As regards the Greek goddess, the chief interest of her worshippers was concentrated on the myth which told how her only daughter Persephone (Proserpine) had been carried off in a chariot by Pluto, the god of the lower world, from the fields of Enna in Sicily, where she was gathering flowers; other districts also were assigned for this incident, but the Romans naturally preferred Enna as being the nearest. Demeter wandered over the earth searching for her daughter in vain, in her anguish refusing food or drink, and threatening a famine for mankind, till Zeus agreed to allow Persephone in future to live half the year with her mother on the earth. The other half she must remain with Pluto in the lower world. From the myth so far it was a∣ obvious step to think of Demeter as a mother always anxious for her child, yearning through half the year to see her again, and sad through the other half at the prospect of her leaving again. But a deeper meaning appears to have been found in the myth by those who were initiated into the mysteries of Eleusis, in which seems to have been taught the principle of a new life after death, founded on the return of Persephone to the upper world, or rather on the process of nature by which seed sown in the ground must first die and rot before it can yield new life, a process which the annual going and coming of Persephone was designed to illustrate. To make more explicit this connection of Demeter with seed-sowing, the myth tells how, in searching for her daughter, she was hospitably received among other places at Eleusis in Attica, and how, when leaving Eleusis, she gave to Triptolemus, the king’s son, her chariot drawn by winged snakes, with the injunction to travel over the world teaching men to cultivate grain as she had then begun to teach them. At the Thesmophoria, a festival in which only married women took part, Demeter was regarded as having instituted certain laws (θeσμo[) for regulating life, in particular the married life of women. In the Cretan myth of Demeter she was connected with a hero Jasion, said to have been the first to sow grain, to whom she bore a son, Plutos. Poseidon, the god of the sea, appears as repugnant to her in the myth, according to which she took the form of a horse to escape him, but was overtaken, and finally bore to him the winged horse Arion. It may have been with reference to this that she was figured in . an ancient image at Phigaleia as having a horse’s in place of a human head. Her attributes were a veil and diadem on her head, ears of corn or poppies in her hand. Her principal sacrifice consisted of pigs. Demeter was a daughter of Kronos and Rhea. Zeus was the father of Persephone.