The goddess Demeter, the Ceres of the Latins, though afterwards of considerable dignity and importance, is but a feeble luminary in the Homeric heavens. That there are in the Iliad[400] only two distinct notices of her personality, might of itself be compatible with a contrary supposition: for in the Troica he introduces his divine personages on account of their relation to the subject, rather than for their general importance; and corn, which feeds man, has little affinity with war, which destroys him. But her weight is, if possible, even smaller in the Odyssey, where she is noticed but once[401], and that incidentally.
The use of the phrase Δημήτερος ἀκτὴ for corn, like the φλὸξ Ἡφαίστοιο for Vulcan, and Ἄρης for the spear, or for the battle, tends to indicate imperfect personality; to show that the deity was indistinctly realized; that the personal name was either recent or at least unfamiliar; and that it was used, not so much to designate a being, as to give life to an idea.
Homer has not asserted any connection between Demeter and Persephone: and the idea of it in later times may have arisen simply from the observation that in the poems Demeter stands as a mother without a child, and Persephone as a daughter without a mother.
Possibly, however, the connection may have been suggested by the name; which seems manifestly to be equivalent to Γῆ μήτηρ or Mother-Earth. And though the original reference was to the production of food by which man lives, the word might be susceptible of another sense, connecting it with the nether world, which had a material relation to Earth, and which, even in Homer, Tityus the son of Γαῖα, and in the later tradition the earth-born race generally, were reputed to inhabit.
The name in its proper sense indicates first the idea, and then the goddess of agriculture: and points to a Pelasgian, and perhaps farther back an Egyptian, rather than an Hellenic or a Phœnician connection. In Egypt, according to the reports collected by Diodorus[402], Isis was held nearly to correspond with her.
With this supposition agree the only notices contained in the poems that tend to attach the goddess Demeter to a particular locality. Her connection with Iasion was probably in Crete or Cyprus, or at any rate (from the name) in some country occupied, and ruled too, by Pelasgians. Her τέμενος[403] or dedicated lands in Thessaly, the Pelasgic Argos, suggest a similar presumption. In Middle Greece and Peloponnesus we never hear of her. The very solemn and ancient observance of her worship in Attica, which was so eminently a Pelasgian state in the time of Homer, entirely accords with the indications of the Homeric text.
The slight notice she obtains from Homer, compared with the dignity to which other tokens would tend to show that she was entitled, may have been owing to the incomplete amalgamation in his time of Hellenic and Pelasgian institutions.
Upon this goddess, as upon so many others, sensual passion had laid hold. This is decidedly confirmatory of her Pelasgian or eastern, as opposed to properly Hellic associations. We see Venus coming from the east and worshipped in Pelasgian countries: of the three persons whom Aurora appropriates, Orion is pretty evidently the subject of a naturalized eastern tradition, and Tithonus is Asiatic: Calypso and Circe belong to the east by Phœnicia: it is in Troas and Asia that no less than three Nymphs appear as the bearers of children, fighting on the Trojan side, to human fathers[404]. Whereas among the more Hellenic deities, we have Minerva and Proserpine wholly exempt; and Juno using sensual passion it is true, but only for a political end. This assemblage of facts further confirms the supposition, that Ceres ought to be set down as a Pelasgian deity. Orion and Ino, shining in the heavens, seem to belong to the more astronomical form of eastern religion: Ceres to that which was probably transmitted through fertile and well-cultivated Egypt.
Her place in Olympus.
The title of Demeter to rank with the Olympian deities of Homer is not so absolutely clear, as that of many among them: but it may on the whole be sufficiently inferred from the arrangement of the passage in the Fourteenth Odyssey, where Jupiter recites a list of the various partners to whom he owed his offspring. The three first are women, who bore sons never deified, Pirithous, Perseus, and Minos: the two next are women, of whom one gave birth to Dionysus a god, the other to the substantially deified Hercules. The sixth and seventh are Demeter, or Ceres, and Latona; the children of neither are mentioned. Besides that Demeter is called καλλιπλόκαμος ἄνασσα, the two seem to be coupled together as goddesses. The structure of the passage is not chronological, but depends upon dignity advancing regularly towards a climax; so purposely indeed, that Dionysus, always an immortal, is mentioned after Hercules, a mortal born, though Semele had been named before Alcmene. All this appears to require the adoption of the conclusion, that Demeter was reckoned as an Olympian goddess in the Homeric system.