• 1 .The tensions inherent in the adjectives ‘Orphic’ and ‘Bacchic’ are visible in the title of Graf – (...)
• 2 .Diodorus Siculus, 27.4.2.
• 3 .A few dedications refer to her simply as ‘the goddess’: Hinz (1998), p. 205–206.

1“Pure I come from the pure, Queen of the Chthonian Ones.” This is the opening line of a gold leaf — one element of a geographically and chronologically disparate corpus that has variously been described as ‘Orphic,’ ‘Pythagorean,’ and ‘Bacchic’ — from the site of Thurii in northern Calabria.¹ The speaker is the soul of the initiate who presents the credentials that guarantee her a privileged status in the afterlife. The text goes on to identify the Chthonian Queen as Persephone and to characterize the initiate addressing her as a supplicant. A similar relationship can be glimpsed between Persephone and her worshippers in her cult at Epizephyrian Lokri in southern Calabria which Diodorus in his own time knew as the most illustrious in Italy.² We lack the written evidence to know how this Persephone was addressed by her worshippers, but the visual evidence depicts her as a majestic goddess presiding over the lands of the dead, yet approachable by worshippers who came to seek help with the crises of the living, especially marriage and childbirth.³ I propose that the similarities between the goddesses expressed in these two media are neither superficial nor incidental.

• 4 .Leaves 3–7, 1, 8.
• 5 .In support of a unified context for the tablets: Riedweg (2002); Betz (2008); Bernabé – Jiménez (2 (...)

2In the gold leaf from Thurii Persephone enjoys an unusually prominent status compared to her representation in other texts across the corpus, and an unusually intimate relationship with the initiate. Her prominence is evident in other leaves from Magna Graecia as well (all five from Thurii, one from Hipponion and one from Entella),⁴ but this Persephone-phenomenon has received scant attention, largely because work on the leaves has tended to seek a unifying context across their broad geographical and chronological extent.⁵ The prominence of Persephone in this geographically defined sub-corpus, I argue, is owed to the influence of the local Lokrian cult upon the itinerant traditions expressed in the texts of the gold leaves. By importing the familiar Lokrian Persephone into the conceptual world of the gold leaves, the purveyors of these objects created a docking point for their innovative practices within established systems of religious experience.

• 6 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 50–65, provide a comprehensive overview of the history of scholarship.
• 7 .Bernabé – Jiménez (2011) consider the leaves expressions of Orphic practice and distinguish emphat (...)
• 8 .I use the phrase ‘Dionysiac mystery cult’ to differentiate the practices in question from public w (...)

3Created for deposition in graves and inscribed with ritual instructions, the leaves are self-evidently eschatological. They contain information necessary to guide their bearers to an afterlife status that is somehow privileged, distinguished from the fate awaiting those without special connections or instructions. The first scholars of the leaves identified them with a religious movement they designated Orphism and which Wilamowitz and others attacked as little more than a modern construction.⁶ The debate has continued into the 21^st century with one camp emphatically asserting the place of the leaves in an Orphic practice while others have compromised with the hybrid designation “Orphic-Bacchic,” though not to universal satisfaction.⁷ With a growing communis opinio I identify Dionysiac mystery cult, probably informed by texts attributed to Orpheus, as the primary source of such expectations: through initiation the initiate achieves the promise of a better fate after death, distinct from that of the uninitiated and unredeemed.⁸ In conjunction with or in addition to other offerings, the practitioners who created the leaves were offering their customers new or enhanced identities as Bacchic initiates.

• 9 .For near-contemporary usage of ‘orpheotelestai’ see Theophrastus, Characters 16.12; Plato, Republi (...)
• 10 .Cf. Redfield (1991), p. 106: “For the Greeks «Orpheus» was most often a literary persona; Orpheus (...)
• 11 .Graf (2011).
• 12 .The appreciation of local influence also points to the non-exclusivity of these cultic affiliation (...)

4Already in the fourth century we hear of ‘orpheotelestai,’ apparently itinerant figures who offered initiatory and other ritual experiences to their customers on an individual basis and for a price.⁹ Without endorsing the potential implication of the term, namely that Orphism was a reified religious movement or ‘church,’ it is reasonable to speak of practitioners who drew in part on traditions gathered under the authority of Orpheus, just as other texts could be collected under the name of Homer or Anakreon.¹⁰ As Graf argues, the attribution to Orpheus, a quintessential poet with access to privileged knowledge, points to the cosmological and eschatological orientation of the writings gathered under this heading, qualities unsurprising in texts associated with Dionysiac mysteries.¹¹ These practitioners were not, missionary-like, creating Orphic communities. Instead they were offering personalized religious expression and experiences to individuals and groups already integrated into other modes of religious practice.¹²

• 13 .See supra, n. 5.
• 14 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 57, 65.
• 15 .Persephone has been variously conceptualized as the “protagonist” of the leaves (Bernabé – Jiménez(...)
• 16 .Bernabé – Jiménez (2011).

5The gold leaves are now usually considered as a corpus¹³ and a single interpretative framework is constructed to explain their diverse contents, a method Graf terms a maximalist approach.¹⁴ On this model, Persephone’s presence across the corpus should be explained by a single mythological or ritual context. At a very basic level, the presence of an underworld goddess in eschatological texts is hardly surprising, but these maximalist readings attempt to identify a single cultic and mythological pedigree for the Persephone who appears in the leaves.¹⁵ Bernabé and Jiménez recognize that the initiatory milieu of the leaves could lead us to think of the Kore of Eleusinian cult, but they are dissuaded from this conclusion by the dearth of gold leaves found in Attica. Instead, with a majority of other interpreters of the last several decades, they understand Persephone’s presence in the leaves as dependent upon her status as the mother of Dionysos.¹⁶

• 17 .E.g. Athanassakis – Wolkow (2013): Hymn 29. For models of the dating of these hymns and possible g (...)
• 18 .How did this eschatological myth develop? In Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 70–73, Johnston develops t (...)
• 19 .First discussed in connection with the leaves by Comparetti – Smith (1882). See Graf – Johnston (2 (...)

