"The variations usually have to do with the time of her abduction by Hades," Martin says. "In our oldest evidence the so-called Hymn to Demeter, from around 600 B.C.E., she clearly is carried off in springtime. She's attracted by a blooming narcissus flower in a meadow full of other sorts of blossoms, and it then acts like a trigger on a trap door — she goes to pluck it and Hades flies up on his chariot."
But Martin says audiences had trouble with that tale from the start. "Already in ancient times, however, people were wrestling with this whole story both because it is so touching and because it was tightly connected with the all-important Mysteries of Eleusis outside Athens, that promised some sort of eternal happiness after life for everyone," he says. "They tried to explain the details in various ways."
One of those ways involves manipulating the often confusing, usually disturbing overlaps in Greek mythology family trees. "It is weird and disturbing that Zeus, first of all, who is the father of Persephone by his own sister Demeter, basically allows his brother, Hades, to abduct (or even rape) her," Martin says. "In ancient times, allegory was the main tool used to interpret unpleasant or opaque stories. So Persephone was allegorized as spring or the growth of crops; her mother was goddess of grain (called in Latin ceres, hence 'cereal'), making the equation easier. And her disappearance was taken to equal the dead of winter when crops do not grow. So some versions have her disappear in autumn, to make the facts fit the story."
There are other variations too, particularly around the relationship between Persephone and her mom. "In the Hymn to Demeter, Persephone does come back to see her mother, after a spectacular sort of hunger strike by Demeter, who causes crops to wither because she finds out her daughter has been abducted and gets Zeus to tell Hades to let the girl return to Earth," Martin says. "Demeter has the power because without her grain, there can be no sacrifices to the gods, so they get starved out, as it were." Martin is careful to point out that in this particular version, it's not the disappearance of Persephone that causes the lack of crops, but the anger of Demeter. "And again, it's not winter but late spring/summer," he says.