I begin to sing of Demeter, the holy goddess with the beautiful hair […] she of the golden double-axe, she who glories in the harvest.’
So begins Hesiod in his Hymn to Demeter, and I cannot seem to put it out of my mind when faced with this spectacle: a life-sized (30 cm tall, in case you haven’t been up close and personal with wheat lately) spray of wheat.
The three ears are made up of hollow kernels wired together in tiers, each with filament-fine rolled gold wires sprouting from their tips. The leaves are finely grooved gold sheet and the three stalks are gathered together at the stems. The result is a triumph of naturalism and goldworking, within the tradition of Late Classical and Early Hellenistic vegetal wreaths – vibrating and shivering at the merest breeze.
Wheat, grain, and the harvest were all the purview of the goddess Demeter, widely worshipped in the Classical world, and especially emphatically so in the bread-baskets of the Greek world, Magna Graecia and the Black Sea. A close Hellenistic comparison to this example was found in the grave of a woman in a Black Sea settlement, clutched in her hand.
The astounding condition of this spray of wheat would imply that it too was once part of a tomb assemblage. One wonders whether it marked the occupant out as an acolyte of Demeter, or more broadly spoke to the regenerative role of the goddess in the harvest and in the afterlife.
