eternal spring, when every kind of flower grows spontaneously. At that stage, civilisation ignored the relation between seed and ground typical of the Demetric phase. Core is the goddess who assures the eternal growth of flowers and the renewal of a never-ending spring that represents life after death.66 The passage from this ancient and spontaneous phase that we have defined as pre-Demetric, to a technical and agricultural phase, the Demetric one, occurs, according to Martorana, with the rape. This mythical event, in fact, represents the starting point of a new phase that corresponds with the establishment of agriculture, in other words, of a new condition of life, less spontaneous and more complex. With this new phase we witness a gradual fusion of Core with her mother Demeter. Core’s flowers are substituted by Demeter’s corn; the time of the Virgin disappears and we move into the time of the Mother. On the basis of these suppositions Martorana advances the hypothesis of the presence of more than one level to the myth of Persephone. He identifies three important times. First, the time of Core as goddess of spontaneous nature, where the always blooming field of Enna representsthe only spatial dimension. Second, the time of the “rape” that coincides with the discovery of a new spatial dimension, the underworld. With this second phase the opposition between the two ontological extremes of life and death is set up. The cyclical return of Core assures the continuation of life after death. The third and last phase, singled out by Martorana, is the phase of Greek mythology, where Core is identified with Demeter and Zeus’s daughter. It is here that the Demetric phase mentioned above, starts out, and thus, the agricultural cycle with its mystic and
65 Ivi, p. 101. 66 Martorana G., Il riso di Demetra, Cit., pp. 64-65.
24 Eleusinian nature is established.67 The association between the growing of the corn and the development of vegetation with the concept of death and resurrection is typical of Greek thought. This contributed to the identification of a later stage Core with Persephone as the Queen of the underworld. Martorana’s reasoning ascribes a precise meaning to the rape. Being the cause of Demeter’s grief it represents a mythical event necessary to the passage from an ancient and spontaneous phase, Core’s age, to a phase characterised by the cycle of cultivation, Demeter’s age. Martorana underlines the difference between the Sicilian tradition and the Hellenistic one. In its stratification, theSicilian myth does not present the rape as a tragic event. According to this daring viewpoint the dramatic power of the rape is simply the result of a subsequent interpretation that finds expression in the Homeric Hymn and is ritualised in the Eleusinian mysteries. The Homeric Hymn, in other words, would only organise some already existent elements, canonising that version of the myth that has been so far considered as the most authoritative version of it. The analysis of Martorana demonstrates how the myth of Persephone was built on a Sicilian substratum, and especially how the goddess Persephone was the heiress of a Sicilian deity, an ingenuous virgin, the goddess of flowers strictly connected with an Eden-like dimension, identifiable with Enna. Of course, what has been said so far evidently contrasts with Kerényi’s analysis about the “Divine Maiden” mentioned in the first chapter. According to Kerényi, in fact, the two goddesses cannot be thought of as single deities, they are absolutely complementary: Persephone, is above all, her mother’s Kore: without her, Demeter would not be a Meter.68
This insistence by Kerényi on the interdependence between Demeter and Kore is probably due to the fact that when Kerényi refers to
67 Ivi, p. 67. 68 Kerényi K., Jung C. G., Introduction to a Science of Mythology, Cit., p. 152.
25 Persephone, he alludes to the goddess in the Hellenistic sense, without considering the potential existence of an indigenous Sicilian deity that may have preceded the Greek one. Nevertheless, Martorana’s point of view is not unchallenged. Others have denied the assumption that the Greek myth of Persephone hides a Sicilian substratum, as recognised in the Diodoric tradition. Emanuele Ciaceri69, for instance, considers the myth of Persephone to be a perfect example of Greek mythology that simply found a suitable setting in Sicily, an island that was simply fit for receiving such a worship due to its qualities. He attributes to the myth of Persephone and to its worship in Sicily a very strong Greco-Roman characterisation and he considers the identification of indigenous elements to this myth to be unfounded.70 He prefers instead the hypothesis that the myth originated in Syracuse under the policy of Gerone, who imported the myth in 480 B.C., when he raised two temples in honour of the two goddesses, after his victory in Imera. According to this hypothesis, therefore, the worship of Demeter and Core is of Greek origin. Only with the arrival of the Romans71 did their worship begin to have importance in Enna. It was at that time that Enna was considered to be the oldest place connected with the two goddesses, regaining its centrality concerning this myth. These two different positions concerning the real origin of this myth show how we can proceed only on the basis of conjectures, because of the very few and controversial elements we possess. However, this does not take away the charm of the myth of Persephone.
69 Ciaceri E., Culti e miti nella storia dell’antica Sicilia, Cit. 70 Ciaceri recognises a Sicilian indigenous nature in other deities, such as Daphne, who represents the personification of the Sicilian pastoral life. 71 As discussed earlier, it seems that the Latin writers followed the Sicilian tradition. For instance, Ovid and Claudian both told that Core had to spend one half of the year in the underworld and the other half with her mother. On the contrary, according to the Greek tradition, followed by Homer, Core had to spend only one third of the year in the underworld. Also the reference to the episode of the source Ciane, that we find both in Ovid and in Claudian is typically Sicilian.
26 For the analysis of the places related to this myth with Enna as the central setting we will refer to the informative work by Anna Corradini, who in her Enna: Storia e Mitologia Attravero le Fonti Classiche runs through all the classical sources that refer to the relationship between the myth of Persephone and the city of Enna. This is the city that has been considered, so far, as the setting where the rape took place and also as the most important site of the religious worship of the two goddesses. The setting of the myth of Persephone is, in all the versions, a flowered field. This theme of the rape of maidens who are gathering flowers is a common topic in all of Greek mythology. Here we could dwell upon the meaning of the rape as a rite of passage, but this is not the right place to deal with such an argument that will lead us too far from our aim.72 This field identified in Enna has always been depicted as an Eden-like place, where the flowers never cease to grow and where spring is the only season. Corradini starts her analysis referring to the Pseudo-Aristotelian source that, chronologically, was the first to relate the myth of Demeter and Persephone to Enna. There, the eternally flowering field and the cave from where Pluto is supposed to come out to seize Persephone is mentioned:
En ti Sikelia peri tin Kaloumenin Ennan spilaion ti legetai einai, peri o kyklo pefykenai fasi ton te allon antheon plithos ana pasan oran. [...] dia de touton tou chasmatos asymphanis estin yponomos, kath’ on fasi tin arpagin poiisasthai ton ploutona tis koris. [...] kai tauto simeiountai to protos par’ autois faninai to protos karpon. Othen ke tis Dimitros 73 antipoiountai, famenoi par’ autois tin theon gegonenai.
