The Ancients - Persephone: Queen of the Underworld

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

This episode contains references to death and sexual assault.Persephone is Queen of the Underworld in Ancient Greek mythology. Wife of Hades, and daughter of Zeus and Demeter, Persephone's journey to the underworld at the hands of Hades is a cornerstone myth. It gives an insight into how the Ancient Greeks saw not only death, but also the changing seasons and marriage.In this episode, Tristan welcomes back Dr Ellie Mackin Roberts to dive deep into the depths of the mythology surrounding Persephone and how significant she was to Ancient Greek society.Senior Producer: Elena GuthrieAssistant Producer: Annie ColoeEditor: Aidan LonerganScriptwriter: Andrew HulseVoice Actor: Nichola WooleyOther episodes in this series include: Zeus, Hera, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Ares, Athena, King Midas, Achilles, Poseidon, Medusa, and Hades.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Sing, muses. Sing to me a story of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern Earth, sea and sky. That is the petition that Odysseus of Ithaca makes upon the mortal bank of the River Styx. He has come following the instructions of the witch Circe. He has come to seek counsel from the spirit of Tiresias. He has come to find a way home.

He has come to find a way home. He draws a line in the muddy bank with his sword and fills the furrow with a sacred mixture. First honey, then milk, now wine, now ram's blood. It is a feast, and the dead swarm to it like flies. They rise from the underworld as a fog, one so thick that it obscures the opposite bank entirely. Their formlessness unnerves Odysseus. He is held fast in the thick of battle. He is a veteran of vanguards and a survivor of onslaughts. But will these revenants, little more than whispers and curling vapor, fear the bronze of his blade? He has come too far to turn back.

I seek the spirit of Tiresias. I pray you, Hades, lord of the dead, king of the underworld, let the blind prophet come forward. A shiver runs through the fog like a sharp intake of breath. Then a light, the pale flame of a torch beating in the heart of the fog. He prays it is Tiresias and not Hades himself come to bargain. It is an ill omen to look upon the Lord of the dead. But it is neither man nor god who steps forth from the fog. The maiden walks barefoot, and each footprint she leaves in the

muddy bank pools with liquid gold. When she speaks, it is to mock him. You do not look as I imagined, Odysseus of Ithaca. You are old and worn. My subjects describe you as more lion than man, the beast who sent them on their way to my husband's hall. It is then that Odysseus drops to his knees. He has recognized dread Persephone, Hades' queen. He begs forgiveness. He speaks words of honor and humility.

But Persephone laughs, a sudden thing that cuts like no bronze ever could. If you wish to speak with Tiresias, it is not my husband whose indulgence you should seek. It is mine. Ask the muses. Let them cure you of your ignorance. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are continuing our special Greek Gods and Goddesses series. Last time it was the turn of Hades, King of the Underworld. This time it's the turn of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, Goddess of Spring, Daughter of Demeter. Now, as with all episodes in this special series, well, to kick

it off, we're beginning it with a story, a retelling of a myth associated with that god or goddess that we are focusing on. And for Persephone, we've chosen the story of her abduction by Hades and how she became his queen, the queen of the underworld. Following that retelling, we have an interview with Dr Ellie Mackin-Roberts from University College London. I really do hope you enjoy. Here's the story, and then here's Ellie to talk all things Persephone. The Musa's song begins in a meadow strewn with flowers. Persephone is picking a bouquet for her mother, Demeter of the Good Grain, when the ground begins to tremble, to smoke and shake and split. From the wound appears Hades, Lord of the Dead.

He pulls young Persephone into the chariot, and like a great whale cresting from the waves, his train of horses plunges back into the rent earth. Hades explains the abduction to her plainly, without exaggeration, without justification or pretense. She is to become his wife. Zeus, father of gods and men, has arranged it all, as is the custom of Olympus. But Persephone laughs, a sudden thing that cuts like no bronze ever could. Her stay in the underworld will be short. Her father may have sanctioned this marriage, but her mother will not abide it. And sure enough, in her desperation to see her daughter returned, Demeter threatens the very contract on which Olympus is built. She withdraws her boon to the world, abundance, fertility, fecundity.