6Here we return again to the troublesome role of Orphic tradition since Persephone’s maternal status is constructed from Orphic eschatologies recorded in the Orphic Hymns which, in their current forms, probably date to the early centuries of the common era.¹⁷ Moreover, Persephone’s personal interest in the fate of the initiate is derived from the controversial myth of the Orphic anthropogony.¹⁸ According to this myth the titans, motivated by jealousy, tore Dionysos limb from limb. As descendants of the titans, humans inherited the guilt for this crime and must individually pay the penalty to assuage Persephone’s anger.¹⁹ Within this mythic context, Persephone’s power in the leaves and her relationship to humans is informed by her role as mother to Dionysos, just as her Eleusinian power is conditioned by the status of missing daughter opposite her grieving mother, Demeter. She is, in other words, fitted neatly into a mythological familial role that preordains and preexplains her attitude toward the initiates who seek a welcome to the privileged reaches of the afterlife.

• 20 .Plato, Meno, 81 b. For potential ties to a Pythagorean milieu cf. Empedocles, fr. 115 (ed. Diels – (...)
• 21 .On this fragment and its potential representation of the Orphic mother/son relationship see Lloyd-(...)

7Pindar fr. 133 (ed. Maehler) is often cited in support of the antiquity of this tradition, but, being both fragmentary and Pindaric, the text is hardly self-explanatory. Persephone is depicted as receiving a penalty from souls who are subsequently elevated to a different status, but what that status is or why a penalty is owed remains unclear. Quoted in Plato’s Meno with reference to the immortality of the soul, it is not evident that the lines describe the same privileged status envisioned by the leaves or whether they are better linked to another (Pythagorean?) milieu.²⁰ Moreover, as the text stands we have no mention of Dionysos and are thus confronted once again with the problem of influences and origins.²¹

• 22 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 70–73. Johnston takes the term from Lévi-Strauss (1962).

8If we take Pindar’s fragment not as early evidence for the influence of Orphic writings, but, instead, as an independent data point for the importance of Persephone as powerful underworld goddess interested in the fate of the soul, an alternate picture begins to emerge. Perhaps Persephone’s association with the underworld — an aspect of her cultic personae across the Greek world and already clearly attested in the imaginative underworld of Odyssey 10 — was sufficient motivation for a number of different bricoleurs, to use Sarah Iles Johnston’s term, to integrate her into their diverse schemata.²² On this model her status as the mother of Dionysos reflects one way of integrating the underworld goddess par excellence into a myth focused on the soteriological power of Dionysos. This is, in fact, exactly how Johnston envisions the development of the myth of the Orphic anthropogony. One of the questions I wish to raise here is whether this myth was firmly established in the fourth century BCE when the first gold leaves were created and whether it should be used as the dominant model for understanding the presence of the goddess within these ritual texts. Alternately, since the leaves from Magna Graecia are among the earliest in the corpus, it could be that it was precisely because of the goddess’ prominence at Lokri that our practitioners integrated her into the landscape of their Dionysiac initiatory practices.

• 23 .For Edmonds (2004), p. 64–82, this reading has gender and class implications which I would want to (...)

9Whether or not the mother-son relationship between Persephone and Dionysos was understood as a foundational element of the universe expressed in the gold leaves, too much emphasis on any single mythological framework runs the danger of limiting the questions that we ask about the relationship between individual leaves and their individual contexts. Edmonds has expressed the eloquent desire “that we read the leaves as the intimate documents that they are, reflecting the values of those buried with them.”²³ By examining how leaves draw on shared narratives and imagery while expressing their own emphases, we can better understand the influence of local belief systems on the reception and development of the gold leaf texts. Such contextualized readings can enrich and deepen our understanding of the appeal that the initiatory concepts expressed within the leaves exerted at different places and in different times. The prominence of Persephone in the leaves found throughout Magna Graecia functions as a test case for this nuanced approach to the corpus. By reading her prominence in the leaves as a direct result of the influence of local Lokrian cult it becomes possible to glimpse the malleability of the traditions behind the leaves and the points of contact with local practice that allowed productive engagement between the two.

• 24 .Zuntz (1971), p. 287–393.
• 25 .Zuntz (1971), p. 312–313.
• 26 .Edmonds (2004), p. 57–61.

10I am not the first to perceive the Lokrian Persephone in the gold leaves, but earlier interpretations of her presence have been hedged in by another enduring tendency in scholarship on the leaves: the desire to categorize and divide them into subgroups drawn from distinct traditions. Zuntz, in his magisterial Persephone, identified two groups of leaves that developed what he saw as Pythagorean traditions quite independently of each other: his group B comprised tablets focused on Memory while his group A (including the metrical leaves from Thurii) was characterized by the centrality of Persephone and the motif of ‘falling into milk.’²⁴ He sees this Persephone as a Magna Graecian figure (he points to the Lokrian evidence) who is associated with life as well as death.²⁵ Edmonds maintains the same divisions in his 2004 study of afterlife journeys in a chapter entitled “Roadmaps of Déviance: the ῾Orphic’ gold tablets” in which he identifies the Persephone who appears in the Thurian gold leaves with the Lokrian goddess, arguing that her nature in that cult as the queen of the dead should frame the way we interpret the Thurian tablets and the aspirations of their bearers.²⁶ This interpretation takes the first and important step of seeing the Lokrian goddess in the leaves, but then uses that insight as a wall separating these leaves from the others rather than as a productive site for understanding the integration of local tradition into personalized initiatory practice.

• 27 .The only leaf from Magna Graecia that does not fit this pattern is one from Petelia (2). Its prove (...)
• 28 .Leaf 9. For this text see Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 133–135; Pugliese Carratelli (1988), p. 168 (...)

13Persephone plays an important, even central, role in many of the leaves across the far-flung corpus, but her nature is uniquely characterized in the texts from Magna Graecia. These leaves include the five found in two ‘timpone’ tombs at Thurii (fourth century BCE), and the single leaves from Hipponion (c. 400 BCE) and Entella (third century BCE).²⁷ The most striking presence among these tablets is a χθονίων βασίλεια, a queen of the underworld and its denizens. She appears in the three leaves from the ‘timpone piccolo’ at Thurii, probably in the leaf from Hipponion, and possibly in the one from Entella. She is also present in a leaf from Rome, but it is much later than the others (third century CE) and is most useful as an indication that its creator still recognized the Queen of the Underworld as a central figure in the context he was evoking.²⁸ Her presence in the Thurii leaves is particularly prominent: the leaf-bearer speaks directly to her, and claims both a common descent and an ongoing relationship with the goddess.

• 31 .By using ‘consort’ here to describe a hypothetical Hades I am highlighting Persephone’s regal stat (...)
• 32 .For possible identifications see Zuntz (1971), p. 310–311; Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 102–110.
• 33 .Cf. Gould (1973) who identified xenia as the outcome of supplication; Naiden (2006) recognizes the (...)