All the elements connected with the Sicilian tradition of the myth are mentioned in this passage.74 We have already mentioned and analysed Diodorus’s account that more than any other underlines the centrality of the Sicilian setting in the
72 The story of the abduction of Persephone symbolises her initiation, her passage into adulthood. Her whole story can be interpreted as the coming of age of a young person. 73 Aristotle, De Mirabilibus Auscultationibus, n. 82. Quoted in Corradini A. M., Enna. Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., p. 15. (English translation no found). 74 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., p. 16.
27 myth of Persephone and especially the veneration that the two goddesses seem to have for this island:
Again, the fact that the Rape of Core took place in Sicily is, men say, proof most evident that the goddesses made this island their favourite retreat because it was cherished 75 by them before all others.
There is still something to consider about this account that is missing in the other versions and that further supports the strong relationship between Core and Enna:
Core, Athena and Artemis, [...], because of the time they had spent together and their intimacy they all loved this island above any other, and each one of them received for her portion a territory, Athena received hers in the region of Himera, [...]. And Artemis received from the gods the island at Syracuse which was named after her, by both the oracle and men, Ortygia. [...]. Like the two goddesses whom we have mentioned, Core, we are told, received as her portion the meadows round about Enna; but a great fountain was made sacred to her in the territory of Syracuse and given the name Cyane or “Azure Fount”. For the myth relates that it was near Syracuse that Pluto effected the Rape of Core and [...] he 76 caused the fountain named Cyane to gush forth, [...].
The above passage mentions the episode of the sharing of the island of Sicily between the three goddesses, Core, Artemis and Athena. The two virgins, Athena and Artemis77, may have come to Sicily for their education, that in this case is symbolised by the gathering of flowers and the making of a peplum for their father, Zeus. It seems, therefore, that Core lived together with these two other goddesses, with whom she formed a typical divine triad.78 In this last passage of Diodorus’s account mentioned above, it is worth remarking upon another typically Sicilian theme that both Ovid and Claudian have mentioned in their versions of the myth. I refer to the Cyane fount. According to Diodorus, Pluto raped Persephone in Enna, reached Syracuse and here broke the ground to enter the underworld, from which
75 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, Cit., pp.102-103. 76 Ivi, pp. 105-107. 77 Both Athena and Artemis are considered by Kerényi to be Kore figures.
28 the fount Cyane arose. Ovid took inspiration from this account and told that Pluto transformed Cyane into a fount because she tried to hinder the God of the underworld in his undertaking. This version of the myth had the effect of spreading in Syracuse a rite, celebrated once a year by this fount. This confirms again the importance of this myth throughoutthe island. But let us return now to our journey through the classical sources that attribute to Enna an unquestionable centrality as the setting of the myth. According to Corradini, even if Diodorus’s description of the place is burdened with a charm thatcan be attributed to the mythical frame, we are able to detect some elements traceable to an historical and geographical reality.79 For instance, from his account we can deduce that the place where the rape took place had to be a highland:
The meadow we have mentioned is level in the centre and well watered throughout, but on its periphery it rises high and falls off with precipitous cliffs on every side. And it is conceived of as lying in the very centre of the island, which is the reason why certain writers 80 call it the navel of Sicily.
The Ovidian description of the place of the rape in Metamorphoses, as we have already said, is clearly a continuation of Diodorus’s depiction. As Corradini emphasises, this attention from such a skilful writer as Ovid represents for the Sicilian island a source of pride.81 Many other classical sources make reference to the strong relationship between the myth and the city of Enna, among them Valerio Massimo in Factorum et Dictorum Mirabilium (book I, chap. I. I); Sito Italico in Punica (book I, vv., 213-214); Pomponio Mela in De chor (book II, chap. VII); Columella in De Re Rustica (book X, vv., 269-274), Lattanzio in Divinae Institutiones: “De Origine Erroris” (book III, chap. 4), the already mentioned Claudian in The Rape of Proserpine, and also Sidonio Apollinare
78 Manni E., Sicilia Pagana, Cit., p. 110. 79 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e Mitologia attraverso le Fonti Classiche, Cit., p. 21. 80 Oldfather C. H., Diodorus of Sicily, Cit., p. 103. 81 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e Mitologia attraverso le Fonti Classiche, Cit., p. 27
29 in carme IX (vv., 168-72). The latter demonstrates the strong identification of Enna with this myth well into the fifth century, at a time when the Christianity had already been established. One of the most important sources, in support of the thesis we have advanced throughout this text, is Cicero and his The Verrine Orations.82 The Verrine Orations is the written version of Cicero’s speech against Verre, who was the pre-praetor in Sicily from 73 B.C to 71 A.D. He was obsessed with artistic collections and, for this reason, he often stole art works. Cicero, who was a lawyer, convicted the pre-praetor of extortion. To better sustain his accusations, he travelled all around Sicily for fifty days in order to collect some necessary evidences for the trial. Cicero comments on the myth of Demeter and Persephone in Sicily, and the attachment that the Sicilians felt for these two goddesses:
The antiquity of this belief that finds in these spots the footprints, one might almost say the cradle, of those divine persons, has engendered throughout Sicily, in individuals and communities, a devotion to Ceres of Henna that is quite astonishing. [...] So ancient, so awe-inspiring was the cult, that they were felt, in going thither, to be making their way not 83 to a temple of Ceres but to the presence of Ceres herself.
This relation is a further confirmation of the antiquity of the worship and of the importance of Demeter’s and Proserpine’s connecting with the city of Enna.84 Behind this account there is, in fact, a precise political and economic aim: Cicero wants to point out the religiosity of this worship and of the
82 Cicero Marcus Tullius, The Verrine Orations, IV. 83 Ivi, book IV, chap. XLVIII, vv. 107-108. 84 The antiquity of the cult of the two goddesses in Sicily is confirmed by many archaeological discoveries but also by what is considered to be the symbol of the island, the “Trinacria”, where it is possible to identify elements of this cult. The Trinacria is characterised by the face of a Medusa in the middle, surrounded by three legs that symbolisethe three Sicilian promontories (Lilibeo, Pachino and Peloro). The face is encircled by four snakes and two wings, and sometimes it is possible to discern also some ears of wheat that, of course, are symbols of Demeter’s cult.
