The Greek word kore is one of the plainest in the language. It means a girl, a daughter, a young woman who has not yet married. Called by it, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the maiden in the meadow, the one who has not yet been taken. It is a name for the moment before the story turns.
The same word has some odd extra meanings. It was used for a doll, the sort of figure a girl played with before she was married. It was used for the small statues of young women that Greek sanctuaries were filled with. And it was used for the pupil of the eye, the dark centre of the iris, because if you look closely into another person’s eye you see a tiny figure of yourself looking back, like a little girl in a window. All of those things, in Greek, were kore.
The maiden in the meadow
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed around 600 BCE, tells the story of the abduction. Persephone is out with her friends, the daughters of Oceanus, picking flowers in a soft meadow. She reaches for a narcissus, a flower grown by Earth as a trick for the girl, with a hundred blossoms on one stem. The ground opens, a chariot drives out, and the lord of the dead seizes her. She screams for her father and nobody except Hecate and the sun hears.
In that opening part of the hymn, the poet calls her Kore, and the word carries the whole of her innocence. She is a girl at an age that Greek families watched carefully, the years before a marriage, and the story is in part about what that moment feels like to the parents. A daughter is taken, by arrangement or by force, from her mother’s side and carried off in a chariot to a house she has never seen. Greek weddings borrowed the image. The bride was led away from her family on a cart, with torches and a wedding song.
Two goddesses
At Eleusis, where the great Mysteries were held, Demeter and her daughter were often called simply the Two Goddesses. The famous relief found there, carved in the middle of the fifth century BCE, shows them side by side. Demeter holds a sceptre and offers a stalk of grain to a youthful god, Triptolemos, and Kore stands at his shoulder with a torch and rests a hand on him. The younger figure looks almost like her mother’s double, with the same robes and the same calm.
In that setting, Kore is not a captive who has been dragged below. She is a partner. The name suits her in the sense of belonging to her mother, and she has her own place in the ritual, an equal with Demeter in the promise of the Mysteries.
The bride in Italy
The most surprising evidence for how Persephone was seen comes from the Greek colony of Locri in southern Italy. Excavators there, in the early twentieth century, found a sanctuary dedicated to her, and in it thousands of small clay plaques, made around 500 to 450 BCE. The plaques show Persephone in many scenes, and a good number show her as a bride, being given a flower, a cockerel or a pomegranate, sitting on a throne next to Hades, or being carried off in the chariot.
Local girls seem to have dedicated these before they married. It suggests that the Locrians thought of Persephone mainly as the patron of the passage from girlhood to wife, as if she had been the first to do it. The abduction story, which looks so frightening in the hymn, appears in the plaques as a wedding.
The Mistress in Arcadia
In some places the girl had another name. In the mountains of Arcadia, at Lycosura, there was a famous sanctuary of a goddess called Despoina, the Mistress. Pausanias says that her real name was kept secret from the uninitiated, and that she was the daughter of Demeter and Poseidon, a version of the story that makes her a goddess of her own and not a copy of the Eleusinian queen. The cult statue there, made by the sculptor Damophon in the second century BCE, showed her seated beside Demeter, and large fragments survive.
Moving from Kore to Despoina changes the tone. The girl has become a ruler, and the title stresses power over helplessness. The Greeks did not have one Persephone. They had a girl, a bride, a queen and a mistress, and each name emphasised another stage.
The statue of the girl
The word also names a type of sculpture. In the sixth century BCE the people of Athens put up rows of standing marble women on the Acropolis, with long robes, patterned cloth, hair in braids and a faint smile. Modern scholars call them korai, the plural of kore, and the name has stuck. We do not know whom each one represents. Some may be goddesses, some priestesses, some simply the daughters of rich families who gave a statue as a thank-offering. What they have in common is their age. They are all girls on the edge of adult life, caught in stone at the moment before the story starts.
Perhaps that is why the word lasted. Kore is not a name for a girl who is anything in particular. It is the name for a girl as such, in the space between her mother’s house and her husband’s. It was a good title for Persephone because it covered the part of the story that everyone in the audience understood from experience, and a good word for the small reflection in the pupil of the eye, which looks out of a person the way a girl looks out of a window, waiting to see what comes up the road.