CERES. — The Roman divinity of cereal vegetation, closely related to Tellus; she is associated with her both in the feriae sementivae, celebrated in January at the end of the sowing season, and in the sacrifice of the porca praecidanea, at the beginning of the harvest (Cato, De Agr., 134). She had her own priest, the flamen cerialis.
Beyond Rome and Latium, CERES—whose etymology is uncertain, though the ancient hypothesis deriving it from *creare* is not to be dismissed—was also venerated in regions of central Italy. During a famine that broke out in the early years of the Republic, the Sibylline Books advised invoking the Greek triad of Demeter, Dionysus, and Kore, to which the dictator Aulus Postumius dedicated a temple in 496 B.C. (according to the traditional chronology, though lowered by historians) on the slopes of the Aventine facing the *carceres* of the Circus (H. Jordan-C. Hülsen, *Topographie der Stadt Rom.*, I, III, Berlin 1907, p. 117), or, less probably, near the Statio Annonae. The new triad, perhaps introduced from Magna Graecia, was immediately Latinized with the names, respectively, of CERES, Liber, and Libera, among whom CERES took the place of honor. From the beginning of the 5th century B.C., the aedes Cereris was linked to the plebeian aediles, who seem to have taken their name from the temple, as evidenced by the designation *Aediles plebei Ceriales*, introduced by Caesar.