Ilyssa Silfen
22 March, 2010
ENL 314
Professor Riddle
Persephone: Abductee or Escapee?
There are many characters in both The Iliad and The Odyssey that are of great
importance to the story. Just to name a few, we have Odysseus, the highly revered king of
Ithaca who partook in the ten year Trojan War and then took another ten years just to get
home; we have Achilles, the both famed and doomed Greek warrior; we have Athena, the
great Goddess of wisdom who aided the Greeks during the Trojan War and Odysseus
specifically once the war was over. However, no character is as intriguing and utterly
mind-boggling as that of Persephone, the dual Goddess of both Spring and Death. Within
both The Iliad and The Odyssey, the side of her personality that represents Spring is
completely ignored, and the side of her personality that aligns with Death reigns supreme.
In that vein, the fact that Persephone is characterized as a cold, emotionally distant
recluse cannot be argued; however, her reasons for acting in this manner can be. We must
try to decide if Persephone’s behavior is due to the fact that she is unhappy with her
supposedly forced role as the Goddess of Death, or if she has chosen this role for herself
in some way, shape or form, and revels in the powers that it brings to her.
When it comes to The Iliad, Persephone is given the barest mention; she’s only
mentioned in one passage in the entire epic poem. Therefore, it might seem unimportant
for me to include that passage in this essay; however, I feel that it is incredibly important
to include it in that it gives us some very credible insight into Persephone’s mindset and
behaviors:
He screamed out to the cruel Furies—‘Never,
never let me bounce on my knees a son of his,
sprung of his loins!’—and the gods drove home that curse,
mighty Zeus of the Underworld and grim Persephone (Homer, The Iliad, IX: 556557)
In this particular passage, Phoenix is speaking about how his father, enraged by the
knowledge that his son had slept with his mistress, cursed him with either impotence or
the ability to sire only daughters (that particular passage can be interpreted both ways);
however, that’s not what’s important here. What’s important is the fact that Persephone,
according to the passage, was more than willing to “drive home that curse”; as a
Goddess, she did not have to listen to a mere human’s ranting and raving. I also take
particular notice of the word choice here; when Phoenix could have easily described her
using a word similar to the word that he used to describe Zeus, such as “powerful” or
“great,” he chooses to describe Persephone as “grim.” Perhaps this is done to help
emphasize her role as the true ruler of the Underworld, and therefore of the dead, since
Zeus is inexplicably described as “Zeus of the Underworld” when we know for a fact that
that is Persephone’s role. This is the last we hear of Persephone in The Iliad, but this
characterization of Persephone as “grim,” amongst other things, continues in The
Odyssey in much greater detail.
The characterization of Persephone continues in Book XI of The Odyssey, when
Odysseus and his men travel to the Underworld to find the ghost of Teiresias, the blind
seer, whom Odysseus means to question about his fate and his chances of being able to
return to Ithaca. At this point in the epic poem, after Teiresias has come and gone,
Odysseus’ mother’s spirit appears to him, and when he attempts to throw his arms around
his mothers’ shade, “she went sifting through my hands, impalpable / as shadows are, /
and wavering like a dream” (Homer, The Odyssey, XI: 230-232) In other words, she
passes right through his waiting arms. As a result, Odysseus cries out:
O my mother,
will you not stay, be still, here in my arms,
may we not, in this place of Death, as well,
hold one another, touch with love, and taste
salt tears’ relief, the twinge of welling tears?
Or is this all hallucination, sent
against me by the iron queen, Perséphonê,
to make me groan again? (Homer, The Odyssey, XI: 235-242)
I find it interesting that, rather than attributing this to the fact that his mother is
not only clearly dead but also clearly without a physical form at this point, he chooses to
place the blame on Persephone’s shoulders, rather than on his mother or even on Hades,
who is supposedly the ruling deity of the Underworld; perhaps this is done in order to
keep with the theme of locations ruled by Goddesses, such as the islands ruled by Circe
and Calypso, but it is equally likely that this is an indication that he and Persephone are
equally sharing the duties that come with ruling the land of the dead. I was also
particularly taken by the words that were chosen to describe her; rather than simply
calling her the Queen of the Underworld, or even Queen of the Dead, which would both
be accurate descriptions by all accounts, Odysseus describes her as an “iron queen”
(Homer, The Odyssey, XI: 241). The word “iron” conjures the sense of hardness and
coldness since, in the literal sense, most metal is hard and often quite cold to the touch, as
are the bodies of the deceased after they’ve been in that particular condition for a while. I
feel that this coldness is metaphoric in relation to her emotional disposition, in that she is
apparently more than willing to produce hallucinations for the sole purpose of torturing
others; this is very cold behavior indeed. It is interesting to note that in Fagles’ translation
of this passage, that particular sentence is translated simply as “great Persephone.”