30 places related to it, in order to emphasise the profanity committed by Verre:
My charge is this: That this very Ceres, the most ancient and sacred of all, the fountain-head of all the cults of the goddess among all nations and peoples, was stolen by Gaius Verres from her own temple and her own home. Those of you who have visited Henna have seen the marble image of Ceres, and that of Liberain the other shrine. These are works of great size and notable beauty, but not so very old. But there was a bronze one, of moderate size and unique workmanship, in which the torches were shown; this very old-far the oldest, indeed, of all the treasures in this sanctuary. This Verres stole – and was not 85 satisfied even with taking this.
This last passage introduces another important issue connected with this myth, the presence in Enna ofsome temples dedicated to the two goddesses. It is not easy to locate them, but their existence is recorded in more that one source. A sanctuary dedicated to Demeter has been located in Enna close to what is called “The rock of Ceres”. It is a big rock placed in the north part of the castle of Lombardy. Even if there were not visible traces of this sanctuary, the finding of a stone with an inscription that probably was set at the bottom of the Demeter’s statue would confirm its ancient existence. Cicero reaches the maximum pathos in Chapter L:
I think of that sanctuary, that sacred spot, that solemn worship: before my eyes rises the picture of the day when I visited Henna, my reception by the priests of Ceres wearing their fillets and carrying their sacredboughs, my address to the assembled townsfolk, in which my words were heard amid such groans and weeping as showed the whole town to be a prey to the bitterest distress. [...] it was the sin against the holiness of Ceres, against her ancient worship and venerated sanctuary, that they would see atoned for by the punishment of this utterly unscrupulous and wicked man: all else, they said, they were ready to endure without resentment. [...] For indeed the town of Henna is thought of as no mere town, but as Ceres’ sanctuary: its people believe that Ceres dwells in their midst, and I therefore think of them not as the citizens of a city, but all of them as the priests, all of 86 them as the servants and ministers of Ceres.
85 Cicero M. T., The Verrine Orations, book IV., chap. XLIX, v. 109. 86 Ivi, book IV, chap. L, 110, 111.
31 Even if the evident stress on the religiosity of the Sicilian faith for these two goddesses can be justified, as we have said, by the attempt to discredit Verre, the fact that there was a veneration for Demeter and Core is quite credible.87 According to Corradini’s enquiry, Cicero’s account is the last recorded source that refers to the myth of Persephone in relation to the city of Enna. Moreover Cicero’s account is further evidence of the survival of the pagan myth of Persephone also in the Roman Times.
So far this analysis has tried to bring to the fore some issues connected with the complex mythology of Persephone. In its Sicilian tradition, for instance, we cannot deny the possibility that there existed an indigenous unique goddess connected to the spontaneous vegetation that has been absorbed by the Greek dual deity of Demeter and Core later on. This would confirm the ancientness of this myth in Sicily, where Enna especially rises to mythical place par exellance. We have also seen how many classical sources confirm the thesis of an ancient Sicilian maiden, goddess of spontaneous nature, who loved wandering around this Eden-like island, gathering flowers and contemplatingthe beauties of this charming place. Indeed, we, as Sicilians, like to think that this is not just conjecture, but truth. The fact that such an important myth addressing the alternation of seasons, the origin of the underworld or generally speaking, the opposition of life and death, light and darkness, spring and winter and so on, originated in Sicily, it is a great source of pride for the island. One discouraging aspect, however, is the modern condition of the lake of Pergusa near Enna, the same place depicted in the classical sources as the charming and fascinating site, where the rape of Persephone took place. Corradini is quite optimistic in her appreciation of the modern appearance of the lake. She thinks that the voices of the past, of Cicero and Ovid and of the other writers, who have told the story of Persephone in
87 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e Mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., p. 98.
32 Sicily are still alive and that it is still possible to enter the myth through the eyes of the past.88 In my opinion, on the basis of my experience in visiting the lake of Pergusa, the place is still enveloped in a particular charm, but much of the original enchantment is gone. As Stephen Hinds has rightly observed:
To the present-day visitor the landscape of Enna is lost. By laying a motor-racing track around Lago Pergusa the twentieth-century Sicilians have ensured that now, at least, 89 there is no danger of confusing literary convention with the reality of the place.
Even more incisive is what Mary Taylor Simeti has put forward in her work, a Sicilian Journal, On Persephone’s Island.90 A summary of her impression may help us to better figure out the modern aspect of the mythical Sicilian site:
Lake Pergusa proves to be a bitter disappointment, a brilliant example of the Sicilians’ best efforts to ruin their landscape. As is true of all the island’s interior, the wooded hills and flowering meadows that once attracted Persephone have long since been sacrificed to Sicily’s need to produce more and more grain, but here the subsequent erosion has given way to a more contemporary blight. [...] All around the marshy shore runs a fancy track for car racing. It is a landscape neither Greek nor Sicilian, totally without character, and although we feel obliged, having come all this way, to make the drivearound the lake, we are glad to be done with it. [...] I expected something more from this pilgrimage, some greater indulgence than a brief lifting of the clouds at the end of the day. I had imagined myself standing on Demeter’s rock and looking down onto the shores of the lake, watching
88 Ivi., p. 125. 89 Hinds S., The Metamorphosis of Persephone, Cit., pp. 142-143. 90 Taylor Simeti M., A Sicilian Journal, On Persephone’s Island, London, Bantam Books, 1986. Mary Taylor Simeti was born in New York and arrived in Sicily in 1961, after marrying a local man. On Persephone’s Island recounts the events of 1983 in a sort of autobiographical account of Simeti’s experience in the Island, where at the beginning she felt the isolation of being an expatriate and outsider. Eventually, in her living half of the year in the countryside far from the city where she spends the winter, she discovers a correlation between her own situation and the story of Persephone, who alternately inhabited the worlds of light and darkness.
33 Persephone, sharing Demeter’s moment of distraction and the horrible clutching of her 91 bowels as she turns her gaze back and Persephone is no longer there.
