Ceres Fountain - Versailles, France
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 48° 48.451 E 002° 07.038
31U E 435189 N 5406434
This is one of several fountains at the Gardens of the Versailles Palace.
Waymark Code: WMD0V2
Location: Île-de-France, France
Date Posted: 11/03/2011
Views: 23
This website (
visit link) describes the fountain:
"Ceres Fountain
The square Ceres Fountain was laid out between 1672 and 1679 by Thomas Regnaudin, after a drawing by Charles Le Brun. Ceres, the Roman goddess of harvests and corn, is seated on a bed of corn stalks, accompanied by cornflowers and roses. Symbolising summer, the fountain forms a set with those of Bacchus, Flora and Saturn who represent the three other seasons."
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds that amongst her many attributes, Ceres:
"...was patron and protector of plebeian laws, rights and Tribunes. Her Aventine Temple served the plebeians as cult centre, legal archive, treasury and possibly law-court; its foundation was contemporaneous with the passage of the Lex Sacrata, which established the office and person of plebeian aediles and tribunes inviolate. As representatives of the Roman people, the tribunes held a high-profile immunity to arrest or threat; the lives and property of those who violated this law were forfeit to Ceres, whose judgment was expressed by her aediles.[15] When the Lex Hortensia of 287 BC extended plebeian law to the city itself, and all its citizens, the status of aediles was raised, and their scope was broadened. The official decrees of the Senate (senatus consulta) were placed in her Temple, under her guardianship. Livy puts the reason bluntly: the consuls could no longer seek advantage by arbitrarily tampering with the laws of Rome.[16] The Temple might also have offered asylum for those threatened with arbitrary arrest by patrician magistrates.[17] Goods, property and fines raised through prosecution of those who offended her laws were used to fund her temple, games and cult. Ceres was thus the patron goddess of Rome's written laws; the poet Vergil later calls her legifera Ceres (Law-bearing Ceres), a translation of Demeter's Greek epithet, thesmophoros.[18]
Ceres' role as protector of laws continued throughout the Republican era. Those who approved the murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC justified his death as punishment for his offense against the Lex sacrata of the goddess Ceres: those who deplored this as murder appealed to Gracchus' sancrosanct status as tribune under Ceres' protection. In 70 BC, Cicero refers to this killing in connection with Ceres' laws and cults, during his prosecution of Verres, Roman governor of Sicily, for extortion."