Tag: Demeter

Persephone Is in the Underworld During the Summer, Not the Winter

For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere, winter will soon be upon us. The ancient Greek myth of the goddess Persephone, who spends one third of the year in the underworld and the remaining two thirds of the year with her mother Demeter, is a well-known etiological myth (i.e., a myth that explains how things came to be the way they are) for the changing of the seasons.

Most modern people who know the myth of Persephone think that the ancient Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the winter and with Demeter for the rest of the year. Even many professional classicists think this. I, however, like some other scholars, am convinced that this is incorrect. The surviving ancient sources for the myth are unclear about which part of the year Persephone spends in the underworld and it makes far more sense given everything we know about the ancient Greek agricultural and religious calendars to conclude that the Greeks believed that she was in the underworld during the summer, not the winter.

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Filthy, Obscure Greek Myths, Accidentally Preserved by Clement of Alexandria

The early Christian writer Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE) was probably born in Athens, but he lived most of his life in Alexandria, where he was a teacher at the Catechetical School, also known as the Didaskalion. He was extraordinarily well educated and well read in ancient Greek literature, mythology, philosophy, and theology. As a devout Christian, however, he believed that traditional Greek and Roman religions were rife with immorality and depravity. His earliest surviving work is a treatise titled Exhortation to the Hellenes, in which he condemns traditional Greek and Roman religions and exhorts Greeks and Romans to adopt Christianity.

One of Clement’s primary goals in the treatise is to prove just how perverted and morally depraved traditional religions are. He rightly points out the immoral and often rapacious behavior of the Olympian deities in the stories that are well known, but he also retells some extremely obscure and absolutely filthy Greek myths that are not recorded in any other sources before him. As a result, Clement accidentally preserved these myths for posterity—myths that we otherwise would have no idea even existed. (One of them involves a god inventing a dildo in order to anally masturbate on a dead lover’s grave!)

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