And without it, there can be no prayer to the gods. For before long, there will be neither beasts to sacrifice nor men to slay them, to divide the mortal portion of meat from the deathless portion of bone, and cook it all upon the flame. But in that time, Persephone has seen the kind of husband Hades might be. Cephanie has seen the kind of husband Hades might be. He may be solemn and somber, but he will never be cruel. For he does not share the tempestuousness of his brothers, Poseidon and Zeus. No, his hallmarks are curiosity and stability.

He is as much the underworld's rivers, its forests, its structures and bureaucracies, as he is its custodian and its king. And as for Persephone herself, well here, she is a queen. Six pomegranate seeds later, and the change is as final as death itself. Demeter can rave and range all she wishes, but Persephone has consumed a portion of the underworld, and now she can never be free of it. An arrangement is agreed then. Half the year she will dwell on the good black earth with her mother, and half the year she will reign with her husband beneath it. As Odysseus of Ithaca listens to this sweet song of the muses,

he begins to recall other tales, other stories shared about the flickering campfires of Troy, the failure of Orpheus and Eurydice, the bargain of Adonis, the invasions of Theseus and Heracles. Every hero, every heroine who has returned from the underworld has done so with the blessing of Persephone alone. Returned from below the good black earth like seeds unburied, like the goddess herself. Once more, Odysseus drops to his knees and the dread queen smiles. When he looks up again, it is the prophet Tiresias who stands before him. And as for Persephone, all that remains of her are footprints in the mud and the liquid

gold that pools in them. Ellie, it's great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks for having me back. It's been some time. It's been some time. We've done Hera, now we're doing Persephone. And this is someone, and I quote your own words, I think I'm quoting your own words, she's taken a lot of your, many years of your research. She has consumed many years of my life. Indeed, she has. For better or worse. For better or worse. And let's get into it straight away. Who is Persephone? Well, Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She's the wife of Hades,

becomes the wife of Hades. She really is only involved in one big myth, and that is her abduction. And this is told brilliantly in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. It's probably our main source for it. And essentially what happens is this. She is out picking flowers with some nymphs. In some sources, she is with Athena and Artemis. And Zeus has gifted her to Hades. Hades has fallen in love with her and he has asked her father Zeus for her hand in marriage. This all happens before the story begins. And so Persephone is in this field picking flowers and Hades asks his mother to send up a particularly lovely flower. And as she bends to pick it, the earth splits open and Hades comes out in his chariot and grabs her and they quickly dive back down into the underworld and she screams back for her mother.

And Demeter hears this cry and instantly knows something is wrong. She goes searching for Persephone for nine days and nights, not eating, not drinking, asks Hecate to help her. At this point, Hecate is not a goddess of witchcraft. She's very much an intermediary goddess between the gods, the Olympian gods and people. And that certainly is the role that she plays here as an intermediary. Eventually, Hecate says, why don't we go and ask Helios, the sun god who sees everything? They go, he says, why don't we go and ask Helios, the sun god who sees everything. They go. He says,

oh, by the way, yes, Hades stole your daughter. But like, don't be too upset about it because Hades is a good match. Like he's a king and you could do worse. And Demeter sort of thinks, no, no, not having any of that. So she goes and sulks on a well in a mortal town called Eleusis, and that becomes important later. She stays there for a while. Various things happen. She puts a mortal prince in the fire every night to burn away his mortality. She gets angry, asks them to build her a temple. Anyway, then she sits in the temple and sulks and really sulks this time.

I mean, I say sulk like it's like she's lost her daughter. She's grieving. And so she withdraws her gift from the world, which means that nothing grows. And so as animals and crops begin to die, people begin to die. There are less sacrifices being made to the gods. So Zeus finally thinks we need to put a stop to this. So he sends Iris, the rainbow messenger goddess, to Demeter. And she says, not having any of it. And a parade of gods go down. And eventually Demeter says to them, I will return my gift to the world when Persephone has

returned to me. And so Hermes, who is a psychopomp par excellence, is sent to get Persephone back from the underworld. And then Persephone comes back into the story. So even like her main myth is not really about her. It turns out she's eaten some pomegranate seeds while she was in the underworld, which means she is tied to the underworld. And eventually Demeter and Hades and Zeus broker a deal, essentially, where Persephone will spend three months, in some versions four months, in some later versions six months, in the underworld with Hades and the rest of the year she will spend in the mortal world with her mother. And this is an etiological myth, if I'm not mistaken. What is this myth supposed to explain? So it is an etiological myth which

is about the seasons. There are two potential interpretations of it. The first, which I think is the most popular, is that Persephone is the fertility of spring. So she goes into the underworld in winter when it's sad and nothing grows. And then she comes back in spring when everything kind of blooms. And this kind of works for most modern day agriculture, but it doesn't work for Greek agriculture where their fallow period is summer. So nothing, they don't grow anything in summer. They grow and harvest over the autumn and winter. They're sort of staple wheat, olives.

