Statue of Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus, represented with the attributes of the goddess Ceres, dating to about 20 A.D., now in the Louvre Museum, Paris.
The name of the Roman goddess Ceres derives from the Indo-European root *ker-, signifying “growth”; the goddess presided over the growth of cereals, the name of which derives on its turn from the goddess’s one. Her feast, the Cerealia, was held on April 19 and was part of the oldest cycle of the Roman liturgical calendar. The goddess intervened as patron of the growth of crops, sometimes in association with Tellus, the goddess of the Earth, and in her honour were held, in January, the feriae sementivae, at the end of the sowing season. Before harvest, it was again invoked Ceres’s intervention with the sacrifice of a sow, called porca praecidanea (from Latin praecidaneus, “slain before”), followed by the offering of the first wheat ear which was cut (Schilling 1981).


[Image: http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/liviaceres_louvre.html]