Art and Myth in Ancient Greece - A reading

The focus of the book is "Greek narrative art - depictions of scenes that tell stories" (Carpenter, 1991); I chose to read it as I wanted to create a wider context for my project. The term 'Archaic' comes up frequently in this "handbook" :

Archaic, adj

Very old or old-fashioned

(Of a word or a style of language) no longer in everyday use but sometimes used to impart an old-fashioned flavour:

Of an early period of art or culture, especially the 7th-6th centuries bc in Greece:

I feel that archaic perfectly describes the practice of forced marriage, we're in 2015 with fantastic technological developments, it's an old fashioned way of imposing power on young women. But with the advancement of feminism and the equal rights movement, forced marriage seems practically barbaric.

While reading through the book I was hoping to get some depictions of the pomegranate, I didn't but there were depictions of Persephone and Hades. 

The Myth (in a nutshell)

Persephone is the Goddess of the underworld, but she wasn't intended to be. The daughter of Zeus and Demeter (the goddess of the harvest), Persephone was incredibly beautiful and everyone loved her, including Hades. She was collecting flowers one day when Hades rose up from the earth, took her and raped her.

Mourning over the loss of her daughter, Demeter withdrew herself from the world and so the land became infertile. Zeus feared what could happen to the world so went to Hades to make him release her, he agreed. But before she was sent back, Persephone was given the seeds of a pomegranate to eat which bound her to the underworld for a third of the year. The other months she stayed with Demeter, who refused to let anything grow whilst Persephone was in the underworld.

I think that knowing this myth concretes my narrative, especially the connection with forced marriages. The depictions of the myth within the book show the aftermath of the rape of Persephone.

Scans from the book, artwork depicting the kidnap and rape of Persephone