Although the modern Sicilian landscape has lost, for many reasons, much of the original charm, I am sure it is still possible to discern, in some still untouched corners of the Lake of Pergusa, the graceful Sicilian Proserpine wandering around and looking for flowers to gather. Corradini has observed that today the inhabitants of Enna use a typical expression in dialect, “Kori, Kori” that refers to a feeling of wonder and sorrow. According to Corradini this represents proof of the modern survival of the ancient myth.92
What follows now is an attempt to trace in some modern literary samples the same Sicilian tradition we have dealt with so far, with a focus on the places in order to point out how the following generation of writers have developed this correlation between myth and setting.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone in literature Before moving into the analysis of some modern literary records of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, I want generally to refer to the relationship between myth and literature. John B. Vickery, in his Orpheus and Persephone: Uses and Meanings, has rightly observed that “[...] each poem or work of literature that engages a myth assigns specific values to the mythic variables. As a result the sum of such works is a record of the progressive revelation of the interpretative significance logically inherent in the myth”93. According to Vickery, we should consider that “a myth may symbolically diagram a pattern of relationships found in a number of markedly different works of literature. In short, myths are scenarios or scripts for the performative
91 Ivi, pp. 39-40. 92 Corradini A. M., Enna: Storia e mitologia attraverso le fonti classiche, Cit., p. 127. 93 Vickery J. B., Orpheus and Persephone: Uses and Meanings, in <
34 utterances that make up literature”94. This last metaphor underlines my choice in this chapter to deal mainly with theatrical works, rather than poetry or prose that I explain later on. The large number of modern writers, who have given voice to the myth of Demeter and Persephone through their works is a testament to its power. It is unsurprising then how many poets, especially, have taken into account the story of Persephone to frame their own literary versions. From P. B. Shelley (Song of Proserpine, 1839) to Ch. Swinburne (Hymn to Proserpine 1866 and The Garden of Proserpine 1866); from D. G. Rossetti (Proserpine 1881) who also portrayed a wonderful and immortal image of the goddess, to G. Meredith (The Day of the Daughter of Hades, 1883 and The Appeasement of Demeter); from Tennyson (Demeter and Persephone in Enna, 1887) to H. Heine (Unterwelt, 1844); from O. Wilde, who treated the figure of Proserpine in more than one of his poems (Ravenna 1878, Charmide, The Burden of Itys, The Garden of Eros, Theocritus: A Villanelle, collected in Poems, 1881) to D. H. Lawrence (Bavarians Gentians, 1932 and Purple Anemones, 1931). All of them have depicted their own Persephone, maintaining her myth into the modern era.95 Some of these literary records, mentioned above, have also provided worthy descriptions of the places related to the myth and, in particular, the enchanting Sicilian site at Enna, that was discussed in the second chapter. It is enough to quote Tennyson’s account:
So in this pleasant vale we stand again, The field of Enna, now once more ablaze With flowers that brighten as thy footstep falls, 96 All flowers-[...].
94 Ivi, p.190. 95 The source for these modern writers is considered to be Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in particular the reference to Proserpine in book IV: “Not that fair field/ of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers,/ Herself a fairer flowers, by gloomy Diz/ was gathered – which cost Ceres all that pain/ to seek her through the world”. (Milton J., Paradise Lost, London, Macmillan & Co., 1962, book IV, v.267-272, p.10) 96 Tennyson A. L., Demeter and other Poems, London, Macmillan, 1889, p. 16.
35 Or the reference to the city in Meredith’s The Day of the Daughter of Hades:
Soft Enna that prostrate grief Sang through, and revealed round the vines, Bronze-orange, the crisp young leaf, 97 The wheat-blades tripping in lines, [...].
These are only two of the many references to the Sicilian landscape that it is possible to single out in the literary works that have taken inspiration from the myth of Persephone. The extraordinary interest in this myth is probably connected with the fact that throughout much of the European intellectual community of the last century there flourished an immense fascination with ancient Greek. This was particularly true for the Victorian poets. In this regard Frank M. Turner states in his work The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain that:
Greek antiquity began to absorb the interest of Europeans in the second half of the eighteenth century when the values, ideas, and institutions inherited from the Roman and Christian past became problematic. The search for new cultural roots and alternative cultural patterns developed out of the need to understand and articulate the disruptive political, social, and intellectual experience that Europeans confronted in the wake of the Enlightenment and of revolution. In some cases the appeal to Greece served to foster further changes, in others to combat the forces of disruption. [...] Across the Western world Victorian authors and readers were determined to find the Greeks as much as possible like themselves and to rationalize away fundamental differences. [...] Discussions of Greek antiquity provided a forum wherein Victorian writers could and did debate all manners of 98 contemporary questions of taste, morality, politics, religion, and philosophy.
Before going further with the analysis of some modern literary versions of the myth of Persephone, I want to focus on one aspect that I consider to be basic in this myth. I refer to the tiebetween myth and rite.
97 Meredith G., Selected Poems, Westminster, Archibald Constable and Co., 1897, p. 101. 98 Turner F. M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven, Yale UP, 1981, p. 2, 8.
36 Edwin Oliver James in his work The Ancient Gods,99 has defined these two phenomena as the two faces of the same sacrred activity. The rite, according to James, is the consequence of the necessity to make visible and audible the sacred. The rite has a sort of social function, as together with the myth, it expresses the most deeply rooted emotions of a community, its hopes, its sorrows. James has rightly observed that the myth gives to the rite its orientation and in its turn the rite gives off life when nature requires a renewal. In James’s view mythology is the natural language of religion, just like a rite is dramatisation of the worship. This is particularly true for the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Its modern theatrical versions represent, we could say, a sort of natural and updated continuance of its inherent ritualisingnature. The rite and the theatrical representation share the same function in giving expression to something that has always existed, but that needs to be given voice in order to actualise its timeless values. What was the sacred drama staged in Eleusis or the celebration of the worship of Demeter and Core in Sicily if not an implicit form of theatrical representation? My choice of theatrical records of the myth of Persephone is due to the fact that theatre is, indeed, the genre that I consider as the most appropriate for perpetuating mythology, because it gives palpable shape to the imaginary. The theatre, more than poetry or prose, makes real what “potentially” exists. With its scenic necessity of creating plots and mimic dialogues it grants the myth the important occasion of “living”. Its advantage with respect to the other literary genres is determined by an aspect that a theatrical work does not share with any other literary record, I refer to its potential mise en scene, in other terms, its “embryonic” representative nature.
The modern literary development can be traced through four plays in particular: Johan Wolfgang Goethe’s Proserpina (1778), Mary Shelley’s
99 James E. O., The Ancient Gods: the History and Diffusion of Religion in the Ancient near east and eastern Mediterranean, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960.