14The goddess is front and center, in the texts of the leaves as well, apparently, as in her place within the realms of the dead. There is no infernal consort here, or at least no equal partner.³¹ Other divinities are addressed, but their secondary position suggests the queen’s primacy and the fact that two masculine names occupy this secondary position makes it hard to think that one of the two should be understood as the queen’s consort and equal. The notion of hierarchy is intensified by the tacked-on inclusion of ‘the other immortal gods’ and, even more emphatically, ‘the other gods and the other daimones.’ Whoever Eukles and Eubouleus are — and the suggestions that these might be cult titles for Dionysos or euphemistic references to Hades deserve consideration³² — the queen stands first. She is not only the most authoritative figure in the underworld landscape — she is also the one with whom the leaf-bearer claims the closest relationship. In the second text the human speaker approaches Persephone as a suppliant. If we think about the nature of supplication elsewhere in Greek thought this implies a relationship of mutual responsibility according to which the one of whom something is asked is bound to the one asking.³³ The desired outcome is access to ‘the seats of the pure,’ a place or state of being apart from the lot of most of the dead.

• 34 .Leaves 26 a and b.
• 35 .Camassa (1995) explains all instances of ‘falling into milk’ as the identification of the mystes w (...)

15More intimate yet is the expression in the first text above: “I have descended beneath the lap (κόλπον) of the Lady (Δεσποίνας), the Chthonian Queen”. This expression is pretty clearly integrated into a broader complex of initiatory experience and should not be separated from it, but the repetition of lines 6 and 8 is intriguing: could it be that the escape from the circle is somehow paralleled to the experience in the lap of the goddess? Even that they are two ways of alluding to the single (ritual?) experience that permitted the approach to the longed-for crown? The kid falling into milk is clearly echoed in the parallel animal imagery in leaves from Pelinna where Persephone is once again present, but no reference there is made to intimate interaction between her and the mystes.³⁴ Instead, those leaves emphasize the centrality of Bacchos to the initiatory context and attribute to Persephone the (passive?) role of receiving the initiated.³⁵

• 36 .Homer, Odyssey 10.491, 534, 564; 11.47. Odyssey 10.508–512 seems to distinguish between Persephone (...)

17As in the first of the Thurii texts, an unidentified speaker hails the leaf-bearer as becoming a god instead of a man and a kid fallen into milk. The speaker then encourages the leaf-bearer to rejoice and to continue on to the desired destination: the holy meadows and groves of Persephone. The continuing path that the soul must follow looks back to the first lines of the leaf which, like those from Entella, Hipponion, and Petelia, offers directions for the navigation of the underworld, though in far less detail than those other texts. Though she is not addressed as queen in this leaf, Persephone holds a position of power within the underworld landscape. Specifically attributed to her is that region to which the initiate aspires, somehow set apart from the open-entry section and presumably the referent also of ‘the seats of the pure.’ In this leaf, at least, Persephone is not only the gatekeeper who allows the initiated to pass through her realm to a better, more selective place, but the deity (or one of the deities) to whom that place belongs. The Homeric tone of the last line encourages us to think of the powerful and feared Persephone of the Odyssey.³⁶

• 37 .Leaf 4. Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 139–141, argue for approaching the text as a kind of ‘word-se (...)
• 38 .Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 148: ‘counselor’ is an epithet of Zeus (Il. 8.22; 17.339) and functio (...)
• 39 .Until her appearance in the later Orphic Hymn 29 (line 6).

18The importance of Persephone for the individual buried in the ‘timpone grande’ is further indicated by the contents of a leaf that enclosed the one just addressed: this ‘envelope leaf’ consists of a dense table of letters from which editors have been excavating sense since its discovery.³⁷ While the text is still debated, some words have been consistently recognized. Among these are three apparent references to Persephone: the Kore of Demeter (Κόρρα<ι> […] Δήμητρος, line 2), the chthonic Kore (Κόρη Χθονία, line 8), and simply Kore (κούρην, line 9) who is snatched by someone described as μήστωρ. Whether or not we credit these descriptions to Orphic or other traditions, the Kore thus obscurely evoked is to be identified by her status as daughter, as an underworld presence, and (apparently) as the object of an abduction.³⁸ Kore as daughter of Demeter could be fit neatly into the ‘Orphic anthropogony,’ or she could be associated with the two goddesses as they were worshipped at Eleusis; Chthonian Kore, too, conforms to both Orphic and Eleusinian traditions, but she also resonates with the Chthonian Queen who is unique to this region.³⁹ This mysterious leaf may demonstrate the cooperative interaction that I am suggesting between the traditions imported with the leaves and the existing practices in the landscape of Magna Graecia. The ‘Kore’s of this puzzle, if we recognize the text as significant and not primarily intended as a hindrance to the uninitiated, look to a goddess of central importance to the initiate and allude to her several aspects which converge in the envisioned afterlife encounter.

• 40 .Leaves 25, 29; 10–14, 16, 18.

19The situation in the Hipponion and Entella leaves is less straightforward in that neither of them, in their current states, actually mentions Persephone. I say ‘actually’, because the Hipponion leaf comes very close and the Entella leaf might well have done so — once. These leaves offer detailed guidance through an underworld landscape that has clear affinities with underworld spaces described in leaves from Thessaly and Crete.⁴⁰

• 41 .Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 245–248, as also West (1975), p. 233.
• 42 .Hymn, 29.6.
• 43 .Bernabé – Jiménez (2008), p. 48–49.
• 44 .Orthography in the leaves varies widely; or as Zuntz (1971), p. 291, puts it, “the writing on [one (...)

20In contrast to these similar leaves from other regions, however, an unusual figure appears in the Hipponion text: the hυποχθονίōι βασιλε͂ϊ. Now, as the text stands this should be translated — as Graf and Johnston do, following Graf’s edition — ‘to the Chthonian King.’ This is the epigraphically respectful thing to do, but I am inclined, to follow the edition of Bernabé and Jiménez in emending the text to read hυποχθονίōι βασιλεί<αι>.⁴¹ The support for this reading is twofold: a) though the adjective appears with other masculine nouns in both early and late Greek texts, the mysterious ‘Underworld King’ makes no other appearance while b) in a later Orphic hymn Persephone herself is described by the emended phrase.⁴² Then too, as Bernabé and Jiménez point out, the context leads us to expect Persephone in the underworld, while the identity of the alleged Chthonian King is not immediately obvious — would he be Hades? Dionysos himself?⁴³ It is necessary here to balance the danger of stepsistering our reading of the leaves into shoes too small for them with the risk of missing significant patterns by respecting the orthography on the leaves (and certainly this is not always respected).⁴⁴

• 45 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 16–17.