And then in summer, they bury all of their grain that they've harvested over the last harvesting season. So I think it's far more likely that what we have actually is, yes, an etiology for the agricultural seasons, but not that Persephone is in the underworld during the winter, that she's in the underworld during the summer when the grain is stored underground and she, the divine representation of the grain, is stored underground. So that is very different to the usual perception of this myth. Yeah.

Wow. Well, I mean, yes and no. Okay, fair enough. It's still kind of, you know, the etiology of the seasons. But like so many of the things which she's involved in, it's actually not even about her. It's still about Demeter and Hades because Demeter is the fertility. Persephone doesn't kind of have any responsibility

over the fertility of the crops. They die because Demeter mourns, not because Persephone is a goddess who, when she's on the earth, brings fertility with her, but rather that Demeter is not mourning her loss. Did you the myths therefore regularly portray her, and correct me if I got the wrong wording here, but almost as a junior goddess? Yeah, absolutely. And very voiceless which is a junior goddess. Yeah, absolutely. And very voiceless in a lot of ways.

In Euripides, he calls her, in his very bizarre play, The Helen, he calls her the unsayable girl, sort of really invoking this idea that she is a goddess who has no voice of her own. goddess who has no voice of her own. And in fact, the story of her abduction is usually told from Demeter's perspective. And indeed, the majority of the story is about Demeter's searching and mourning. In Homer, she is never the abducted goddess. She is the dread queen of the underworld and she's with this epithet dread and often presented as far more important and powerful than Hades who is really kind of almost in the same way that nymphs are both the spirit of the tree they inhabit, say, and the tree itself. Hades is really the spirit of the underworld and the

underworld, and she is sort of the powerful divinity who rules over the dead. And that kind of links her back to Near Eastern underworld divinities who are all female. Well, let's focus on that Near Eastern link there that you just mentioned. Is there any potential parallels between Demeter and Persephone and this myth with myths that might have preceded it from ancient Mesopotamia, from the Near Eastern, pantheons tend to be male gods, I suppose, princely gods who die rather than like a young, fertile goddess. And the underworld divinities tend to be women, very powerful female, fierce, kind of what we think of as the dread, fierce, kind of what we think of as the dread Persephone powerful underworld ruler. And again, it's sort of this shift into the patriarchal society from not to say that Near Eastern societies weren't patriarchal historically, but the way that that patriarchal society is imposed

on Greek, the Greek mythic landscape kind of shifts a lot of this around. But then also we have Orphic Persephone, who, well, she again is an incredibly powerful goddess. So there are kind of two strands of Orphic theology. The first is about these gold tablets. This is perhaps a mystery cult. We don't know a lot about what any of the actual practice might have been like. But these tablets, which people are buried with, they're tiny, like five by three centimetre kind of gold leaf that have been inscribed with what are essentially instructions to the deceased person, to what they should do when they reach the underworld. And they're things like, don't drink from this fountain because you'll forget who you are.

Go and drink from this fountain. Say to the guards, here's the password, you know, do all these other things so that you have this blessed afterlife. And a lot of them name check Persephone as the queen of the underworld. They don't include Hades. They do include a figure named Eucleus, who might be Hades Pluton, but that's intelligent supposition on the part of scholars. It's not something which we have any text or evidence that like concretely backs up that link. But then in the Orphic Hymns, these are a bit later

than our sort of main archaic classical texts. And in those, again, she takes on this role of a more fierce, overbearing, powerful ruler. And in those, she is, well, in the whole tradition, she is the mother of Dionysus Zagreus, which is where that link sort of comes in, who is the child of Zeus. And he has a very interesting kind of story in which he is cut up and eaten and reconstituted and reborn. It's labyrinthine in its construction. In the Orphic Hymns, Hades and Persephone have a child named Melanoe, who is the goddess of nightmares. That's kind of late, very late, compared to kind of the bulk of what we're talking about in terms of Persephone cult.

