Good Ceres is content with little, if that little be but pure. (Ovid, Fasti IV 407-408)
You attendants, with tucked up robes, take the knives away from the ox; let the ox plough; sacrifice the lazy sow. The ax should never smite the neck that fits the yoke; let him live and often labor in the hard soil. (Ovid, Fasti IV, 409-416)
The subject requires that I should narrate the rape of the Virgin. (Ovid Fasti IV, 417-418)
There the goddess kindled two pine-trees to serve her as a light; hence to this day a torch is given out at the rites of Ceres. (Ovid, Fasti IV, 492-494)
As she was about to pass within the lowly dwelling, she plucked a smooth, a slumberous poppy that grew on the waste ground; and as she plucked, ’tis said she tasted it forgetfully, and so unwitting stayed her long hunger. Hence, because she broke her fast at nightfall, the initiates time their meal by the appearance of the stars. (Ovid, Fasti IV ca. 530)
Ceres was the first to turn the glebe with the hooked plow-share; she first gave laws. All things are the gift of Ceres; she must be the subject of my song. (Ovid Metamorphoses V, 341-344)
Within this grove Proserpina was playing, and gathering violets or white lilies. And while with girlish eagerness she was filling her basket and her bosom, and striving to surpass her mates in gathering, almost in one act did Pluto see and love and carry her away: so precipitate was his love. The terrified girl called plaintively on her mother and her companions, but more often upon her mother. (Ovid Metamorphoses V, 391-398)
Meanwhile all in vain the affrighted mother seeks her daughter in every land, on every deep. Not Aurora rising with dewy tresses, not Hesperus sees her pausing in the search. She kindles two pine torches in the fires of Aetna, and wanders without rest through the frosty shades of night; again, when the genial day had dimmed the stars, she was still seeking her daughter from the setting to the rising of the sun. Faint with toil and athirst, she had moistened her lips in no fountain, when she chanced to see a hut thatched with straw, and knocked at its lowly door. Then out came an old woman and beheld the goddess, and when she asked for water gave her a sweet drink with parched barley floating upon it. While she drank, a coarse, saucy boy stood watching her, and mocked her and called her greedy. She was offended, and threw what she had not yet
drunk, with the barley grain, full in his face. (Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 438-452)
She did not know as yet where her child was; still she reproached all lands, calling them
ungrateful and unworthy of the gift of corn; but Sicily above all other lands, where she had found traces of her loss. So There with angry hand she broke in pieces the plows that turn the glebe, and in her rage she gave to destruction farmers and cattle alike, and bade the plowed fields to betray their trust, and blighted the seed. The fertility of this land, famous throughout the world, lay false to its good name: the crops died in early blade, now too much heat, now too much rain destroying them, Stars and winds were baleful, and greedy birds ate up the seed as soon as it was sown; tares and thorns and stubborn grasses choked the wheat. (Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 474-486)
“Proserpina shall return to heaven, but on one condition only: if in the lower-world no food has as yet touched her lips. For so have the fates decreed.” He spoke; but Ceres was resolved to have her daughter back. Not so the fates; for the girl had already broken her fast, and while, simple child that she was she wandered in the trim garden, she had plucked a purple pomegranate hanging from a bending bough, and peeling off the hard rind, she had eaten seven of the seeds… But now Jove, holding the balance between his brother and his grieving sister, divides the revolving year into two equal parts. Now the goddess, the common divinity of two realms, spends half the months with her mother and half with her husband.(Ovid, Metamorphoses 530-538,564-7)
Here she gave her fleet car to Triptolemus, and bade him scatter the seed of grain she gave, part in the untilled earth and part in fields that had long lain fallow…. “My country is far-famed Athens; Triptolemus, my name. I came neither by ship over the sea, nor on foot by land; the air opened a path for me. I bring the gifts of Ceres, which, if you sprinkle them over your wide field, will give a fruitful harvest and food not wild.” (Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 645-647, 652-656)