37 mythological drama, Proserpine (1820) and Rosso di Sansecondo’s The Rape of Proserpine (1954). The choice of these theatrical pieces is due to their “Sicilianisation” of the myth that I have discussed above. In all four plays the setting is, in fact, Sicilian, and in keeping alive the centrality of this island in the myth of Demeter and Persephone these plays seem to pursue the Diodoran tradition, in other words, seem to return this myth to its original location. Some of the descriptions of the places that are singled out in this inquiry represent a sort of hymn to Sicily. And what is evenmore striking is the fact that writers such as Mary Shelley and Robert Bridges offer a very detailed and enchanting depiction of the Sicilian scenario of her play without ever having visited that Mediterranean site. Nevertheless this does not imply a “loss” in the characterisation of the setting that, on the contrary, is wonderfully portrayed. The play that can be, though, considered as the most Sicilian of all is the last one I analyse, San Secondo’s Il Ratto di Proserpina. First of all because it is written by a Sicilian. Secondly, this play is especially important because, as I will try to demonstrate, it brings full circle our inquiry about the myth of Persephone and her relationship with the island of Sicily.
Goethe wrote Proserpina in 1777. Initially it was written in prose. The first publication was a separate edition (1778), and one month later it appeared as prose in the review Teuscher Merkur of Wieland. The version in verse was inserted into his satirical Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1778/79), which was published in the IV volume of the Schriften in 1787.100 It was recovered later on in 1815 when Goethe decided to create a more complete work that joined word, music and theatre. He took back Preserpina and made of it a melodrama with the music of Carl Eberwein. Goethe seemed very much involved in this work. He paid much attention to
100 Jamme C., Proserpina, in <
38 every aspect of it, especially to its mise en scene.101 For the scenery he took inspiration from Poussin’s paintings; nothing was left to chance. The choice of the melodrama as genre was probably a desire to create a very emotional piece by concentrating on the sorrow of a character.102 Goethe’s Proserpina takes inspiration from the Ovidian Metamorphoses, but as a monodrama, itsplot is very restricted. It represents Proserpine already in the underworld, portraying about her tragic experience of abduction. As Margherita Cottone has rightly observed in her article Kore, Goethe underlines Proserpine’s tragic condition of being “Königin” of the underworld.103 Here there is no reference to her return to the world and this makes more sorrowful her state of solitude. She meets all the sad figures of the underworld, Tantalus, Ixion and, helpless, she cannot do anything for them, and this makes her feel worthless. She is doomed to be queen of the underworld forever, it seems. Concerning the setting, all the drama takes place in the underworld, but there are some evocative moments that let us glimpse that world she has left behind. In Goethe’s Proserpina there is no evident reference to the Sicilian landscape, but the Ovidian influence and the few allusions to the upper world do not exclude the possibility that that world so much beloved and invoked by Proserpine is, indeed, the Sicilian Lakes of Pergus:
Companions at play! When all those valleys rich in flowers Blossomed for us still, When at the heavenly crystal stream of Alpheus We splashed and played in glow of evening, Wove wreaths for one another And secretly recalled that youth, To whose head our hearts would consecrate them, There for us no night could be too deep for discourse, No time too long,
101 He himself performed this play together with the actress Corona Schröter in Ettersburg in 1779. 102 Jamme C., Proserpina, Cit., p. 34. 103 Cottone M., Kore, Cit., pp. 23-29.
39 To tell again our friendly stories. And the sun Could not arise more easily from its silvery bed Than we, when filled with a lust to live, 104 We bathed our rosy feet in early dew.
The Sicilian landscape seems also to be evoked in the episode of the pomegranate, when Proserpine, captured by the beauty of this tempting fruit, remembers those worldly fruitful fields:
Let me enjoy you, Friendly fruit! Let me forget All my harm! Again imagine myself Above, in my youth, In that dizzying, Lovely time, In those fragrant, Heavenly blossoms, In those aromas Of blessed joy, Which were granted to me 105 In my delight, my desire!
Goethe had always been attracted by the Sicilian landscape that he evokes more than once, even before his visit to Sicily that occurred ten years after the composition of Proserpina. Sicily represented for Goethe that ideal landscape that was easily traceable in Poussin or Lorrain paintings. In Proserpina, therefore, he portrays a Sicilian setting that, at that time, he
104 Goethe J. W., Proserpina, in Berliner Ausgabe, 5, Poetische Werke, Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag, 1964, p. 335. English translation by C. Hamlin, Proserpina. A Monodrama in Hamlin C., Ryder F., (eds.) Goethe’s Collected Works, New York, Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988, vol. 7 (Early Verse Drama and Prose Play), vv. 14-28, p. 274. 105 Goethe, Proserpina, Cit., p. 337-338. English translation by C. Hamlin, op. cit., vv. 183- 196, pp. 278-279.
40 had not yet seen, but that he knew through his imagination, and that would be confirmed by a personal visit to that mythical southern island.
The second theatrical work that I want to take in account in this analytical journey is the mythological drama by Mary Shelley, Proserpine. Mary Shelley wrote it together with the drama Midas in the early or mid-1820s and they both provide an example of literary collaboration between the Shelleys.106 The drama seems to be directed towards a younger audience, which explains why Proserpine focuses not on the rape but instead on the struggle between Ceres and Pluto.107 It is not known how and when Mary Shelley started to get interested in the myth of Persephone. The only available reference I have found to it is a letter her husband P. B. Shelley wrote to T. L. P., ESQ., during their stay in Bologna, where he tells about his visit with her wife’s to a palace:
I am sure -I forget the name of it- where we saw a large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember, however, an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were, to the flowers 108 she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna.
106 Mary’s play, Proserpine, A Mythological Drama in Two Acts, was published in the Winter’s Wreath for 1832 as “by the Author of Frankenstein”. That version of Proserpine did not include Arethusa which Shelley also contributed, probably because Mary had already published the lyrics in Posthumous Poems as Shelley’s work. Mary also wrote another mythological drama, Midas, and the manuscripts of both plays were edited and published by André Koszul in 1922 under the title Proserpine and Midas. Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas by Mary Shelley. The earlier publication of Proserpine in 1832 was discovered by Elizabeth Nitchie. (Feldman P. R., Scott-Kilvert D., (eds.), The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, vol. I: 1814-1822, n. 3, p. 316). 107 Bennett B. T., Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, An Introduction, Baltimore, London, The John Hopkins UP, 1996, p. 61. 108 Shelley Mary (ed.), Essays, Letters from abroad, Translations and Fragments, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1840, vol. II, Letter XIII. (http://www.wam.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/letters/1840letter13.html).
