[3] She was originally the central deity in Rome's so-called plebeian or Aventine Triad, then was paired with her daughter Proserpina in what Romans described as "the Greek rites of Ceres".

Faliscan ceres, Oscan kerrí 'Cererī' < *ker-s-ēi- < *ker-es-ēi-), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱerh₃-os ('nourishment, grain'), a derivative of the root *ḱerh₃-, meaning 'to feed'.

[5] Archaic cults to Ceres are well-evidenced among Rome's neighbours in the Regal period, including the ancient Latins, Oscans and Sabellians, less certainly among the Etruscans and Umbrians.

Ancient Roman etymologists thought that ceres derived from the Latin verb gerere, "to bear, bring forth, produce", because the goddess was linked to pastoral, agricultural and human fertility.

[7] Ceres was credited with the discovery of spelt wheat (Latin far), the yoking of oxen and ploughing, the sowing, protection and nourishing of the young seed, and the gift of agriculture to humankind; before this, it was said, man had subsisted on acorns, and wandered without settlement or laws.

After the race, foxes were released into the Circus, their tails ablaze with lighted torches, perhaps to cleanse the growing crops and protect them from disease and vermin, or to add warmth and vitality to their growth.

[14] In the ancient sacrum cereale a priest, probably the Flamen Cerialis, invoked Ceres (and probably Tellus) along with twelve specialised, minor assistant-gods to secure divine help and protection at each stage of the grain cycle, beginning shortly before the Feriae Sementivae.

Its opening offered the spirits of the dead temporary leave from the underworld to roam lawfully among the living, in what Warde Fowler describes as 'holidays, so to speak, for the ghosts'.

[34] The days when the mundus was open were among the very few occasions that Romans made official contact with the collective spirits of the dead, the Di Manes (the others being Parentalia and Lemuralia).

[36] Di Luzio observes that the Roman mundus shared functional and conceptual similarities with certain types of underground "pit altar" or megaron, used in Demeter's Thesmophoria.

[40] The rites of August 24 were held between the agricultural festivals of Consualia and Opiconsivia; those of October 5 followed the Ieiunium Cereris, and those of November 8 took place during the Plebeian Games.

As a whole, the various days of the mundus suggest rites to Ceres as the guardian deity of seed-corn in the establishment of cities, and as a door-warden of the afterlife, which was co-ruled during the winter months by her daughter Proserpina, queen-companion to Dis.

In Livy's history, Ceres is among the deities placated after a remarkable series of prodigies that accompanied the disasters of the Second Punic War: during the same conflict, a lightning strike at her temple was expiated.

[44] The complex and multi-layered origins of the Aventine Triad and Ceres herself allowed multiple interpretations of their relationships, beyond the humanised pattern of relations within the Triad; while Cicero asserts Ceres as mother to both Liber and Libera, consistent with her role as a mothering deity, Varro's more complex theology groups her functionally with Tellus, Terra, Venus (and thus Victoria) and with Libera as a female aspect of Liber.

Pigs offend her by their destructive rooting-up of field crops under her protection; and in the myth of Proserpina's abduction on the plains of Henna (Enna), her tracks were obscured by their trampling.

This species of temple is "clumsy, heavy roofed, low and wide, [its] pediments ornamented with statues of clay or brass, gilt in the Tuscan fashion".

"[50] During the early Imperial era, soothsayers advised Pliny the Younger to restore an ancient, "old and narrow" temple to Ceres, at his rural property near Como.

Ceres bears a torch, sometimes two, and rides in a chariot drawn by snakes; or she sits on the sacred kiste (chest) that conceals the objects of her mystery rites.

[54] Augustan reliefs show her emergence, plant-like from the earth, her arms entwined by snakes, her outstretched hands bearing poppies and wheat, or her head crowned with fruits and vines.

It also raises unanswered questions on the nature, history and character of these associations: the Triad itself may have been a self-consciously Roman cult formulation based on Greco-Italic precedents.

While Ceres' original Aventine cult was led by male priests, her "Greek rites" (ritus graecus Cereris) were exclusively female.

[71] Towards the end of the Second Punic War, around 205 BC, an officially recognised joint cult to Ceres and her daughter Proserpina was brought to Rome from Southern Italy (part of Magna Graecia) along with Greek priestesses to serve it.

[72] In Rome, this was known as the ritus graecus Cereris; its priestesses were granted Roman citizenship so that they could pray to the gods "with a foreign and external knowledge, but with a domestic and civil intention"; the recruitment of respectable matrons seems to acknowledge the civic value of the cult.

[75] In 133 BC, the plebeian noble and tribune Tiberius Gracchus bypassed the Senate and appealed directly to the popular assembly to pass his proposed land-reforms.

At the behest of the Sibylline oracle, the senate sent the quindecimviri to Ceres' ancient cult centre at Henna in Sicily, the goddess' supposed place of origin and earthly home.

A coin of Sulla shows Ceres on one side, and on the other a ploughman with yoked oxen: the images, accompanied by the legend "conditor" ("he who stores the grain") claim his rule (a military dictatorship) as regenerative and divinely justified.

The traditional, Cerean virtues of provision and nourishment were symbolically extended to Imperial family members; some coinage shows Claudius' mother Antonia as an Augusta, wearing the corona spicea.

[85] Under Nerva's later dynastic successor Antoninus Pius, Imperial theology represents the death and apotheosis of the Empress Faustina the Elder as Ceres' return to Olympus by Jupiter's command.

Imagery that represented the profitable business of commercial brewing showed the grain-goddess as a respectable matron and Liber-Bacchus as a gentleman; a wholesome picture of moral sobriety and restraint.

A misanthropic poem recited by Dmitri in Dostoevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, (part 1, Book 3, chapter 3) reflects on Ceres' heartbroken search for her lost daughter, and her encounter with the worst and most degraded of humanity.