Persephone is remembered today as a gentle goddess of spring, but in the ancient world she was a queen of the underworld so feared that people avoided speaking her name, calling her Despoina, the mistress, or Nestis, the fasting one, instead. This episode reconstructs her biography from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and archaeological records, starting with her early life as Kore, the maiden, and the moment Hades bursts from the earth in a black chariot to abduct her, taking a herd of pigs down with her, a detail that explains the pig sacrifices of the Thesmophoria festival.

The conversation follows Demeter's agricultural strike that starves the gods of sacrificial smoke, the pomegranate seeds that bind Persephone to the underworld, and the seasonal compromise that mirrors how Mediterranean farmers stored grain underground in pithoi during th ...