41 This letter is dated Nov. 9th, 1818, two years before Mary Shelley wrote Proserpine. In a short novel written in 1819, Matilda, Mary Shelley makes a reference to Proserpine in chapter IV:
Often, when my wandering fancy brought by its various images now consolation and now aggravation of grief to my heart, I have compared myself to Proserpine who was gaily and heedlessly gathering flowers on the sweet plain of Enna, when the king of Hell snatched 109 her away to the abodes of death and misery.
These few elements are enough to affirm that when Mary Shelley refers to the myth of Proserpine she has in mind a Sicilian setting. The plot of Proserpine, in two acts, is evidently Ovidian. The characters are Proserpine, her mother Ceres, the two Nymphs Ino and Eunoe, Iris, Arethusa and finally some shades from Hell, including Ascalaphus. The first act sees Proserpine gathering flowers with her companions, who are told by Ceres to take care of her daughter. Everything seems enveloped in a magic aura. Proserpina is depicted as a childish and spontaneous maiden whose main activity is gathering flowers and listening to her companions story telling. This relaxed atmosphere conforms perfectly to the Sicilian setting, to which Proserpine makes continuous reference throughout the drama. Proserpine herself exalts this island:
Pros. [...] While yet the Sun is low down in the east, And Enna’s plain is shaded by the form Of the giant Etna:- Nymphs, let us arise, And cull the sweetest blossoms of the field, And with swift fingers twine a fragrant wreathe 110 For my dear Mother’s rich and starry hair.
109 Shelley Mary, Matilda in Clemit P., The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, London, William Pickering, 1996, vol. II, chap. IV, pp. 19-20. 110 Shelley M., Proserpine, in Crook N., Clemit P., (eds.), The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, London, William Pickering, 1996, vol. II, vv. 176-181, p. 78.
42 Also Ino contributes to this jubilant portrait of the Sicilian site:
Ino. How beauteous is this plain! Nor Grecian vale, [...] Nor Crete, which boasts rich Amalthea’s horn Can be compared with the fair gold fields 111 Of Ceres, Queen of plenteous Sicily.
In the description of the vale of Enna, Mary Shelley seems to follow perfectly Diodorus’s pattern, his Eden-like depiction of the Sicilian site. Also, the characterisation of Persephone seems to personify the indigenous Sicilian deity, goddess of flowers. Proserpine herself is identified with a flower in Ino’s words:
Ino. [...] Star-eyed Narcissi & the drooping bells Of hyacinths; and purple polianthus, Delightful flowers are these; but where is she, 112 The loveliest of them all, our Proserpine?
In the second act, where the rape occurs, all the landscape seems to suffer from Proserpine’s absence. A feeling of tragedy, in fact, marks the setting:
Ino. [...] Trinacria mourns with her;-her fertile fields Are waste and barren, and her failing brooks Flow sluggishly within their altered banks; The flowers that erst were wont with vain desire, To view themselves within the glassy waves, Missing the object of their insane love, 113 Have pined and died-as would, alas!
Which regains its original charm with the return of Proserpine:
When Enna gleams with blossoms, and the sun
111 Ivi, vv. 187, 193-195, p. 78, 112 Ivi, 239-242, p. 80. 113 Ivi, vv. 10-15, p. 83.
43 Shoots his fierce rays strait on the gladsome land, When Summer reigns, then thou shalt live on Earth, And tread these plants, or sporting with your nymphs, 114 Or at your Mother’s side, in peaceful joy. Still in Mary Shelley’s drama, the relationship between Persephone and her mother is, in reality, very intense. Persephone is definitely part of the Demetric sphere and her independence is only apparent. The time of the Virgin seems past. Based on the skilful description of the Sicilian landscape throughout the drama Proserpine, we can affirm that even if Mary Shelley has never been physically to Sicily, she must have travelled all around that mythical island, at least in her vivid imagination.
Another drama that deserves mention in this literary tour is Robert Bridges’ Demeter, A Masque.115 As Stanford informs us, “Bridges began and ended his career as a dramatist with two masques- Prometheus The Firegiver composed in 1881 and Demeter written in 1904”116. As one can read in the front page of the play, Demeter was Written For The Ladies At Somerville College & Acted By Them At The Inauguration Of Their New Building In 1904. Whether performed or not a masque has qualities different from the conventional stage play. It is supposed to be poetic, transcendent even, remote from reality, depending for its effect on poetry, music, setting, and costumes rather than on realism and the hurly-burly action of the commercial theater.117 We can infer, therefore, that Bridges reserved high treatment for the myth of Persephone.
114 Ivi, vv. 243-247, p.89. 115 Bridges R., ‘Demeter, A Masque’, in Bridges R., Poetical Works of Robert Bridges with the Testament of Beauty but excluding the eight dramas, Oxford University Press, New York, 1930, pp. 49-85. 116 Stanford D. E., In the Classic Mode, The Achievement of Robert Bridges, University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1833, p. 126. 117 Ibid. The original performance of June 11 was repeated by request on June 22. It was acted again at Sommerville College in 1954, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the
44 The source for this mythical play must be the Ovidian Metamorphoses. Here, even more than in Shelley’s drama, the flower imagery is prevalent. Persephone is again depicted as a childish maiden who “expresses her joy in the innocent beauties of the flowers that she is gathering for Zeus’s festival”118.
Per: Is not all as I promist? Feel ye not Your earthborn ecstasy concenter’d here? [...] Electric beams-[...]-as they strike the earth Excite her yearning heart, till stir’d beneath The rocks and silent plains, she cannot hold Her fond desires, but sends them bursting forth In scent and colour’d blossom of the sping? 119 Breathes it not in the flowers?
And even if Athena forewarns her:
Ath: That thy desire and love may spring of evil And ugliness, and that Earth’s ecstasy 120 May dwell in darkness also, in sorrow and tears.
She continues in her excitement, stating:
What I have chosen, what mankind shall hold Devote and consecrate to me on earth: 121 It is the flowers [...].
first production. There was also a performance at the Fremsham School in New South Wales in 1933. 118 Ivi, p. 134. 119 Bridges R., Demeter, A Masque, in Bridges R., Poetical Works of Robert Bridges with the Testament of Beauty but excluding the eight dramas, op. cit., p. 54-55, v. 99-116. 120 Ivi, p. 55, vv. 125-128. 121 Ivi, p. 57, vv. 208-210.
