Ceres

Ceres is the Roman goddess of grain, of the growth of crops and of the fertility of the fields, and her name survives in the English word cereal. However fully she was later identified with the Greek Demeter, her Roman roots are distinct: she was one of the most ancient of the native Italian deities, invoked at every stage of ploughing and sowing, and above all she was the goddess of the common people. Her great temple on the Aventine hill, dedicated early in the fifth century BCE, was the religious centre of the plebeians in their long struggle with the patrician order; she formed there a triad with Liber and Libera, and the temple served as an archive for the decrees of the plebs and a refuge whose violation carried a terrible penalty.

Ceres was formally counted among the twelve major Roman gods later listed by the poet Ennius as the di consentes, the Roman set roughly paired with the Greek Twelve Olympians, and her priestess, the sacerdos Cereris, was by long custom brought from the Greek cities of southern Italy, Naples or Elea, specifically to perform the rites of Ceres graeco ritu, in the Greek manner, a detail Cicero records; Rome deliberately imported and preserved a foreign style of worship for her rather than fully Latinising it, treating the Greek form of the cult as more efficacious than any native alternative for this particular goddess.

Ceres was honoured with the Cerealia, a spring festival held in April with games in the Circus, at which, a peculiar rite, foxes were let loose with burning brands tied to their tails. From 496 BCE, at a time of famine, her cult was reshaped along Greek lines on the advice of the Sibylline Books, and thereafter she absorbed the myth of Demeter: her daughter Proserpina, the Roman Persephone, is carried off to the underworld, and Ceres's grief and search explain the barren season of the year until the girl's partial return. The Romans marked the loss with the solemn, women's rites of the sacrum anniversarium Cereris. In this way a plain old Italian corn-goddess became also the sorrowing mother of the Mediterranean grain myth, without ever losing her deep association with the plough and the poor.

In 1801 the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, observing from Palermo in Sicily, an island long sacred to Ceres as one of Rome's chief grain-producing provinces, discovered the first object of what would become the asteroid belt and named it Ceres in the goddess's honour; classified at various points as a planet, an asteroid and, since 2006, a dwarf planet, it remains the largest body in the belt and carries the Roman grain-goddess's name into modern astronomy much as her Greek counterpart Demeter's myth of loss and searching had once carried an older harvest goddess into a different island's soil.