21The leaf from Entella poses a different challenge: it remains in private hands and unavailable for a closer examination of the current lacunae. As seen in the translation above, the current edition shows three lines beginning καί τοι δὴ […] καὶ τότε […] καὶ τότε […] Graf and Johnston recognize the parallel to the Hipponion leaf and suggest — emphasizing that this must remain pure supplement until further investigation — the possibility that the line might once again have depicted the guards announcing the leaf-bearer’s identity to the Chthonian Queen.⁴⁵ It has also been noted that the remnants of words beginning φ- and φε- in the last lines of the leaf could be the beginning of Persephone’s name. The late tablet from Rome has the ‘Queen of the Chthonian Ones’ with the motif of purity familiar from Thurii as well as the Mnemosyne-motif, suggesting a familiarity (though at what distance one can only guess) with multiple components of the older leaves from the region.

• 46 .Eleutherna: leaves 10–14; Mylopatomos: 16; Rethymnon: 18. Both of these latter leaves contain the (...)
• 47 .Leaves 15, 17.
• 48 .Amphipolis: leaf 30. One of the Persephone greetings is from Pella/Dion (31, late 4^th century), th (...)

22In Magna Graecia, then, we have a powerful Persephone, a ruler of the underworld worthy of the title Βασίλεια. Is this situation fundamentally different from the other leaves? While Persephone is present in the rest of the corpus, she is less central and never referred to by any royal title. In the collection of leaves from Eleutherna on Crete in which the underworld landscape is described with clear parallels to the Hipponion leaf she is completely absent (as in the similar leaves from Rethymnon and Mylopotamos).⁴⁶ A single contemporary leaf from Eleutherna reads simply ‘Greetings to Pluto and Persephone,’ while another from Rhethymnon reads ‘to Plouto, to Persephone.’⁴⁷ These texts suggest that her absence in the other leaves should not indicate her absence from the eschatological expectations of those buried with them. At the same time, Hades’ presence here — possibly as the dominant figure — introduces an important variation from the leaves discussed above. The situation in Macedonia is somewhat similar to these final Cretan leaves. Among the nine leaves found in Macedonia, only four offer texts that are more than simply the name of the bearer. One of these (Amphipolis, late fourth century BCE) declares the bearer sacred to Dionysos Bacchios; the other three offer greeting formulae: two to Persephone (Φερσεφόνηι), one to ‘the lord’ (τῷ Δεσπότει).⁴⁸ The remaining five leaves carry nothing but a name. If greetings are carried to Persephone it is reasonable to conclude that the leaf-bearer expected to encounter her in the underworld and the emphasis falls on her alone, without the Pluto-figure who preceded her in the Eleutherna leaf. Who, though, is the male lord who also receives greeting? He could be her counterpart, Pluto/Hades, or he could be Dionysos himself. However the question is resolved, this male figure inhabits some authoritative role in this eschatological structure which is not equally evident in the leaves from Magna Graecia. Meanwhile, the leaves from mainland Greece carry only single names (Elis) or μύστας/μύστης with or without a name (Aigion). We can develop from these leaves a scenario in which the inscribed name or title serves to introduce the leaf-bearer to the powers they encounter, but who exactly these are — Hades, Persephone, Dionysos? All of them together? — and what relationship the initiate bears to them is not indicated in the leaves. So far then, leaves from these other regions suggest a mystery context in which Persephone, though present, does not require the same emphasis as she does in the leaves from Magna Graecia.

• 49 .Leaf 25 (Pharsalus), 29 (unknown location in Thessaly).

23The Thessalian leaves present a more varied collection of texts within which Persephone is sometimes present, sometimes absent. A leaf from Pharsalus nearly parallels the Hipponion text, while a leaf from an unknown location in Thessaly bears a text very close to leaves from Eleutherna.⁴⁹ Persephone makes no appearance in either. In the two leaves from Pelinna, however, Persephone does appear, as do other appealing links to the Thurii leaves. The Pelinna leaves were found together in a single grave and are nearly identical to each other (with b lacking two lines that appear in a): I give the translation of a, with the lines missing from b in parentheses:

• 50 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 36–37, translate Βάκχιος αὐτὸς as ‘the Bacchic one himself’ and underst (...)
• 51 .Edmonds (2004), p. 57–61; Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 131–133.
• 52 .Cf. Graf (1993), p. 251–253.

24It was the publication of these two ivy-shaped tablets in 1987 which ended the neat division of the tablets into A and B groups and established that the mystery rites which lay behind the leaves were Bacchic in nature. The connection was indicated by the role played by Βάκχιος in the second line as well as the shape of the leaves.⁵⁰ The deciding voice, in the fate of this leaf-bearer, belongs to the god. The bearer is instructed: ‘tell Persephone that Bacchios himself released you.’ All the authority belongs to Bacchios here, while Persephone appears as something like his agent in the underworld.⁵¹ She is still the one whom the dead encounter, but her judgment is subordinate to his decision, presumably enacted in the experience of initiation.⁵² Here Persephone’s relationship to the initiate appears secondary: her function is to allow access based on Bacchios’ decision.

• 53 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 196–200.

26The first text consists mostly of passwords which the leaf-bearer must utter upon his approach to the underworld: man-child-thyrsos, and Brimo. The first, particularly the inclusion of the thyrsos, clearly refers to the context of Bacchic mysteries, while Sarah Iles Johnston has argued that Brimo is here a reference to a cult name of Persephone, or the name of a local goddess with whom she was identified.⁵³ The second, apparently spoken in the leaf-bearer’s voice, claims familiarity with the rites of Chthonian Demeter and the Mountain Mother.

• 54 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 204.
• 55 .Graf – Johnston (2013), p. 199. She points out that Brimo in conjunction with the other deities me (...)