Interesting with the Persephone cult, with these different sources that you mentioned. You mentioned earlier Homer and then this later source but it's interesting how as far back as homer she's portrayed as you know this quite powerful queen and then later she's does it always feel as if her character's importance in the underworld in these stories it goes through almost peaks and troughs between these various authors as time goes on yeah i think so and i, this also relates to the ritual landscape of the Greek world, where in some places she is incredibly subordinated to,

particularly Demeter, around probably her most famous cult, the Eleusinian Mysteries. And in other places, she is really shown as a leader in the underworld, as more important than Hades, particularly in the cult of Locri Epizephri in southern Italy. well let's go on to both of these cults now and really emphasize these differences let's focus then on the ellisonian mysteries first of all okay so set the scene what are the ellisonian mysteries so well that's the mystery isn't't it? We don't know. So essentially the mysteries is two rituals. You have to take part in the lesser mysteries before you can be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. And they take place in sort of February, March each year.

And then the Eleusinian mysteries take place in sort of September, October. So we're talking about like autumn, which kind of again feeds into this idea that Persephone is in the underworld during the summer, I think. Eleusis itself is in the territory of Attica. So it's controlled by Athens by the mid sixth century. We do have very, very early Mycenaean, perhaps slightly pre-Mycenaean archaeological evidence for a cult there, but not enough to say that there's a link between that cult and the cult of Demeter and Persephone that is there. It does appear that

it might've been around a mother goddess, which obviously when you then come in with your traditional Greek mythology, that's the cult that you put on the top of that, right? And it's a mystery cult, so it's a private cult that's open to anybody, theoretically, who can speak Greek and who can afford to participate. And so we do have an idea that you might even get enslaved individuals, certainly women, men from all sorts of walks of life be initiated into the cult at Eleusis. And they were subject to secrecy. And we do have evidence of people being tried for profaning the mysteries. So this is one of the reasons that we don't know what it was because there were hefty punishments if you told people who weren't initiated the secret. So

essentially what happens is there's a big procession from Athens to Eleusis during the festival and then some kind of what some scholars call a sacred drama which is essentially where the priest and priestess so this all happens at night so the temple is dark and you're all sort of in there and maybe a bit tired you've walked a very long way, 30 kilometers from Athens, and there's torch flashing, perhaps replicating Demeter searching for Persephone and those sorts of things until the very end when you are presented with what is the mystery. And from what we kind of understand and can reconstruct, but mainly from later Christian sources, what then happens is a box is opened and inside the box is the secret. And we think it was probably an ear of wheat, which seems like a bit of an anticlimax, really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, it is really an agrarian fertility sort of festival. The big question, I think, is, is it eschatological in nature? Does being initiated into the cult of Eleusis guarantee you a better afterlife? And I think a lot of scholars think that that is the reason people get initiated. I don't know. This is one of these questions that I keep going backwards and forwards on. I personally think it's not an eschatological cult, like the purpose of it is not to get a better afterlife. The purpose of the cult is to,

for want of a less kind of flippant term, to become friends with Demeter and Persephone, to enter into this ongoing, lifelong, reciprocal relationship with Demeter and Persephone as an agrarian pair, a fertility mother and daughter. So we're talking about then within all of that, good harvests, good animal stocks. I was about to say good breeding. That's good fertility for your own children, blessing you with easy pregnancy or your wife, family, whatever. Easy births, as far as that might be possible. Children who thrive, all of that kind of stuff is wrapped up in this mother-daughter cult. And yes, a part of that relationship might be that you are

treated well in the afterlife. But that's not, to me, that's not the purpose of the cult. The purpose of the cult is this ongoing reciprocal relationship that you enter into with these two divinities. And that's just one thing that you might get because they are favorable, because Persephone in particular is favorable to you. Keeping on the pairing of Demeter and Persephone for a bit longer, and this Demeter being the senior and Persephone the junior role, this close familial relationship that is stressed between the two in much of the literature and cultsephone, the junior role. This close familial relationship has stress between the two in much of the literature and cults like this. It seems given the amount of more turbulent familial relations you see between other gods of the Olympian pantheon,

this seems quite atypical how close these two particular goddesses were. Yeah, absolutely. And look, it's the only mother-daughter pairing that we have, apart from maybe Demeter and Desponnia, the mistress, who is sometimes in later sources equated with Persephone, but in the majority of sources, Demeter has her while Persephone's in the underworld, so they can't be the same goddess and that's really centered around Arcadia in the Peloponnese but then we have Thesmophoria which is another festival of these two goddesses a women's only festival also kind of about fertility and kind of also about women letting off steam and having some autonomy and having fun and you know Aristophanes played the Thesmophoria, as you say, the women at the Thesmophoria,

