Often closely identified with the Greek goddess Persephone and her mythology, Proserpina was the Roman goddess married to the ruler of the underworld (Dis) and the daughter of a fertility goddess (Ceres). Like Persephone, she was invoked, with her husband, in contexts relating to death and, with her mother, for fertility and family issues. The sacrum anniversarium Cereris was an annual Roman ceremony in which matrons and unmarried girls reenacted the myth of Ceres being reunited with Proserpina after her abduction by Dis. The ceremony reaffirmed the importance of the community’s fertility, matronal roles, and the mother/daughter ties that transcended the daughters’ transition to marriage (Spaeth 1996: 103–19). Several literary depictions of Proserpina’s abduction narrative also survive, notably by Ovid and Claudian.
In her role as queen of the underworld, Proserpina shared with Dis a vaguely defined super- visory role. Statius (Silv. 5.1.247–58) presents her as greeting the arrival of meritorious dead. As a force of death, though, Romans could also invoke her in curse tablets to harm enemies (Warmington 1940: 280–5). Probably also because of her association with death, Romans sometimes performed expiation rites to her after a crisis, as after the fire in Rome in 64 CE (Tac. Ann. 15.44.2). Proserpina and Dis were also invoked in the republican-era form of the Secular Games, a rite initially intended to ward off disease, but the emperor Augustus later reworked the ceremony to reduce the chthonic elements and focus on other gods (Turcan 2001: 45–6, 83–5; Feeney 1998: 28–38).
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