27Johnston has recently put forward an argument that partially parallels what I propose here for the effect of the cult of Lokrian Persephone on the gold leaves of Magna Graecia. She sees a process at work in Pherae by which one of the practitioners who disseminated the tradition reflected in the leaves drew together several disparate strands to offer a ‘multi-generational’ tale of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos; one which drew on the “best parts of both the Bacchic and Eleusinian mysteries.”⁵⁴ She suggests that Brimo’s importance in this constellation results from “one or more ritual practitioners develop[ing] this strand of Bacchic mysteries in response to an already established importance of Brimo and her identification with Persephone in the area around Pherae.”⁵⁵ According to this argument Persephone’s local cult plays a constitutive role for these leaves as well. This argument also poses an important contrast to mine, though, in that the Brimo-model characterizes Persephone by emphasizing her place within a divine family. Following Johnston’s argument, these two leaves can be read as witnesses for a single context in which each element (Demeter, the Mountain Mother, Persephone/Brimo, Dionysos) has a role in the establishment and practice of mysteries in which Persephone’s role is inextricable from her status as daughter and mother. In contrast, in the leaves from Magna Graecia, Persephone’s personal power over the fate of the initiates is emphasized and she is not defined by her place within the familial structures familiar from Dionysiac and Eleusinian mystery traditions.

• 56 .Dating: ceramics from as early as c. 700 BCE appear at the site with dedications increasing c. 600 (...)
• 57 .Livy, 29.18.16–17. As a side note, this defensive behavior suggests that this Persephone has a def (...)

29The quantity and quality of votive dedications from the Persephoneion at Lokri join with the literary evidence to indicate an important Persephone cult whose fame reached beyond the boundaries of Lokri itself. The prominence of this sanctuary is one reason to believe that Lokrian Persephone enjoyed sufficient regional importance to influence developments and perceptions within other local cultic contexts. Founded around the same time as the colony itself, during the seventh century BCE, the cult endured into the Roman period where historical accounts of pillage offer a glimpse of its size and importance.⁵⁶ Livy recalls an attempt by the Lokrians to take the goddess’ treasure out of the extramural sanctuary and bring it into the city where it would be safe. The goddess, however, not only forbade it but also knocked down the defensive walls they tried to build around the sanctuary, insisting that she could take care of her own property.⁵⁷ This probably refers to the mid-sixth century battle of Sagra between Kroton and Lokri and is offered by Livy as a warning to men of his own time against menacing the sanctuary, thus indicating at least a perceived continuity of the cult from that time into Livy’s own.

• 58 .Hinz (1998), p. 204–205.

30Until the end of the twentieth century modern scholarship only knew of the Lokrian Persephoneion through such literary sources. Orsi’s excavations at Contrada Mannella outside the northwestern wall of the city revealed the site of the sanctuary including a pit filled with votive offerings from the seventh through the first half of the fifth century. These were apparently cleared from the existing sanctuary as part of a rebuilding campaign in the second half of the fifth century and buried under the newly constructed terrace. A treasury was then constructed there, as well as other small buildings in the course of the following centuries during which time votives continued to be deposited.⁵⁸ The archaeological material allows us to fill in the outlines of the shadowy Lokrian goddess, revealing a Persephone whose competencies resonate with the hopes enigmatically expressed in the gold leaves.

• 59 .Seaford (1987), p. 106–107, for an overview of the evidence; especially interesting is the makaris (...)
• 60 .Demeter’s absence: Redfield (2003), p. 209, 368. There is exactly one pinax-type (PLE 10/6) — numb (...)
• 61 .These votives include fruit (especially pomegranates), flowers and buds, wreaths, roosters, and do (...)

31As a goddess of the underworld and wife of Hades, a maiden, a bride, and a guardian of children, the Lokrian Persephone presided over moments of transition, times of altered identity and potential danger. Marriage and death share overlapping conceptual space elsewhere in Greek thought: women who die unmarried can be designated ‘brides of Hades’ and wedding imagery is often included in their funerary apparatus, while the tragedians get a lot of mileage out of interweaving the two themes.⁵⁹ The myth of Persephone’s abduction in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter — a myth closely related to Eleusinian cult — expresses and manages the anxiety attendant on these transitions by allowing the archetypal maiden to alternate eternally between her roles as daughter and wife. The Lokrian cult also deals with the abduction but expresses a different attitude to the experience of transition. Demeter is absent and the maiden Persephone does not return; she is permanently transformed and accepts her place and powers as Queen of the Underworld (Fig. 1).⁶⁰ Votives dedicated throughout centuries of cultic activity at the Persephoneion reflect concerns rooted in the experience of biological and social transitions.⁶¹ It was to Persephone that women turned for assistance at these times; as such, she was a goddess poised to resonate with the elective transitional experiences undertaken by initiates into the mystery practices reflected in the leaves.

• 62 .Schenal Pileggi (2011), p. 7–10: more than 5300 fragments which allow the reconstruction of more t (...)
• 63 .Debate continues over the correct interpretation of these scenes in terms of their individual cont (...)
• 64 .Though it would be a worthy endeavour, it is not my purpose here to fully explicate the cultic act (...)

32The most famous — and most iconographically detailed — votive dedications are the pinakes: rectangular clay tablets depicting mythological and cultic scenes associated with the sanctuary, made from molds and dedicated in great quantities.⁶² These are local Lokrian creations which begin to be produced at the end of the sixth century with the latest examples continuing into the late fifth century. Often fragmentary and highly varied, the pinakes depict a wide range of scenes, both human and divine, and objects associated with the cult site.⁶³ Because of their detail and their potential to evoke a ritual or mythical narrative — characteristics they share, in a way, with the gold leaves themselves — I base my analysis of the goddess in the representations of the pinakes. I focus on a series of images which capture a single moment of experience crystallized from the thick weave of perception and activity that constituted the cult.⁶⁴ These images draw the goddess into a set of experiences that map a mortal woman’s life, articulated in terms of childhood, marriage, and childbearing.

• 65 .PLE II.3 p. 242–243 n. 67: “Di questi tre livelli soltanto il primo ha una dimensione esclusivamen (...)

33Some of the images are usually read as mythological scenes, others as lived cultic practice. The distinction between these two categories should never be drawn too starkly, and in the pinakes it becomes particularly porous. An observation by the editors of PLE can be productively applied to a majority of these images: they simultaneously communicate meaning at the level of myth (the experience of the goddess), communal ritual (the festival activities carried out within and in direct reference to the sanctuary itself), and individual experience (offerings made on one’s own behalf outside of a calendrically-determined, community-based context).⁶⁵ These levels cannot be fully extricated from each other, but participate in an ambiguity which I think existed already at the time of their dedications.

• 66 .PLE Group 2. Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 56–60, has recently argued that some variations on this mot (...)
• 67 .This is what Zancani Montuoro (1954a) argued with the belief that they were purely mythological sc (...)
• 68 .Terrified bride: PLE 2/2, 2/4, 2/5, 2/7–9, 2/16, 2/18–19, 2/22; willing bride: 2/12, 2/13, 2/15, 2 (...)

