His conqueror, taking with him the girl, brought her back to Lepsína, just at the season when spring was coming and the flowers were beginning to appear in the fields. Then he went, as he had vowed, and shut himself up in the monastery. S. Demetra, having received back her daughter, went away with her. What became of them afterwards, no one knows; but since that time the fields of Lepsína, thanks to the blessing of the Saint, have not ceased to be fertile.'
It would be superfluous to point out the numerous details of this legend which accord explicitly with the account of the rape of Persephone in the Homeric hymn. The interspersion of Christian ideas and reminiscences of Turkish domination and stories of fabulous monsters may strike oddly on the ear unacquainted with the vagaries of Greek folk-stories. Yet the most sceptical could not doubt that the tradition which forms the groundwork of the legend is none other than the old myth, or that the four chief actors in the drama are none other than Demeter and Core, Pluto and Triptolemus. Pluto, masked as a Turkish agha, is perhaps the least readily recognisable; yet in one way as a relic of ancient tradition the part he plays is the most remarkable in the whole legend. It is to Souli in Epirus that he carries off the maiden. Now this is the district of the ancient Cocytus and Acheron; here was one of the descents to the lower world; here Aidoneus held sway; and here, in one version of the myth[1], was laid the scene of the rape of Persephone by that god. Hence the claims of two separate localities to the same mythological distinction seem by some means to have become incorporated in the single modern legend.
In the same part of Epirus, according to Lenormant, a similar story to that which he heard at Eleusis concerning S. Demetra's daughter, is told, mutatis mutandis, of S. Demetrius: but since either a sense of propriety or a want of knowledge prevented him from publishing the details of it, the mere statement that it existed is of no great value. But the legend which he narrates in full may I think be accepted as genuine without corroboration on the grounds of its own structure. Lenormant has indeed been accused of mala fides in his own department of archaeology and of tampering with some of the inscriptions which he published;
- ↑ Euseb. Chron. p. 27. Plut. Vita Thes. XXXI. ad fin.
