Demeter as Thesmophoros: What Does She Bring Forth?

The onomastic attribute Thesmophoros given to Demeter, and generally shared by her daughter, is here set against the background of her “onomastic landscape” in archaic and classical evidence. The chronological focus is applied in order to understand, without any risk of anachronism or unclear contexts what the onomastic attributes of Demeter tell us about her competences in the archaic and classical periods, and the relative weight of the title Thesmophoros in this group. This is the subject of the first part of the present paper, with a short evocation of Demeter’s archaic profile. The second part, rooted in the same chronological context, tries to grasp the scope of the thesmos-compound in the name. For more than a century, a large number of authors have addressed the meaning of thesmophoros and Thesmophoria, as a brief overview of the scholarship shows. Without claiming to renew the understanding of the term from top to bottom, the present paper try to refine it by taking into account, more than others have, the archaic anchoring of the term thesmos, in particular in comparison with nomos, another word for “law”.