? Demeter took the name of the
old Roman goddess Ceres, a goddess of fertility, about whom we know just
enough to assert that she belonged to the old religion of Numa and that
she was at heart quite a different person from Demeter. All the rest is
lost, submerged under the new Demeter-Ceres with her temple built by
Greek architects and her April games. It is this new Ceres who soon
develops an extraordinary political importance because her temple is to
the Plebeians as a class what the temple of Minerva is to the unions of
organised labour. It is there that they have their meeting-place, and
the temple itself is always their treasury as contrasted with the Saturn
temple, the treasury of the state as a whole. The very officers of the
Plebeians, the famous Plebeian aediles, get their name from association
with this temple (_aedes_). This political side of her activity is the
only real advantage, except the grain itself, connected with her
importation; the two form at best a poor economic compensation for the
ever increasing immoral effects of the public games of Ceres.

But though Ceres is the most important of the three deities economically
and politically, we must not forget the other two, both of whom are
interesting, though one of them more for what she is not than for what
she is. Along with Demeter came Dionysos and Demeter's daughter Kore:
the three were associated in the solemn mysteries of Eleusis, but none
of the beauty of these ideas went over into the Roman cult. Demeter was
merely the deified grain-traffic, and Dionysos was little else than the
god of wine, while poor Kore fell out without any particular content for
a curious reason that we shall see in a moment. The only old Roman deity
with whom Dionysos could be identified was the god Liber, who had had a
rather interesting history, and who had done enough along the line of
self-development to deserve a better fate than to be crushed to
insignificance under the prominence of his new namesake. Liber was at
this time a flourishing god of fertility and, since the introduction of
the grape into Italy, especially the patron of the fruit of the vine,
but he had made his own career, and there was a time when he had no
individuality of his own but was merely a cult-adjective of the great
god Juppiter, the giver of all fertility in every phase of life. Thus
out of the original Juppiter-Liber there had grown the independent god
Liber; and now this Liber lost his indi