34One of the most popular motifs is the abduction of a maiden by a man intent on carrying her away on his chariot.⁶⁶ These images have usually been read as the rape of Persephone, and I agree that this is its basic referent.⁶⁷ At the same time, they also assert a partial collapse of the experience of the goddess with that of her worshippers. The varied depictions of the maiden’s emotional reaction, ranging from terror to active affection for her abductor, allow a glimpse of the complex reactions to marriage that worshippers brought to the cult. In one poignant example the maiden is carried away from a group of young women — a group to which she had very recently belonged.⁶⁸ This image exemplifies the experience of transition that I read in the Lokrian abduction scenes, an experience at once desired and feared.

• 69 .PLE Group 5.
• 70 .Sourvinou-Inwood (1978), p. 113–114, sees the processions as the presentation of Persephone’s nupt (...)
• 71 .On proteleia see Dillon (2002), p. 213–217. These same goddesses appear as kourotrophoi, a role th (...)
• 72 .On these distinctions see Platt (2011), esp. p. 36–37.

35The layering of natural and supernatural realities is not limited to the iconography of the abduction; the effect also frames representations of the worshipper’s ritual encounters with the goddess, direct and mediated. The ritualized transition from girlhood to womanhood appears throughout the pinakes in scenes depicting the manipulation or dedication of objects relating to the nuptial preparations.⁶⁹ One subset of these includes a garment carried in procession or dedicated by a single female⁷⁰ while others depict the dedication of a ball, an act best understood as a proteleia sacrifice or the symbolic renunciation of childhood in preparation for marriage (Fig. 2).⁷¹ These scenes seem to take place in a sanctuary setting as identified by the ritual vessels — variously phiale, hydria, and oinochoe — on the walls and by the presence of a figure with cup and wand, usually identified as cult personnel, who either accompanies the dedicators or sits enthroned and receives the dedications, perhaps acting in persona deae. In a single pinax type, however, a larger-than-dedicator-sized, rooster-carrying figure appears in the throne usually occupied by the priestess. Whether this is meant as an epiphany or as a more symbolic assertion that Persephone herself will ultimately receive these offerings, the image suggests that the goddess will receive the dedications and enter into — or maintain? — a relationship with the dedicants.⁷²

• 73 .PLE 8/25, 8/26, 8/28, 8/29.
• 74 .PLE Group 8.
• 75 .Zancani Montuoro (1954 a), p. 79–90, reads these scenes as mythological events; Sourvinou-Inwood ( (...)

36However we parse the representations of dedication, the experience denoted by these images brought maidens at the cusp of change into contact with the goddess and that contact was of enough significance to be memorialized by the offering of a pinax. The potential for contact between goddess and worshipper is expressed even more emphatically in a series of scenes that bring a female worshipper, often accompanied by a male divinity, into the presence of Persephone enthroned.⁷³ In these scenes the female figure carries a ball or other offerings; the situation echoes a related group of pinakes in which a variety of divinities stand before Persephone enthroned alone or with Hades and offer gifts.⁷⁴ The latter images are usually identified as mythical scenes in which divine well-wishers present wedding gifts to the newly married infernal rulers and greet Persephone in her new role as Underworld Queen.⁷⁵ The setting of the purely divine encounters, like the encounters between maiden and enthroned goddess, are somewhat ambiguous. Some of the pinakes depict columns while others have the hanging vessels that indicate interior space, still others lack ambient decoration. In terms of mythical logic, we might expect the gods to greet Persephone in her own kingdom, but the setting must remain undetermined.

• 76 .Schenal Pileggi (2011), p. 35, has suggested that the female figure is the bride-to-be with the he (...)

37If an intentional schematic parallel to the ‘wedding gift presentations’ is expressed in the scenes of mortal women making offerings to the enthroned goddess then a remarkable statement about the effects of worship is being made: the act of dedication transports a worshipper for a moment into the goddess’ own sphere, a place beyond the boundaries of usual lived human experience. Even without taking the necessarily shaky step of identifying the setting as the underworld, we can perceive a merging of the human/ritual experience of the sanctuary with the divine realm of the goddess. Through her association with Persephone the maiden achieves a fluidity in the boundaries of her experience, temporarily entering a decontextualized or mythologized space. Her encounter with the goddess has led her, briefly, beyond the world of human experience and allowed her to join in the company of the gods.⁷⁶ The visual transfer of the same ritual action from the sphere of the sanctuary to a scene dominated by Persephone herself highlights the worshipper’s expectation of a personal reception by the goddess.

• 77 .Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 117–118; Redfield (2003), p. 372 (specifically in reference to PLE 8/29) (...)

38It has been suggested that the approach to Persephone’s throne represents the experience of young women who died unmarried.⁷⁷ If this interpretation could be substantiated, the anticipated post-mortem reception would offer striking parallels to the reception into Persephone’s realm articulated in the gold leaves and draw a direct line between the transitional experiences of marriage and death, placing both firmly under Persephone’s care. As long as we are limited to the evidence available it is impossible to state with certainty whether the encounters with the goddess were accessible only to those worshippers who had died young — one dedicatory experience thereby supplanting another — or whether dedication during one’s life was also felt to effect this kind of intimate contact with the goddess.

• 78 .Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 45–46.
• 79 .On the krater and its iconography, see Johnston – McNiven (1996).

39In either case the importance of the goddess as partial model for her worshippers and as an enduring source of support is sufficient to motivate the conceptualization of such intimate encounters. There is no need to posit, as Mertens-Horn does, a central role for Bacchic mysteries within the rituals of the sanctuary, and to see the maidens as initiates, in order to explain these scenes.⁷⁸ While it is true that Dionysos appears in the pinakes, his presence need not be motivated by the mother-son relationship that Mertens-Horn reads between him and Persephone. She argues for Dionysos’ special status in the underworld predicated on this relationship, adducing the interaction between Hades, Persephone, and Dionysos on the fourth-century-BCE Toledo krater.⁷⁹ When Dionysos appears in the pinakes a century earlier, however, he fulfills the same roles as other divinities including Hermes and the Dioskouroi: he greets the enthroned goddess and accompanies the female dedicants. Like the Dioskouroi, Dionysos played an important role in the religious landscape of Lokri and — as is generally accepted of the Divine Twins — this regional importance is sufficient to explain his presence in the corpus. Dionysos is no stranger to the sanctuary but Persephone remains the figure of central importance, the recipient of dedications and the source of hoped-for assistance.

