Tyldesley Joyce - Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome

This is a map of ancient Greece and Rome.

Greece is a southern European country with a long coastline and thousands of islands scattered around the mainland in the Mediterranean Sea. Many hundreds of years ago, this land and its islands were divided into many small kingdoms or city-states. The people who lived in these city-states all spoke the ancient Greek language and all worshipped the same gods and goddesses, but each city-state had its own king and its own laws. Sometimes the city-states were friendly towards each other, and sometimes they fought fiercely against each other. The largest city-states were called Athens, Sparta, Thebes and Corinth.

The ancient Romans lived slightly later than the ancient Greeks, in the European country that we now call Italy. They worshipped the same gods and goddesses as the Greeks and told many of the same stories about them. However, they gave the gods and goddesses different names. So, Zeus the king of the gods in ancient Greece, was known as Jupiter the king of the gods in ancient Rome. The wise Greek goddess Athena became the wise Roman Minerva, and Aphrodite the ancient Greek goddess of love, was known as Venus in Rome.

The goddess Demeter worked very hard every day. It was her job to make sure that the people of Greece always had enough food to eat. She made the crops grow in the fields, the fruit ripen on the trees and the flowers bloom in the gardens. She taught the farmers how to plough the fields, and how to scatter seeds on the land. When the grain and the vegetables and the fruit had grown, she taught the farmers how to collect the plentiful harvest, and how to store it safely in their barns. Thanks to Demeters hard work, the people of Greece never went hungry.

Demeter had just one child: a beautiful daughter, named Persephone. Persephone was as good and kind and cheerful as she was beautiful. She was a happy girl, who loved to sing and play in the warm sunlight while her mother was busy helping the people to grow their food. Everyone loved Persephone, but Demeter loved her most of all.

One sunny day, Persephone was singing and picking pretty flowers in the green meadow when Hades drove by in a golden chariot pulled by four fierce black horses. Instantly, Hades fell head over heels in love with the beautiful Persephone. He wanted her to be his wife, and to live with him forever. But Hades was no ordinary man. He was the god-king of the Underworld; the dark and cold land where the dead live as ghosts. The sun never shone in the Underworld. There were no green meadows, and no pretty flowers to pick. Hades knew that Demeter would never allow him to marry Persephone and take her to live in the gloomy Underworld, away from the warmth and sunlight that she loved. And so he decided not to tell Demeter what he was going to do. He simply reached down and dragged Persephone, kicking and screaming, into his chariot. Ignoring the girls terrified screams, Hades drove as fast as he could away from the green meadow.