kind of plays on this, like women getting drunk and telling bawdy jokes. And we know that they did drink and they did tell bawdy jokes. And this is a festival that happens across the Greek world. And even there's some really interesting links between this and even modern Catholic services in Sicily in particular that are about a mother-daughter kind of this almost continuous link. But they are very connected to one another. And we often find in cults of Demeter that are not these kind of two big ones, that Persephone is there. So for example, in Hermione, in the Peloponnese, Again, we have this really interesting cult of Demeter, Persephone, and Climonas, who is essentially Hades. And that's Demeter in an underworld aspect. It's Demeter Chthonia, Demeter of the underworld. And so she's kind of always in conversation with Persephone.

And the one place where we find the Thesmophoria happening where there's no strong archaeological evidence that Persephone is also involved is Locri Epizephri, where there is a strong Persephone cult. Well, let's go on to this Locri, how do you say it? Epizephri. Locri Epizephri.. Locri Epizephry. Or Locri Epizephroi. Okay. We're going to go with the former. Let's focus on this cult there. So take it away, this particular Persephone cult.

Yes. This is so interesting. So this is a Greek colony on sort of the toe of Italy. And colony on sort of the toe of Italy. And Locri Epizephri means Locri on the west wind. And so it's essentially Western Locri. The mother city of Locri Epizephri is mainland Locri. So that's why we can't just call it Locri, which would be much easier because you need to differentiate. And here we have the very interesting case of a divinity who is not Hera as the primary marriage divinity, and that's Persephone. So we have these beautiful terracotta plaques, pinnakes, that show a variety of sorts of scenes.

And the main types are the abduction of Persephone by Hades. So essentially it shows Hades grabbing Persephone in the chariot. We have a subsection of that which shows local girls and their own groom abducting them. And these are very interesting because we really see like the whole range of emotions about marriage. There are some where the girl is jumping on the carriage and taking the reins. She's really keen to be abducted and get married. And there are some where it really replicates that kind of tentative or scared aspect that we get in the Persephone abduction scenes where she's kind of like calling back, screaming back, and her groom is obviously kind of forcing her in. And then we

have the offering plaques where they show Persephone being offered various things either by mortals who are shown much smaller or by other divinities. And these tend to kind of be regular Persephone related things like wheat, vegetation, flowers, those sorts of things, but also things related to marriage, like cosmetic boxes and those sorts of things. And then we have the ones where that show Persephone and Hades enthroned. And Hades is always behind. He's usually shorter than Persephone and she is usually the one that has all the main things with her. So often she will have a pomegranate, perhaps kind of a bouquet of wheat. They might have incense burners and ritual instruments, so like libation jugs and things like that and those two the abduction and the enthroned examples are the only ones that Hades is a part of it doesn't appear

that he's actually a part of the cult itself and we think that these plaques were dedicated by girls in the kind of preparation for their own marriages. Most of them have two little holes in the top, so we think they might have been displayed up in the temple of Persephone. And they are a uniform size and thickness, which means that this wasn't about a display of wealth. This was something which everybody was perhaps expected to participate in from, you know, your most wealthy citizens right down to kind of families who were far less elite, less wealthy. And so it also represents this kind of equaling out of, that girls on this precipice, as Persephone was on this precipice, become the same. It almost feels, and I know the story of Persephone has been taken down to the

underworld, so that's a bit fantastical, but perhaps the whole character of Persephone is a bit more relatable than someone like Hera for these people. more relatable than someone like Hera for these people. Yeah. Yeah. Genuinely, I think that's what it is. And of course, this is supposition as much as kind of being immersed in the evidence. And it would be great to find some inscriptions or something, but isn't that always the case? But this is, you know, Hera is, as we kind of discussed last time, she is this goddess who takes you from pre-marriage all the way through to the end of marriage. But her main purview is the married woman. Whereas here, what we find is a cult that's really come up around this very particular instance of the emotional regulation of girls and perhaps also men on this very particular precipice, which for women is kind of treated as this coming of age kind of rite of