• 80 .Equipped with one or two holes for hanging: Orsi (1909), p. 17. Homes and graves: Zuntz (1971), p. (...)

40The intimacy of the encounters between worshipper and goddess, whether perceived as mediated or unmediated, is reflected in the nature of the pinakes themselves. These were probably individual dedications, relatively cheaply made and acquired, chosen by a worshipper to hang within the sanctuary or in a few cases to take home or even bury in a grave.⁸⁰ Despite their mass-produced nature these dedications were personal, each one chosen by an individual worshipper to communicate her own relationship to her goddess. The balance of individual expression with formalized modes of interaction with the divine is evident in the gold leaves as well, and given the concerns reflected in each type of dedication this overlap is unsurprising. Whether we read the Lokrian dedications as expressive of a primarily nuptial context or explicitly associated with (premature) death as well, the individual dedications express the hopes of an individual and her dependence on Persephone as she approaches a personal moment of transition for which societal and ritual models had prepared her. The gold leaves, too, communicate the hopes of an individual expressed in terms of affiliation with a community to which they are bound by their chosen ritual commitments. As expressed in the pinakes, the Lokrian Persephone’s accessibility to individual worshippers coupled with her powerful underworld status positions her as a figure with great potential resonance for the creators of the gold leaves.

• 81 .PLE Group 9.
• 82 .PLE III.3 (2007), p. 556–559, offers an overview of the iconography and its difficulties. Identifi (...)
• 83 .The objection has been raised that these children are all male and so cannot represent the unique (...)

41We have seen that the concerns of the Lokrian goddess encompass nuptial preparations and the departure from childhood that precedes a marriage ceremony. Her purview also extends beyond the experience of marriage to the subsequent change when a bride becomes a mother. This kourotrophic aspect is visible in a series of pinakes depicting the goddess enthroned, holding on her lap a baby in a wicker basket (Fig. 3).⁸¹ The setting of these scenes, like the encounters between goddess and maiden, is loosely articulated: the context is not clearly cultic, but ritual vessels do appear. Multiple attempts to read the scene as a representation of myth have identified the child as Adonis, Dionysos, and even the Athenian Erichthonius.⁸² Each of these identifications can reasonably be argued, but none of them alone can satisfactorily explain the significance of the tableau. In the other scene identifiable from a single mythological context — that is the abduction of Persephone — the mythical action had a relevance for the dedicant, offering a metaphor or parallel for her own experience. On this model the babies, whichever mythological child they might also be, are the children of the recent Lokrian brides, now Lokrian wives. The protection of the goddess brings success in one of the primary goals of marriage — the creation of the next generation — and effects a safe transition to maternity.⁸³ One can imagine the dedications being offered at any of several stages — by brides hoping to conceive, by expectant mothers seeking a safe delivery, or as thanks after the birth of a child.

• 84 .Sourvinou-Inwood (1978), p. 116–117.
• 85 .Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 39–40; Price (196), p. 53–45 and (1978), p. 175.

42Sourvinou-Inwood suggested that the baby presentation scenes, rather than depicting a mythical parallel to the experience of Lokrian women, actually commemorated the dedication of Lokrian babies to the goddess.⁸⁴ If we pursue this ultimately unprovable reading, the unmediated reception of the baby by the goddess would point once more to the fluidity of experience between the worlds of life and death, mortals and immortals, evoked by the worship of Lokrian Persephone. Even if the dedication of the child to the goddess has no place in Lokrian ritual, the images could have been observed and radically reinterpreted for inclusion in the world of the gold leaves. Specifically, as we saw in one of the leaves from Thurii (5, Thurii 3), the leaf-bearer claims to have descended beneath the lap of the goddess, an experience apparently associated with the special death that awaits the initiate. Mertens-Horn and Price have both suggested that the language from the leaf should be applied to the interpretation of other terracotta votives from Lokri and from Medma, a Lokrian foundation, which depict a seated female holding a diminutive winged figure on her lap; they take the text inscribed there as an excerpt from an earlier poem contemporary with the pinakes.⁸⁵ There is no solid evidence, however, that such a text — or any text — formed an interpretative core of the Lokrian cult. Moreover, an association with a single text limits the multivalence that characterizes the images on the pinakes and blurs the boundaries between the mythical experiences of the goddess and the mundane experiences of her worshippers.

• 86 .See supra, n. 56.
• 87 .Rubinich (2006), p. 402–403, sees this as likely; Redfield (2003), p. 219, esp. n. 44 on Lokri’s p (...)

44If we accept that shared conceptual models made the Lokrian Persephone a potent addition to the conceptual world of the gold tablets it nonetheless remains to ask how the creators of the leaves came into contact with this goddess and her cult. The cult, as described above, was famous and wealthy and this may have been sufficient to spread its influence across Magna Graecia.⁸⁶ The nature of the evidence is such that it is difficult to say whether the dedicants were primarily Lokrian women, but there is nothing to exclude the possibility of citizens of other cities coming to worship at Lokri and embracing elements of the cult.⁸⁷

• 88 .Hinz (1998), p. 210–212.
• 89 .Cerchiai – Jannelli – Longo (2004), p. 92.

45The fame of the cult may be sufficient explanation for the dissemination of awareness of its goddess, but closer ties also exist between the sites of the leaves and the Lokrian cult. The Hipponion leaf offers the simplest explanation of all: a colony of Lokri, Hipponion had its own cult of Persephone with finds similar to those from La Mannella.⁸⁸ This is the oldest of the gold leaves discovered to date in Magna Graecia and it is potentially tempting to see here the entrance point of the Lokrian goddess into the universe of the gold leaves. In Sicily the Lokrian cult would have received increased attention after an allegiance was established between Lokri and Hieron in the early fifth century and again a century later when Dionysios I married a Lokrian woman.⁸⁹ The latter event is particularly rich in possibility, since it is easy to imagine that the well-born wife insisted on continued intimacy with her local goddess and thereby spread familiarity with the cult within the Sicilian court.

• 90 .Diodorus Siculus, 12.10.3–4.
• 91 .Petropoulos (2012), p. 1458–1462.

