In this theological poetry the position of power was held by the long Homeric Hymn to Demeter, although it antedates the presence of Iacchus at Eleusis and at least overlooks the importance of Triptolemus, the young prince of the city, to whom the Earth-Mother gave the first seed-corn and the commission to teach the art of husbandry throughout the world. The representation of this act was left for fifth century sculpture, if we may so interpret the beautiful relief discovered at Eleusis and preserved in the National Museum. Nor is there more than casual mention of Eumolpus, the legendary first priest and the eponymous ancestor of the priestly family in Athens which was charged with the care of Demeter’s worship. But the Hymn told flawlessly the central story of Demeter and Persephone: the ravishment of Persephone by Hades as she was picking roses and crocuses, violets and irises and the marvelous narcissus which the earth bore to be her snare; the grief of Demeter as she heard the mountain peaks and the deep sea echo her child’s cry, her wandering search, her unrecognised sojourn at fragrant Eleusis in the courteous household of the king, and her retarding of the fruits of the earth; the reunion of mother and daughter for two thirds of the year, and the sending up once more of the grain from the rich fields and the burgeoning of the leaves and flowers; and, finally, the command of the Goddess that the people of Eleusis should build her a great temple and an altar below the town and the steep wall, above the spring Callichorus on the jutting rock. Homer himself had not known this story. Hesiod had lacked the Ionic gift to tell it. Euripides, in a later generation, was led astray by his strain of Orphic imagination which needed the roar of rivers and the thunder of the sea, the wail of flutes and the clatter of the tambourine to mark the frenzy of a suffering godhead. The Greeks as a people preferred a story in which nature perishes and blooms again, in which grief and love fight with death, while the dignity of life is unassailed, and the beauty of hills and sea, flowers and welling springs irradiates its tragedies.