passage all across the Greek world. But this cult really typifies that. And Persephone is a goddess who you can relate to as a goddess who is abducted, who goes through this horrific experience, who then by the end of the Homeric hymn, kind of going back to like our literary evidence, describes Hades as her husband. She realizes that even though she has been assaulted, so she kind of describes being forced and tricked into eating these pomegranate seeds, which really is kind of emblematic of being forced to undergo the final process of marriage, the consummation. But at the end, she kind of realizes, reflects, like, this is my life. My father and my now husband have made this contract. This is what I have to do to be a good citizen wife. And you can see, I think, in the range of

their abduction pinnacles, these plaques, see this range of emotional responses that girls have to this, you know, really scary part of their lives where they might never see their mothers again. You know, this person who they've lived with, they've learned from their whole life up until this point. And unless they live close by, they might only see once a year at the Thesmophoria. And so it really is like you can see how Persephone embodies this feeling of being ripped away from your childhood life.

Oh, there you go. I mean, it is really interesting, that evolution, as you say there. And it's also really interesting, isn't it? when you look at some of those other myths associated with Persephone when she is queen of the underworld. Because you get figures such, you mentioned Orpheus earlier, but Heracles as well, he runs into Persephone when he's down there too. Yes, he goes down with his ill-fated friend who decides that he wants to abduct Persephone from the underworld. He does not make it out, but Heracles does. And Heracles has another run-in with the underworld in the story of Alcestis. Now in Euripides' telling, so the very famous telling of this, Heracles doesn't actually go down into the underworld, but there are other versions. So in Apollodorus, for example,

where he does make it down into the underworld to get Alcestis back for his friend Admetus, she dies voluntarily in his stead so that he won't die. But also, of course, Odysseus has pseudo-catabasis. I have argued, and I think I'm right in arguing that actually it's necromantic rather than he goes into the underworld. The underworld comes up to him, but he very clearly talks about the impact that Persephone has over the lives of the dead, that she is the one who's in control of their movements, that she is their ruler, and that Hades is either just the underworld or some kind of absentee lord, you know, but she's definitely the one who really has the impact over their lives. And I think religiously, that's also borne out in cults like the Orphic mystery cult with their gold tablets

and in the Eleusinian mysteries where we're talking about creating positive ongoing relationships with Demeter and Persephone. Well, last thing I've also got to ask about sarcophagi because why do we see Persephone's, you see her depiction on quite a few sarcophagi across the Greek world? Now, why is that? Well, this also kind of comes in big royal tombs. So particularly the Vagina tomb and the pebble that very recently discovered only a couple of years ago. Fantastic pebble mosaic at Amphipolis. of years ago, fantastic pebble mosaic at Amphipolis. And again, I think that this is about thinking through the emotional response of people being dragged sometimes into the underworld for

the first time. And it's very difficult to make that emotional connection with either a god who comes back and forth, so Hermes or Thanatos or Charon, these psychopompoi, guides of souls who come back and forward, who are used to the underworld. Hecate, the same. And it's very difficult to make that connection with formerly deceased people because they have not told their story in a way that demonstrates that they become accustomed to the underworld, right? But Persephone does. She has this very traumatic pseudo-death. She goes into the underworld. She is forced to be there in the same way that people are forced to go after they have died. And she becomes accustomed to being there. And she comes back to kind of

demonstrate that actually it's okay. Ah, so it's reassuring. Yeah. It's a reassurance. Got it. Yeah, I think so. It's so interesting with the story of Persephone's deity, how compared with Hera, where there's so many myths surrounding her, the whole legacy of Persephone and goes back to this idea of marriage is a constant, female emotional responses to marriage, where we're talking about societies where love is not a thing that like, if it happens, you're very lucky. But also death and the fear surrounding dying, I think is a very natural human thing to think about. And I think with Persephone more than with any other divinity, really we can understand the very real emotional response that people have and why religion in the Greek world is so important to

facilitating that emotional response. Well, Ellie, all it takes me to say is thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having me back. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Ellie Mackin-Roberts talking all the things Persephone. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Now, the script for the story was written by Andrew Hulse. It was narrated by Nicola Woolley. The whole episode was produced by Elena Guthrie. The assistant producer was Annie Colo,

and it was edited by Aidan Lonergan. Thank you to you all for making this awesome episode a reality. Now, last things from me. If you're listening to this episode on either Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please be sure to follow the podcast, to subscribe, to make sure that you don't miss out when we release new episodes every Thursday and Sunday each week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.