This description of coldness is repeated later on in the poem: “After Perséphonê, /
icy and pale, / dispersed the shades of women” (Homer, The Odyssey, XI: 449-450), and
yet again, in Fagles’ translation of the text, the description of Persephone is much more
neutral: “no sooner had Queen Persephone driven off / the ghosts of lovely women”
(Homer, The Odyssey, XI: 437-438). It is not uncommon for two different translators to
come up with two different versions of the same story, but I feel that Fitzgerald chose to
describe her as an “iron queen” and as “icy and pale,” rather than just as “great
Persephone” or “Queen Persephone” in order to convey a particular characterization of
Persephone; that of the cold and distant Goddess of Death.
This image of coldness is repeated throughout this section of the poem, and I feel
that the repetition is used in order to drive home the point that Persephone is a very
emotionally distant Goddess. The fact that she never appears within the poem is also
incredibly important in characterizing her as emotionally distant, in that she remains in
the shadows, unseen by anyone. It is very possible that she has to be distant, simply
because of her vocation; there are many vocations where one has to be emotionally
distant in order to avoid a mental or emotional breakdown. However, one has to
remember that she intentionally sends hallucinations to haunt others, so one might
construe her behavior as being emotionally distant at best, pathological at worst:
But first came shades in thousands, rustling
in a pandemonium of whispers, blown together,
and the horror took me that Perséphonê
had brought from darker hell some saurian death’s head (Homer, The Odyssey,
XI: 632-635)
Once again, the word choice is relatively obvious; the words “pandemonium,” “horror,”
“darker hell” and “death’s head” were carefully chosen by Fitzgerald to create an image
of pure panic, caused by none other than Persephone. Fagles is equally commanding in
his word choice in this scene, describing the scene in a similar manner as Fitzgerald:
But before I could, the dead came surging round me,
hordes of them, thousands raising unearthly cries,
and blanching terror gripped me—panicked now
that Queen Persephone might send up from Death
some monstrous head, some Gorgon’s staring face! (Homer, The Odyssey, XI:
724-728)
The word choice here creates the setting, just like in Fitzgerald’s translation; words like
“surging,” “hordes,” “unearthly cries,” “blanching terror” and “panicked” create the
feeling that Odysseus is feeling pure horror at what is going on, and once again, these
feelings are all brought on due to the actions of one person: Persephone. Significantly
enough, through this particular translation, Persephone is linked to Medusa, one of the
Gorgons; perhaps the reason for this was to symbolize and emphasize Persephone’s
monstrous personality. When taking into account what the text implies, it appears that
Persephone not only enjoys the torture that she inflicts upon others but has made a habit
out of doing so, and therefore a linking with Medusa would make perfect sense.
The question that remains in my mind is, what is the reason for depicting her in
such a manner? In many versions of the Persephone myth, she is characterized as an
innocent, free spirited young woman whose only care in the world is to care for
everything and everyone around her; therefore, she could have easily been depicted in
The Iliad and The Odyssey as a Goddess who is very maternal and cares for the spirits of
the dead, as well as those still living, as if they were her own children. However, for
some reason, she is depicted as being incredibly detached from the whole experience.
Perhaps this is related to the myth explaining her existence in the Underworld in the first
place; many versions of the Hades/Persephone story depict Persephone as being abducted
against her will and tricked into eating pomegranate seeds so that she would have to
return to the Underworld every six months when she clearly never wanted to return at all.
Perhaps her emotional distance is a result of her feelings of despair at being forced into
her role as the Queen of the Underworld when she felt that her true home was above the
ground. There are yet other versions of the myth, on the other hand, where it is told that
not only did she run away from Demeter, her mother, on purpose, but that when she was
abducted by Hades, she chose to eat the pomegranate seeds so that she would not have to
return to her mother. However, since Demeter proclaimed that she would not allow the
growing season to occur unless she got her daughter back, the gods forced Persephone to
return every six months. In fact, this very idea is mentioned in a later interpretation of
Persephone within Virgil’s Georgics: “and Proserpine (Persephone) recalled / has no
desire to stay beside her mother” (Virgil, Georgics, I: 42-43). So, what does this say
about Persephone’s behavior in The Iliad and The Odyssey? If Persephone’s true desire
was to escape her mother’s clutches and stay with Hades in the Underworld, it could
mean that her behavior is indicative of her true personality, which she had to hide when
under the care of her mother; the only way for her to express her true self was to forsake
her role as a Goddess of Life and take on the opposite role, a role which she appears to
have been born to play.
Works Cited
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1998.
Virgil. Georgics. 29 B.C.E.