46For Thurii, the source of the remaining Magna Graecia tablets, the cultural connections are not equally evident. The city was only founded in the mid-fifth century and inhabited by Sybarites, Athenians, and settlers from elsewhere in Greece.⁹⁰ At the end of the fifth century the Athenians were expelled and this event might have precipitated a reemphasis on comparatively local tradition, like the worship of the great goddess of Lokri. In any case, three clay pinakes recently discovered at Thurii may show a technological link with the Lokrian cult.⁹¹ These pieces date to the mid-fourth century and are comparable in size, shape and production methods to the dedications found at Lokri and its colonies. These pinakes, like those at Lokri, seem to depict ritual scenes: Dionysos recumbent; a standing woman and a recumbent figure; a robed man offering a phiale. The cultic context of these images is highly uncertain, but it is possible that we have here another Thurian adaptation of Lokrian religious practice.

• 92 .For a more extensive history of this scholarship see Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 36–37.
• 93 .Quagliati (1908), p. 138–140; 208–211.
• 94 .Quagliati (1908), p. 196–208.
• 95 .Oldfather (1910), esp. p. 115, 124–125: “Wir sehen ein ganzes Volk in tiefter Weise von orphisch-m (...)

47Earlier studies have often argued that, rather than there being a Lokrian Persephone in the gold leaves, there is actually a Dionysos in the Persephoneion. As described above, Dionysos is not absent from the pinakes, but his role is similar to that of Hermes or the Dioskouroi. It is due to the powerful gravitational pull exerted by decades of scholarship on the gold leaves that Dionysos has enjoyed outsized attention.⁹² Quagliati, one of the first to publish on the pinakes soon after their discovery, interpreted them as visual representations of the concepts expressed in what he terms the Orphic poems: death as the beginning of a journey followed by arrival in Hades where the initiates enjoy a blessed existence.⁹³ For him the Persephone of the pinakes is the great goddess of the underworld, defined by the eschatological system he imports as a key to interpret the images.⁹⁴ Following Quagliati, Oldfather emphasized the importance of Dionysos as a Chthonic deity whose presence in the pinakes marked them as belonging to the same increasingly influential ‘Grabesreligion’ indicated by the gold leaves.⁹⁵ These readings belong to the early twentieth century when the centrality of Dionysos for the communities associated with the leaves had not yet been established (though Oldfather and others had glimpsed it). The Pan-Orphic readings which underlie these interpretations focused on the Orphic doctrine as an eschatological stance that assured initiates a privileged status in the underworld as a result of their privileged knowledge. The link to the Persephone cult in these interpretations is her own nature as a ‘chthonic’ deity as well as her association with the ‘chthonic’ Dionysos. These readings recognize important points of contact but do not substantiate the claim that the nature of the Lokrian goddess adapted to the beliefs associated with the ‘Orphic’ traditions rather than the other way around.

• 96 .Price (1969).
• 97 .Price (1978), p. 171–172; Tortorelli Ghidini (1995), in contrast, sees in the Lokrian iconography (...)
• 98 .Mertens-Horn (2005/6), p. 68–69.

48As scholarship of the later twentieth century has shifted toward a consensus position that the gold leaves should be read in the context of Dionysiac initiation, ideas about the relationship between the leaves and Lokrian cult have not been dramatically revised. Looking to elements shared by the pinakes and the gold leaves, scholars continue to emphasize Dionysos’ presence in the pinakes as proof of influence upon Persephone’s Lokrian cult. None of these more recent arguments, however, analyzes the shared material in a way that proves priority in one direction or the other. In 1969 Price, as described above, hypothesized the existence of a longer poetic text from which the passages on the gold leaves were drawn and argued that votive dedications from Medma are actually evidence for the existence and popularity of these texts a century before the oldest gold leaf is attested.⁹⁶ In her subsequent work on kourotrophic deities from 1978, Price shows some of the thinking that influenced her earlier article when she conflates the two spheres of religious practice by calling Persephone “the deity par excellence of the Orphics” and identifying her consort as her ‘chthonic’ spouse “Plouto-Dionysos”.⁹⁷ More recently, Mertens-Horn has argued on similar lines that Persephone’s nature at Lokri, particularly her association with the underworld, is conditioned by the initiatory experience that maidens experience under the auspices of Dionysos as part of the ritual of the sanctuary.⁹⁸

• 99 .Lucifero: Orsi (1917), e.g. Fig. 1; 11; Grotto of the Nymphs: Maclachlan (2009), p. 212–214.
• 100 .Giannelli (1963).
• 101 .Giangiulio (1994); Giannelli (1963), p. 194–196, sees the late sixth and early fifth century votiv (...)

49There is no question that Dionysos played an important role in Lokrian religion but, like Demeter, his Lokrian presence was not primarily associated with the cult of Persephone. Dionysos appears with some regularity in the grave goods of the Lucifero cemetery as well as in the iconography of the Cave of the Nymphs.⁹⁹ In both cases the Dionysian imagery looks to contexts distinct from the cult of Persephone: the grave goods draw on the longstanding practice of including symposiastic material in male burials and the material associated with the nymphs contains theatrical referents. Dionysos’ presence in these ritual complexes does not substantiate a close affiliation with the cult of the Persephoneion. Gianelli argued that Lokri was a hotbed of Orphic activity in the 6^th and 5^th centuries and, at some point in this period, coopted the pre-existing Persephone cult as a manifestation of Orphic beliefs. In addition to the problematic nature of the designation ‘Orphic’, this position envisions a significant reorientation of a major Lokrian cult in response to arriviste religious practices. While cultic identity does change over the centuries, the wholesale reconfiguration of a major polis cult is a claim that requires more evidence than a confluence of iconography.¹⁰⁰ A more nuanced interpretation, a line that Giangiulio argues, is that the Dionysiac associations visible at Lokri point to a complicated wave of developments in personal eschatology and funerary representation throughout Magna Graecia.¹⁰¹

• 102 .PLE 8/26.

50It is through such multifaceted eschatological and ritual contexts that we should understand the development of the gold leaves themselves as well as, perhaps, some of the interest in Dionysos at the Persephoneion. This aspect may be expressed in a very popular pinax type in which the atmosphere is emphatically Dionysiac, with the whole image wreathed in vines and grapes.¹⁰² This image belongs to the scenes of gods making offerings to Persephone or Persephone and Hades and may express a confluence of local religious beliefs which would make the meeting of these local deities simultaneously a natural and impressive occurrence. These images may well draw on the same strata of thought that would inspire the texts of the gold leaves. If this is the case, however, they are adapted and integrated into the existing cult of Persephone and do not fundamentally alter the longstanding nature or centrality of the goddess.