Ceres

Ceres was a goddess in ancient Roman religion, associated with agriculture, grain crops, fertility, and motherly relationships. She was the central deity in Rome's Aventine Triad and was paired with her daughter Proserpina in "the Greek rites of Ceres." Ceres' seven-day April festival, Cerealia, featured her games. She was also honored in the May lustration of fields at the Ambarvalia festival, harvest-time, and during Roman marriages and funerals. Ceres is the only agricultural deity listed among the Dii Consentes, Rome's equivalent to the Twelve Olympians of Greek mythology.
Cerēs is a name derived from Proto-Italic *kerēs, meaning 'with grain, Ceres', and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱerh₃-os, meaning 'nourishment, grain'. The Proto-Italic adjective *keresjo- can be reconstructed from Oscan kerríiúí and Umbrian śerfi. A masculine form *keres-o- is attested in Umbrian śerfe. The spelling of Latin Cerus, a masculine form of Ceres denoting the creator, might also reflect Cerrus. Archaic cults to Ceres are well-evidenced among Rome's neighbors in the Regal period, including the ancient Latins, Oscans, and Sabellians. An archaic Faliscan inscription of c. 600 BC asks her to provide far wheat, a dietary staple of the Mediterranean world. Ancient Roman etymologists believed ceres derived from the Latin verb gerere, meaning 'to bear, bring forth, produce'.
The Aventine Triad and Ceres' complex origins allow for multiple interpretations of their relationships. Cicero asserts Ceres as mother to both Liber and Libera, while Varro's more complex theology groups her functionally with Tellus, Terra, Venus, and Libera as a female aspect of Liber. No native Roman myths of Ceres are known. Ceres was an equivalent to Demeter, one of the Twelve Olympians of Greek religion and mythology, making her one of Rome's twelve Di Consentes.
Her known mythology is indistinguishable from Demeter's. Ceres sought Proserpina with lit torches, calling her with shouts where three or four roads meet. Ovid likens Ceres' devotion to her offspring to that of a cow to its calf, but she is also the originator of bloody animal sacrifice, a necessity in the renewal of life. She has a particular enmity towards her own sacrificial animal, the pig, which she enmites for their destructive rooting-up of field crops under her protection.
The myth of Proserpina's abduction on the plains of Henna (Enna) highlights the importance of agriculture as a contract and comes at a price, bringing well-being but also mortality. Enna, in Sicily, had strong mythological connections with Ceres and Proserpina, and was the site of Ceres' most ancient sanctuary.
==Background==
===Cults and Cult themes===
====Agricultural fertility====
Ceres, a goddess of agriculture, was credited with the discovery of spelt wheat, yoking oxen, ploughing, sowing, protection, and nourishing young seeds. She had the power to fertilize, multiply, and fructify plant and animal seed, and her laws and rites protected all activities of the agricultural cycle. Ceres was offered spelt wheat and a pregnant sow at the Feriae Sementivae in January, and her offerings included a porca praecidanea and a propitiary grain sample. Ceres' main festival, Cerealia, was held from mid to late April, organized by her plebeian aediles and included circus games. The festival began with a horse-race in the Circus Maximus, sacred to Consus, a god of grain-storage. After the race, foxes were released into the Circus, their tails ablaze with lighted torches, possibly to cleanse the growing crops and protect them from disease and vermin. Cerealia included ludi scaenici (theatrical religious events) from c.175 BC.
=====Helper gods=====
In the ancient sacrum cereale a priest, probably the Flamen Cerialis, invoked Ceres (and probably Tellus) along with twelve specialised, minor assistant-gods to secure divine help and protection at each stage of the grain cycle, beginning shortly before the Feriae Sementivae. W.H. Roscher lists these deities among the indigitamenta, names used to invoke specific divine functions.
*Vervactor, "He who ploughs"
*Reparātor, "He who prepares the earth"
*Imporcĭtor, "He who ploughs with a wide furrow"
*Insitor, "He who plants seeds"
*Obarātor, "He who traces the first ploughing"
*Occātor, "He who harrows"
*Serritor, "He who digs"
*Subruncinator, "He who weeds"
*Mĕssor, "He who reaps"
*Convector, "He who carries the grain"
*Conditor, "He who stores the grain"
*Promitor, "He who distributes the grain"
====Marriage, human fertility and nourishment====
In Roman bridal processions, a young boy carried Ceres' torch, symbolizing fertility. The adult males waited at the groom's house, and a wedding sacrifice was offered to Tellus on the bride's behalf. Ceres may have been included in the sacrificial dedication, as she is closely associated with Tellus and bears the laws of marriage. In the most solemn form of marriage, confarreatio, the bride and groom shared a cake made of far, the ancient wheat-type.
