Persephone chose to eat the fruit

The argument

The case against the kidnapping reading rests not on how Persephone came to be in the underworld but on what she did once she was there. Various tellings of the myth agree that she had the chance to get out, and that she ate the pomegranate seeds just before she was to leave — the one act that bound her to return. The timing matters: an act performed at the moment of release is not an act performed under duress, but one performed with the exit already in view. Nor can the eating be explained as need. As one source puts it, "We know she didn't do it because she was hungry. It says in the Illiad that gods do not require bread or wine as mankind does". A goddess who eats does not eat to survive; whatever she is doing, she is doing it for some reason other than hunger. That removes the most obvious innocent explanation for the act and leaves deliberate choice in its place. The number is taken to settle the matter. Persephone ate six seeds — not one taken absently, not the whole fruit consumed in distress, but a count specific enough to read as a decision about how much of the year she would spend below. She knew what the seeds did, and she selected them accordingly. The inference proponents draw is that she wanted to come back to him: a woman held against her will does not, at the moment of her freedom, quietly arrange the terms of her own return. Read this way, the myth records not an abduction but a choice made and then formalised. Persephone's love is inferred from her conduct at the only point in the story where her own will is unambiguously operating, and on that reading she was not kidnapped.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Perhaps she just felt bad. Perhaps she wanted to keep Hades company, because she pitied the poor lonely soul that he was.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The sources do not agree: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter it is Hades who gives her the seed, and several accounts describe the eating as done by stealth or under compulsion rather than as a free choice at the threshold. [Rejecting P2] Not needing food establishes nothing about motive — the myth turns on the rule that eating in the underworld binds one to it, so the act's significance lies in the rule rather than in appetite or affection. [Rejecting C] Even granting a deliberate act, something done after an abduction does not make the abduction consensual, and the same texts describe her seizure and Demeter's search in terms of force.