45 In Bridges’ masque, therefore, “the flowerlike Persephone is the epitome and symbol of innocent girlhood”.122 This tone goes perfectly with the setting, a Sicilian one, of which Bridges offers a wonderful description. It is Hades himself, who first makes a reference to the Sicilian landscape:
Hades: And I am come to-day with hidden powers, Ev’n unto Enna’s fair Sicilian field, To rob her from the earth. ‘Tis here she wanders With all her train: nor is this flow’ry vale Fairer among the fairest vales of earth, Nor any flowers within this flowe’ry vale Fair above other flowers, as she is fairest Among immortal goddesses, the daughter Of gentle-eyed Demeter; and her passion 123 Is for the flowers, [...].
Another wonderful description of the vale of Enna is made by the Oceanides at the beginning of the Act I:
Oceanides: But no country to mè ‘neath the enarching air Is fair as Sicily’s flowery fruitful isle: Always lovely, whether winter adorn the hills With his silvery snow, or generous summer Outpour her heavy gold on the river-valleys. Her rare beauty giveth gaiety unto man, 124 A delite dear to immortals.
These descriptive passages indicate perhaps the influence of Diodorus, or at least, as in Mary Shelley’s drama, support the views advanced by Martorana who considered Persephone to be an autonomous and local goddess, a deity of spontaneous nature. The excitement for the flowers would corroborate this thesis, but here as in Mary Shelley’s drama, the relationship between Persephone and her mother is, in reality, very
122 Stanford D. E., In the Classic Mode, The Achievement of Robert Bridges, op. cit., p. 135. 123 Ivi, p. 52, vv. 33-42. 124 Ivi, p. 53, vv. 65-71.
46 intense. Persephone is definitely part of the Demetric sphere and her independence is only apparent. The time of the Virgin seems past.
A shift takes place in the last and most Sicilian theatrical work, San Secondo’s Il Ratto di Proserpina, Spettacolo Fantastico tra l’Antico e il Moderno.125 San Secondo wrote this theatrical piece in 1933, but he revised it until 1954. It seems it has never been performed, but it received the famous “Melpomene” prize. The originality of this text consists in Sansecondo’s attempt to revise the myth of Persephone in a modern key. In this bizarre play the conjunction between the ancient and the modern takes place in a Sicilian setting. The writer being Sicilian himself is, therefore, very much involved in the depiction of thelandscape. In all of Sansecondo’s productions, Sicily has always represented a mythical place, “where passions are shouted; where the inhabitants identify themselves with the arid landscape, riches in scents and pleasures, and the sultry weather, [...] conditions the Sicilian feelings and gestures”126. The Il ratto di Proserpina evokes an important moment in San Secondo’s career. He himself stated, in fact, that this work “is the mirror of my world as it has peacefully created itself at the end of a cycle”127.
125 Rosso di San Secondo P. M., Il Ratto Di Proserpina, spettacolo fantastico tra l’antico e il moderno, Palermo, Flaccovio, 1954. Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo was born in Caltanissetta in 1887. He was one of the most impoerant figures of the Italian theatre of the XX century. Themes such as human solitude, the contrast between north and South andthe pain of living are central to all of his literary works. Sicily represented for him the land of fables and dreams, and this characterisation comes out in Il Ratto di Proserpina more tha. Pellegrino A., (ed.), Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, nella letteratura Italiana del Novecento, n anywhere else. For more details about P. M. Rosso di San Secondo cfrRoma, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990; Bellingeri E. (ed.), Pier Maria Rosso di Sansecondo, nella cultura italiana del Novecento, Roma, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. 126 Nicastro G., Mito e realtà nella drammaturgia siciliana di Rosso di San Secondo, in Sedita Migliore M., Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, nella letteratura italiana ed europea del Novecento, Caltanissetta, Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 1989, p.67. (my translation). 127 Quoted in Distazio G., Il teatro di Rosso di San Secondo, Bari, Graphis, 1998, p. XXX.
47 The great ability of this Sicilian writer consists in his attempt to overcome the antithesis between the ancient and modern world, the pastoral Sicilian world and the modern industrial American one, and he does it by revising the myth of Persephone to which he gives the important task of joining these two spatial and temporal dimensions. To accomplish this undertaking he makes use of an ironical tone, because, as Pellegrino has observed, he could not otherwise have transferred mythological deities into our century.128 San Secondo’s aim is to nullify time, taking a mythological tale and placing it in a modern dimension, where actually nothing has changed, even if now Pluto is no more the king of the underworld but rather a famous businessman of New York and the Oceanides are no more innocent maidens who gather flowers with Proserpine but rather “girls” working for Pluto in a night club in New York. But actually it is only an apparent change. He does not reject the canonical mythological patterns, rather he revitalises them. Proserpina, in fact, is still a childish maiden strongly dependent on her mother, Ceres, who is the character that expresses the ideal life powerfully connected with nature.
Ceres: [...] I am very happy to give life to this world colouring it with green and light blue; and I adore this fertile island where men feed on air and light more than on bread. I won’t ever abandon it [...]. Proserpina, like me, enjoys these natural beauties, and she is 129 content with her flourishing youth, that is similar to an eternal spring.
Even Pluto, who here also represents the “immigrant”, has not changed at all. He himself affirms:
Pluto: [...] I have not become American. I am still Mediterranean, Greek, Roman and Sicilian. In fact, now that I want to get married, instead of asking for a millionaire woman of 130 New York, I have come to Sicily, ‘cause I want a chaste and virginal countrywoman [...].
128 Pellegrino A., Rosso di Sansecondo, ovverosia andata e ritorno di Proserpina in Nicastro G., Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, nella letteratura italiana ed europea del Novecento, op. cit., p. 108. 129 Rosso di San Secondo P. M., Il Ratto di Proserpina, op. cit., part I, vision 2, p. 23. (my translation). 130 Ivi, part I, vision 3, p. 54. (my translation).