From the mid-republican era, an official cult to Ceres and Proserpina reinforced Ceres' connection with Roman ideals of female virtue. This promotion coincided with the rise of a plebeian nobility, an increased birthrate among plebeian commoners, and a fall in the birthrate among patrician families. Ceres Mater (Mother Ceres) was described as genetrix (progenitress) and alma (nourishing), and in the early Imperial era, she became an Imperial deity.
Several of Ceres' ancient Italic precursors are connected to human fertility and motherhood, with the Pelignan goddess Angitia Cerealis being identified with the Roman goddess Angerona.
====Laws====
Ceres was a patron and protector of plebeian laws, rights, and Tribunes. Her Aventine Temple served as a cult center, legal archive, treasury, and possibly law-court. It was founded concurrently with the passage of the Lex Sacrata, which established the office and person of plebeian aediles and tribunes as inviolate representatives of the Roman people. Tribunes were legally immune to arrest or threat, and the lives and property of those who violated this law were forfeit to Ceres.
The Lex Hortensia of 287 BC extended plebeian laws to the city and all its citizens, with the official decrees of the Senate placed in Ceres' Temple. The Temple might have offered asylum for those threatened with arbitrary arrest by patrician magistrates. Ceres' temple, games, and cult were partially funded by fines imposed on those who offended the laws placed under her protection.
Ceres' laws determined the course of settled, lawful, civilized life, with crimes against fields and harvest being crimes against the people and their protective deity. Ancient laws of the Twelve Tables forbade the magical charming of field crops from a neighbor's field into one's own and invoked the death penalty for the illicit removal of field boundaries.
====Poppies====
Ceres' iconography, similar to Demeter's from early Mycenae, features poppies, symbolizing fertility, sleep, death, and rebirth. Poppies grow on disturbed soil and bear numerous tiny seeds. Greek and Roman farmers raised them for their fibrous stems and seed value. The opium poppy, also known as Cereale papaver, eases pain and brings sleep, the deepest sleep being death. Poppies are often woven into Ceres' wheat-stalk crown, the corona spicea, worn by her priestesses and devotees.
====Funerals====
Ceres was a deity who maintained the boundaries between living and dead realms and was crucial at funerals. She assisted the deceased into the afterlife as an underworld shade or deity, while premature or untimely deaths were believed to haunt the living as wandering ghosts. Ceres could be exorcised only when death was reasonable due. Well-off families offered Ceres sacrifice of a pig, while the poor offered wheat, flowers, and libation. Female initiates in the sacra Cereris were offered a method of living and better hope in the afterlife.
====The mundus of Ceres====
The mundus cerialis, also known as Caereris mundus, was a hemispherical pit or underground vault in Rome, now lost. It was usually sealed by a stone lid known as the lapis manalis. On August 24, October 5, and November 8, it was opened with the official announcement mundus patet ("the mundus is open") and offerings were made there to agricultural or underworld deities, including Ceres as the goddess of the fruitful earth and guardian of its underworld portals. The opening offered the spirits of the dead temporary leave from the underworld to roam lawfully among the living, in what Warde Fowler describes as 'holidays, so to speak, for the ghosts'. The days when the mundus was open were among the very few occasions that Romans made official contact with the collective spirits of the dead, the Di Manes. Roman tradition held that the mundus had been dug and sealed by Romulus as part of Rome's foundation. Later authors marked the days of the mundus as dies religiosus (when no official meetings could be held), possibly due to the later introduction and accommodation of Greek elements. The various days of the mundus suggest rites to Ceres as the guardian deity of seed-corn in the establishment of cities and as a door-warden of the afterlife, which was co-ruled during the winter months by her daughter Proserpina, queen-companion to Dis.
====Expiations====
Prodigies in Roman theology were abnormal phenomena that reflected divine anger at human impiety. They were often expiated due to perceived threats to the Roman state, such as famine, war, and social disorder. Ceres' Aventine cult was established as an extraordinary expiation after a series of prodigies during the Second Punic War. After 206, she was offered at least 11 further official expiations, many of which were connected to famine and plebeian unrest. From the Middle Republic, expiation was increasingly addressed to her as mother to Proserpina. The last known expiation occurred after Rome's Great Fire of 64 AD, which was seen as a sign of offense against Juno, Vulcan, and Ceres-with-Proserpina. Champlin (2003) perceives the expiations to Vulcan and Ceres as attempts by the ruling emperor, Nero, to appeal to populist sentiments.
