CERES. - Roman divinity of cereal vegetation, akin to Tellus; with whom she is associated both in the feriae sementivae, celebrated in January at the end of the sowing, 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.
Besides in Rome and Latium, C., whose etymology is uncertain although the one already supposed by the ancients from "creare" is not to be rejected, was also worshipped in regions of central Italy. During a famine that broke out in the early years of the republic, the Sibylline Books suggested invoking the Greek triad, Demeter, Dionysus and Kore, to whom the dictator Aulus Postumius vowed in 496 B.C., according to the traditional chronology lowered by historians, a temple on the slopes of the Aventine hill that faced the carceres of the Circus (H. Jordan-C. Hülsen, Topogr. der Stadt Rom., I, III, Berlin 1907, p. 117), or, less probably, near the Statio Annonae. The new triad, having perhaps entered from Magna Graecia, was immediately Latinized with the names, respectively, of C., Liber and Libera, among whom C. took the place of honor. From the beginning of the 5th century B.C. the Ludi Cereris were connected with the plebeian aediles, who seem to have taken their name from the temple, as would be shown by the designation Aediles plebei Ceriales, introduced by Caesar.