48 That is why he comes back to Sicily, to get married to Proserpine and the plot turns on this undertaking. All Pluto’s friends, among them the Oceanides, Narcissus, Bacchos and many other characters of the play, do their utmost to help him accomplish his desire. The problem, in fact, is to convince her mother, Ceres, who would not allow an American businessman to marry her daughter. A very striking aspect of this play is San Secondo’s ability to gather many myths and insert them in the same plot: the myth of Narcissus, of Echo, of Bacchos, of Pandora and especially the myth of Prometheus. The latter represents a central figure in the flow of events. He is the most wise and rational character of the play, the one who at the end will lead to the resolution of the story. With his desire for freedom, he epitomises the “bridge” between the two worlds. He will make Proserpine reflect about what she really wants. And because of this gained “consciousness” of Proserpine, the rape does not occur in the canonical way; the goddess decides by herself to go to New York with Pluto, who at the end reveals his true identity. This represents a defeat for Ceres, who eventually has to accept her daughter’s decision. A “contract” suggested by Prometheus establishes the terms of her stay with her mother and with her future husband: six months in Sicily and six months in New York. Our main interest, however, is still the description of the mythological place, a place that the writer knows better than others, being himself Sicilian. Most of the story takes place by the lake of Pergusa and its first description is by Epimetheus:
Epimetheus: [...] The place is really beautiful. We are in the middle of Sicily. The ground smells of fragrances, the sky is as tender as the finest silk. Breath deeply this fresh 131 air that [...] announces the sunshine’s birth.
This depiction of the setting is in tone with the figures of Ceres and Proserpine:
131 Ivi, part I, vision 1, p. 5-6. (my translation).
49 Epimetheus: They are both happy and they seek to make happy all those who go and 132 visit them.
All the characters are enthralled by Sicily that they all describe as a charming place. Narcissus offers a very intense description of it:
Narcissus: [...] Sicily with this smell of ground, with this air that penetrates the blood, with this Mediterranean warmness that leads you to the centre, the breath of the sea, 133 with that divine Etna before your eyes [...].
Finally, the last aspect of this play I want to analyse closes, in my opinion, the circle of this study. I refer to the characterisation in San Secondo’s Il Ratto di Proserpina of the figure of Proserpina. Once again in this text she is presented as an innocent maiden belonging to a natural environment and, therefore, leading a very simple and uncorrupted life together with her mother, Ceres to whom she is strongly related. This makes the contrast between her and the Oceanides, who symbolise rough manners, even stronger. But at the end of the story, when the rape is supposed to take place, we witness something unusual. Proserpina, in fact, decides by herself to go with Pluto after rationalising with Prometheus about her condition:
Proserpina: [...] For the first time I have to take an important decision. On the one hand the tenderness of my mother, the sweetness of this land...the quiet dreams...on the other hand...on the other hand... [...] A desire of finding out new things...seeing...acting...doing... If I stay here, what shall I do? I could at the most give the birdseed to the chickens or pasture the flock...But, at the same time, this America, with its 134 skyscrapers, its whirling of money...I am afraid I am not modern enough.
132 Ibidem 133 Ivi, part II, vision 1, p. 65. (my translation). 134 Ivi, part III, vision 1, p. 123. (my translation)
50 Gradually we notice a consciousness growing in Proserpine who seems to be tired of her dependence on her mother who treats her as an eternal child:
Proserpina: I am fed up. Am I always under age?
In other words in going with Pluto, she reacts to her condition of dependence on her mother and even though this can appear as an affront to the original myth, I think it deserves to be taken into account as another possible interpretation. In her escaping from her mother she wants to regain her own independence, her own dimension. And, in my opinion, this can be read as a sort of desire to return to that ancient era, the pre-Demetric and, therefore, pre-Hellenistic phase, when she was an autonomous deity of her own world that she did not have to share with her mother. In the play, it seems, she realises that she cannot pretend anymore, and she has to reveal her own identity asan indigenous Sicilian deity, who now looks with nostalgia at the old times of being care-free. Her escaping to New York represents, therefore, not just a trip to an infernal and corrupted world, but rather the right occasion for her to achieve that self-confidence she needs to establish again, on her return to Sicily, that indigenous and independent dimension, that time of flowers that found and continues to find in Sicily its suitable mythical setting. With San Secondo’s work, therefore, the mythological journey of this study comes full circle end. Starting from the time of Core we have crossed to the time of Demeter and Core, and now, paradoxically in a modern context, back to the time of Core. But as Plato has affirmed: “Of the portents recorded in ancient tales many did happen and will happen again”135.
135 Plato, quoted in Greek Mythology Link: http://hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/index.html.
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52 Frenzel E., Stoffe der Weltliterature, Ein Lexikon Dichtungsgeschichtlicher, Kröner, Langsschritte, 1992. Gillis C., The Persephone Myth in Mandelstam’s Tristia, in Gillis C., California Slavic Studies, 1976, pp. 139-159. Goethe J. W., Proserpina, in Goethe Berliner Ausgabe, Poetische Werke, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin, 5, 1964, pp. 335-339. Goethe J. W., Proserpine, translated by Hamlin C., in Hamlin C. and Ryder F., (eds.) Goethe’s Collocted Works, New York, Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988, vol. 7, pp. 273-280. Griffiths J. G., Triads and Trinity, Cardiff, Univeristy of Wales Press, 1996. Hallam G. H., (ed.) The Fasti of Ovid, London, Macmillan and Co., 1929. Heine H., The Lower World, in Draper H. (ed.), The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: a modern English version, Boston, Suhrkamp Insel Publisher, 1982. Hillman J., Saggio su Pan, Milano, Adelphi, 1977. Hinds S., The Metamorphoses of Persephone, Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1987. Holm A., Storia della Sicilia nell’Antichità, Roma, Mondadori, 1901. Hymn to Demeter, in Lang A., The Homeric Hymns, Ballantyne, London, Hanson & Co., 1899, pp. 183-210. James E. O., The Ancient Gods: the History and Diffusion of Religion in the Ancient near east and eastern Mediterranean, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960. Jamme C., Proserpina, in <
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54 Tennyson A. L., Demeter and other Poems, London, Macmillan, 1889. Turner F. M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven, Yale UP, 1981. Vernant J. P., Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, Paris, Methuen, 1974. Vernant Jean-Pierre, L’universo, gli Dei, gli uomini, Il racconto del mito, Torino, Einaudi, 2000. Vickery J. B., Orpheus and Persephone: Uses and Meanings, in <
ELECTRONIC SOURCES Cristina Paolicchi, Demeter and Persephone: http://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/papers/paolicchidemet er/demeter.html Eleusis, Pathway to Ancient Myth: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/clas/pathways/eleusis/emys.htm Greek Mythology Link: http://hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/index.html Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/FrankenDemo/MShelley/mshe lley.html Persephone: http://hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/Persephone.html Shelley M. (ed.), Letters of Italy, in Essay, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, By Bysshe Shelley, Letter XIII: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~djb/shelley/letters/1840letter13.html The Perseus digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Data di pubblicazione on-line: 24 novembre 2003
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