===Temple===
Vitruvius, a Roman historian, describes the "Temple of Ceres near the Circus Maximus" as an Araeostyle temple with wide-spaced columns and wood architraves. The temple is clumsy, heavy-roofed, and low and wide, with pediments adorned with clay or brass statues. Vitruvius recommends that Ceres temples be located in rural areas, where the public sacrifices to her. During the early Imperial era, soothsayers advised Pliny the Younger to restore an ancient, narrow temple near Como. The temple contained an ancient wooden cult statue of Ceres, which he replaced. The annual feast on the Ides of September was attended by pilgrims from the region, and Pliny considered this rebuilding a fulfillment of his civic and religious duty.
====No images of Ceres====
Ceres, a goddess of peace, is depicted in various images from pre-Aventine cults, dating back to the middle Republic. These images show her in various forms, such as carrying a torch, riding in a chariot drawn by snakes, or sitting on a sacred chest. Some images also depict her holding a caduceus, symbolizing Pax. Augustan reliefs depict her emergence from the earth, with snake-entwined arms, hands bearing poppies and wheat, or her head crowned with fruits and vines. In free-standing statuary, she often wears a wheat-crown or holds a wheat spray. Moneyers of the Republican era used Ceres' image, wheat ears, and garlands to advertise prosperity and popular interest.
===Priesthoods===
Ceres was served by various public priesthoods, including male and female ones. Her senior priest, the flamen cerialis, was usually plebeian and served Tellus. Her public cult at the Ambarvalia, or "perambulation of fields," was led by the Arval Brethren. Rural versions of these rites were led by household heads. An inscription at Capua names a male sacerdos Cerialis mundalis, a priest dedicated to Ceres' rites of the mundus.
The plebeian aediles had minor or occasional priestly functions at Ceres' Aventine Temple, responsible for its management and financial affairs. Their care included grain supply, grain doles, public games, and maintenance of Rome's streets and buildings.
In Rome and throughout Italy, Ceres' ritus graecus and joint cult with Proserpina were led by female sacerdotes, drawn from local and Roman elites. Celibacy may have been a condition of their office, and sexual abstinence was required for those attending Ceres' major festival.
Her public priesthood was reserved to respectable matrons, whether married, divorced, or widowed. Their selection and relationship to Ceres' older, entirely male priesthood is unknown, but they far outnumbered her few male priests and would have been highly respected and influential figures in their own communities.
===Cult development===
====Archaic and Regal eras====
Ceres, a goddess of fertility, was credited with the festival Cerealia, a celebration of fertility. Her senior priesthood was a minor flaminate, influenced by Numa's innovations. Ceres' cult with Tellus, also known as Terra Mater, may have developed during this time. Later, Ovid described these goddesses as "partners in labor," with Ceres providing the cause for crop growth.
====Republican era====
=====Ceres and the Aventine Triad=====
In 496 BC, during a period of economic recession, famine, and potential war against the Latins, dictator A. Postumius vowed to build a temple to Ceres, Liber, and Libera near Aventine Hill. The famine ended, and Rome's plebeian citizen-soldiery cooperated in the conquest of the Latins. In 493 BC, Ceres became the central deity of the new Triad, housed in a new-built Aventine temple. She became the patron goddess of the plebs, who were key players in Roman agriculture. Much of Rome's grain was imported from territories of Magna Graecia, particularly Sicily. Ceres' Aventine temple and rites were described as Greek, indicating long-standing connections between the plebeians, Ceres, and Magna Graecia. The Triad itself may have been a self-consciously Roman cult formulation based on Greco-Italic precedents. A new form of Cerean cult, known as the ritus graecus (Greek rite) of Ceres, was officially imported from Magna Graecia and distinct from her older Roman rites. The older forms of Aventine rites to Ceres remain uncertain.
====Middle Republic====
=====Ceres and Proserpina=====
Around 205 BC, a joint cult to Ceres and her daughter Proserpina was brought to Rome from Southern Italy, along with Greek priestesses. This cult, known as the ritus graecus Cereris, was based on ancient Greek cults to Demeter, including the Thesmophoria to Demeter and Persephone. By the end of the 3rd century BC, Demeter's temple in Enna, Sicily, was recognized as Ceres' oldest and most authoritative cult center. Libera was recognized as Proserpina, Roman equivalent to Demeter's daughter Persephone.
