That whole night long, shaking with fear, the women

did their best to appease the great goddess.

When dawn came at last, they told everything

to Celeus, exactly as Demeter had instructed,

and he, as their ruler, lost no time

in calling the citizens together, and giving them

the order to build the goddess her temple

and to put her altar just where the hill rises.

They listened to him, and they did all that he said,

so that a temple rose up, as the goddess required.

When the job was done, and the people stopped working,

they all went home; but golden Demeter

installed herself in her temple, apart from the other gods,

and stayed there, eaten up with grief for her daughter.

She made that year the worst for people living

on the good earth, the worst and the hardest: not one

little seed could poke its head up from the soil,

for Demeter had smothered them all; the oxen

broke their ploughs and twisted them, scraping

across hardened furrows; and all the white barley

that year was sown in vain. She would have destroyed

every single human being in the world

with this famine, just to spite the gods on Olympus,

had not Zeus decided to intervene: first

he dispatched Iris, on her wings the colour of gold,

to give Demeter his orders, and she did as he asked,

covering the distance in no time, and landing

at Eleusis, where the air was filled with incense.

She found Demeter wearing dark robes in the temple,

and spoke to her urgently: ‘Zeus, our father

who knows everything, summons you back now

to join the family of the immortal gods:

come quick, don’t let his command be in vain.’

But her pleas had no effect at all on Demeter:

then Zeus sent out all of the gods, one by one,

to deliver his summons, bringing the best of gifts,

with whatever fresh honours she might desire;

but Demeter was so furious then that she

dismissed every speech out of hand, and told them all

that she would neither set foot again

on Olympus, nor let anything grow on the earth,

unless she could see her beautiful daughter once more.

When he heard this, Zeus, the deep- and wide-bellowing God,

sent Hermes with his golden staff down into the dark

to talk to Hades there, and ask his permission

to lead Persephone back up from the shadows

and into daylight again, where her mother

could set eyes on her, and so be angry no longer.

Hermes agreed to do this: he hurried away

from his place on Olympus, down into the earth’s

crevasses and crannies, down, till he reached

the king of all the dead in his underground palace,

stretched out at his ease, and by his arm a trembling

bride, who pined still for the mother she had lost.

Coming up close to him, the god Hermes began:

‘Hades, dark-haired lord and master of the dead,