About the composition itself there are many difficult
questions, with various surmises as to why it has remained only in
this unique manuscript of the end of the fourteenth century.
Portions of the text are missing, and there are probably some
additions by later hands; yet most scholars have admitted that it
possesses some of the true characteristics of the Homeric style, some
genuine echoes of the age immediately succeeding that which produced
the Iliad and the Odyssey. Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated
version of it.
"I begin the song of Demeter"--says the prize-poet, or the
Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy places--"the song of Demeter
and her daughter Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away by the
consent of Zeus, as she played, apart from her mother, with the deep-
bosomed daughters of the Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft
grass--roses and the crocus and fair violets and flags, and
hyacinths, and, above all, the strange flower of the narcissus, which
the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth for the
first time, to snare the footsteps of the flower-like girl. A
hundred [84] heads of blossom grew up from the roots of it, and the
sky and the earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the scent
thereof.
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