A new, women-only cult to "mother and maiden" took place alongside the old, making no reference to Liber. Ceres was offered two distinct forms of official cult at the Aventine, with the older form involving both men and women and likely focusing on plebeian political identity and discontent. The new form identified its exclusively female initiates and priestesses as upholders of Rome's traditional, patrician-dominated social hierarchy and morality.
=====Ceres and Magna Mater=====
In 133 BC, the Roman cult of Magna Mater was established alongside the Greek goddess Cybele, who was a form of Graeco-Roman earth goddess with mythological ties to Troy. This cult coincided with the start of a new saeculum, which led to Roman victory and recovery. The patricians dined with Magna Mater and each other at her festival banquets. The plebeian nobility also underlined their claims to Ceres, with the senate appeasing her with a new festival called the ieiunium Cereris ("fast of Ceres").
In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, a plebeian noble and tribune, bypassed the Senate and appealed to the popular assembly to pass his proposed land-reforms. Civil unrest led to violence, and Gracchus and his supporters were murdered by their conservative opponents. The senate sent the quindecimviri to Ceres' ancient cult center at Henna in Sicily, the goddess's supposed place of origin and earthly home. Some form of religious consultation or propitiation was given to either expiate Gracchus' murder or justify it as the lawful killing of a would-be king or demagogue who had offended Ceres' laws against tyranny.
====Late Republic====
The Eleusinian mysteries gained popularity during the late Republic, with early Roman initiates like Sulla and Cicero, and later Emperors like Hadrian founding an Eleusinian cult center in Rome. In Late Republican politics, aristocratic traditionalists and popularists used coinage to promote their claims to Ceres' favor. Coins featuring Ceres and a ploughman with a yoked oxen claimed his rule as regenerative and divinely justified. Popularists used her name to appeal to plebeian interests, while plebeian nobles and aediles used them to highlight their ancestral connections with plebeians. During the Civil War, images and dedications on Rome's coinage celebrated Ceres, Libertas (liberty), and Victoria (victory).
====Imperial Era====
Imperial theology in Rome viewed traditional cults as divine upholders of Imperial Pax (peace) and prosperity for the benefit of all. Emperor Augustus restored Ceres' Aventine Temple, and his successor Tiberius completed it. Coinage on the Augustan Ara Pacis features figures such as Empress Livia, Tellus, Venus, Pax, or a composite of them. Emperor Claudius reformed the grain supply and created an Imperial goddess, Annona, as a junior partner to Ceres and the Imperial family. The traditional virtues of provision and nourishment were symbolically extended to Imperial family members, with some coinage showing Claudius' mother Antonia as an Augusta, wearing the corona spicea.
The relationship between the reigning emperor, empress, and Ceres was formalized in titles such as Augusta mater agrorum and Ceres Augusta. Coinage shows various emperors and empresses wearing her corona spicea, demonstrating the goddess, emperor, and their spouse are jointly responsible for agricultural prosperity and grain provision.
In Britain, a soldier's inscription of the 2nd century AD attests to Ceres' role in popular syncretism, as she is "the bearer of ears of corn", the "Syrian Goddess", and the virgin mother of the gods. Ceres gradually "slips into obscurity" during the Late Imperial era, with the last known official association of the Imperial family with her symbols being a coin issue of Septimius Severus.
===Legacy===
The word "cereal" comes from Ceres' association with edible grains, with her son Liber representing wine and "good living." The line sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, translates to "without food and drink, love freezes" or "love needs food and wine to thrive." Ceres was also depicted as a respectable matron and Liber-Bacchus as a gentleman, showcasing moral sobriety and restraint.
Ceres is featured in De Mulieribus Claris, a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by Giovanni Boccaccio. She appears briefly to bless the wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda in a masque at the end of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest. In 1801, a newly discovered dwarf planet or asteroid was named after her, and two years later, the newly discovered element Cerium was named after it.
In the US, Ceres appears on several CSA banknotes, including a $10 note with her reclined on a cotton bale holding a caduceus. An aria in praise of Ceres is sung in Act 4 of the opera The Trojans. A misanthropic poem recited by Dmitri in Dostoevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov reflects on Ceres' heartbroken search for her lost daughter.
In the US, Ceres is one of the three "goddess offices" held in The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, depicted on the Seal of New Jersey, and has historical links with agriculture and agricultural trade.
Category:Roman Pantheon
Category:Goddess
Category:Religion
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