Abducting Girls and Manuscripts

Both Hades and Persephone have enormous HANDS

So the stunning mosaic unearthed in the Macedonian tomb at Amphipolis shows Hermes escorting a chariot driven by Hades, who is abducting Persephone to the Underworld. This myth depresses me. However empowering the response of Persephone’s mother Demeter, who held the universe to ransom until she forced Hades and his brother Zeus to allow her yearly access to her daughter, this is fundamentally just another male-organised rape + forced marriage narrative. Persephone got the minor compensation of being made Underworld Queen, with a role in the judgement of the dead and the power to send ghosts on missions. But she never did get much say in her own destiny.

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The story of Persephone (Roman Proserpina) helped the ancients to think about death. It was not a physical resurrection story like that at the heart of Christianity. But the Mysteries of Persephone and Demeter offered initiates hope of a blissful afterlife. Persephone may look understandably panicky on the mosaic, but the family of the deceased who commissioned it will have taken comfort from the image. They knew that she did become adjusted to her new ‘life’, retained ties with her mother, and could even visit the upper world from time to time.

Leighton's Pastel Persephone

Persephone's story was eerily reflected in the sensational adventures undergone by the oldest Greek version we can read, the exquisite Homeric Hymn to Demeter. No copy survived to the Renaissance. Or so it was thought until 1777, when the world was stunned by a discovery as exciting as that of the Amphipolis tomb. An ambitious German scholar of Greek named Christian Friedrich Matthaei, teaching in a Moscow school, mysteriously came into possession of some manuscripts. One, which he called the Codex Mosquensis ('Moscow Book', now in Leiden), contained the long-lost Hymn.

Matthaei’s ‘finds’ made his name and career. The Hymn was soon published in several languages, including English. It made the story one of the most popular themes in 19th-century literature and art including Frederic Leighton's famous 'Return of Persephone' (1891).

Holy Synod, Moscow: "Give us Back our Codex"?

But Matthaei’s story surely deserves a Name of the Rose­-style detective novel/movie. He may simply have stolen the codex from the library of the Holy Synod; he claimed, however, that it had been found neglected on the floor of a stable 'where, for many years, it had lain concealed among the chickens and pigs.' This would be appropriate enough in the case of agricultural goddesses to whom piglets were sacrificed, but it stretches credulity to breaking point. I would enjoy the controversy if the Holy Synod asked for it back one day.