tell me, how did he snatch you down to the misty dark,> and what did he trick you with, the mighty Hospitable One?”

Beautiful Persephone spoke to her in reply: “Well, mother, I will tell you everything just as it was. When coursing Hermes came swift with the message from father Zeus and the other Heavenly Ones that I should leave the Darkness, so that you might set eyes on me and cease from your wrath and your dreadful resentment against the immortals, I at once jumped up in joy; but he surreptitiously got a pomegranate seed into me, a honey-sweet food, and made me taste it against my will. As to how he snatched me up through the crafty design of Zeus my father, and took me off to the recesses of the earth, I will explain and go through it all, just as you ask. We were all frolicking in the lovely meadow—Leucippe and Phaeno and Electra and Ianthe, and Melite and Iache and Rhodeia and Callirhoe, and Melobosis and Tyche and Ocyrhoe with eyes like buds, and Chryseis and Ianeira and Acaste and Admete, and Rhodope and Plouto and captivating Calypso, and Styx and Ourania and lovely Galaxaura, and Pallas the battle-rouser and Artemis profuse of arrows—and we were picking lovely flowers, a mixture of gentle saffron and iris and hyacinth and rosebuds and lilies, wondrous to behold, and narcissus that the broad earth put out like saffron. I was