Homeric Hymn To Demeter Research Paper
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter can be used to explain the origins of arranged marriages. In Ancient Greece, in was common for women to be married off without concern for how the mother of the bride personally felt about the marriage. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter shows how Persephone is taken away from Demeter as what can be perceived an arranged marriage. This is later complicated by how Demeter becomes reunited with Persephone.
In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, gets forcibly taken by Hades to the underworld as his wife with the approval of Zeus, her father. Persephone was not aware prior to being taken that Zeus and Hades had agreed that she would be his wife. Demeter also had no idea this had happened until
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No one seemed to care about how Demeter felt about the situation until she withheld fertility to the earth resulting in the the mortals becoming unable to give sacrifice to the immortals. This bothered Zeus, so he commanded Hermes to bring Persephone to Demeter. When Demeter was finally reunited with Persephone, she found out that Persephone had eaten food from the underworld which meant that Persephone was only able to spend 8 months on Olympus and 4 months in the underworld. Traditionally women would not have been able to do this, but Demeter was a powerful god and able to use her power to achieve her goal. Even so, Demeter being able to get Persephone back even for only 8 months out of the year was very uncharacteristic of how arranged marriage worked in Greece as women were rarely given power in that situation.
The notion that the Homeric Hymn to Demeter may be the origin of arranged marriage gets complicated when Demeter finally gains power in the situation by making the mortals unable to sacrifice to the gods resulting in Persephone’s return. Because Demeter had the power to get Persephone back from the underworld, the hymn become less characteristic of how a traditional arranged marriage would have
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