Blog: Bad Boys and Worse Verse: Hades and Persephone in Translation, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Young/New Adult Fiction
By ToriLee | September 26, 2023
Blog: Persephone’s Pomegranate Seed and My 5-Year Visa
By Ximing Lu | November 1, 2021
I recently taught the troubling Homeric Hymn to Demeter in my Classical Myth course at Bucknell. On the one hand, this hymn is a story of violence. Three quarters into the hymn, readers find Hades “sitting in the bed with his bashful, very unwilling, wife who yearned for her mother” (ἥμενον ἐν λεχέεσσι σὺν αἰδοίῃ παρακοίτι, | πόλλ᾽ ἀεκαζομένῃ μητρὸς πόθῳ, 343–344). As Jermaine Bryant and Ship of Theses have recently discussed on Twitter, this scene is clear evidence that Hades has sexually assaulted Persephone.