Demeter
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Natalie tells the powerful and painful story of Demeter's fight to get justice for her daughter Persephone.
Hades conspires with his siblings Zeus and Gaia to abduct Persephone and force her to live with him in the underworld as his wife. Many versions of this story are sanitized for children but the original is not. It is clear that Persephone is tricked and trafficked, that she hates and fears Hades and never becomes accustomed to life among the dead. And that her mother Demeter is furious and grief-stricken.
The light is gone from Demeter's life and consequently from the world: crops fail and the people starve. It's only now that Zeus takes note of her pleas to get Persephone back. He doesn't really care about the people but he misses their gifts and praise.
In a tour de force solo performance recorded at the Hay festival, Natalie reclaims the goddess' story for our times. A story of a mother's love and fury that speaks painfully to us across millennia.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.5 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Demeter. |
| 0:17.9 | Demeter is one of the Olympian goddesses. |
| 0:21.2 | She is a daughter of Kronos and Ria. |
| 0:23.6 | So she is sister to Zeus, to Hera, to Hades and more. |
| 0:27.8 | She is also, and this is the thing we probably know her for best, |
| 0:31.0 | the mother of Persephone. |
| 0:32.9 | The father of Persephone is Zeus. |
| 0:35.4 | So I realise this is one of those quite weird things where incest is very |
| 0:38.7 | bad for people. Fine with gods. Just don't worry about it. It's absolutely fine. Fine, fine. So, |
| 0:44.8 | Mother of Persephone, and she is the goddess of agriculture and of grain. So she's not quite the |
| 0:49.5 | same thing as Mother Earth, right? Although that's sort of what her name means. There's a whole separate goddess for that in Greek myth called Gaia, and she is a sort of primordial goddess, who is the mother of the giants and the titans, including Kronos and Ria. So technically she is Demeter's grandmother. Got it? There's not going to be an exam. It's fine. So Demeter has quite a difficult early life, |
| 1:13.0 | by which I mean that Kronos, her father, as her siblings and she are born, swallows them whole. |
| 1:18.8 | Because he's paranoid that one of his children will grow up to overthrow him, because that really happens in their family. |
| 1:25.5 | It's like a big thing. He overthrew his father. He's terrified. A child |
| 1:29.0 | whatever. I always think of it when you see one of those really aggressive, I'm not saying it's |
| 1:32.9 | all dads, I'm saying football dads in the park. And they're yelling at a tiny child because |
| 1:39.6 | they're not kicking a ball properly. And you're like, dude, if anyone's behavior is improper in this context |
| 1:45.7 | it would probably be you since you don't play for England and nor does he and I'll tell you why |
| 1:51.9 | he's three stop screaming at him to kick it with a straight leg what does that even mean he doesn't |
| 2:00.1 | know he's three but to the ancient |
| 2:02.6 | Greeks that would have looked like a baffling situation |
... |
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