De roof van Proserpina (Persophone)
The story of her abduction by Hades is traditionally referred to as the Rape of Persephone. It is mentioned briefly in Hesiod’s Theogony,[29] and told in considerable detail in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Zeus, it is said, permitted Hades, who was in love with the beautiful Persephone, to abduct her as her mother Demeter was not likely to allow her daughter to go down to Hades. Persephone was gathering flowers with the Oceanids along with Artemis and Pallas, daughter of Triton, as the Homeric Hymn says, in a field when Hades came to abduct her, bursting through a cleft in the earth.[30] Demeter, when she found her daughter had disappeared, searched for her all over the earth with Hecate’s torches. In most versions she forbids the earth to produce, or she neglects the earth and in the depth of her despair she causes nothing to grow. Helios, the sun, who sees everything, eventually told Demeter what had happened and at length she discovered the place of her abode. Finally, Zeus, pressed by the cries of the hungry people and by the other deities who also heard their anguish, forced Hades to return Persephone.[31]

The Rape of Proserpina by Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the Galleria Borghese in Rome.
Hades indeed complied with the request, but first he tricked her, giving her some pomegranate seeds to eat. Persephone was released by Hermes, who had been sent to retrieve her, but because she had tasted food in the underworld, she was obliged to spend a third of each year (the winter months) there, and the remaining part of the year with the gods above.[32] With the later writers Ovid and Hyginus, Persephone’s time in the underworld becomes half the year.[33]

Various local traditions place Persephone’s abduction in a different location. The Sicilians, among whom her worship was probably introduced by the Corinthian and Megarian colonists, believed that Hades found her in the meadows near Enna, and that a well arose on the spot where he descended with her into the lower world. The Cretans thought that their own island had been the scene of the rape, and the Eleusinians mentioned the Nysian plain in Boeotia, and said that Persephone had descended with Hades into the lower world at the entrance of the western Oceanus. Later accounts place the rape in Attica, near Athens, or near Eleusis.