Demeter, “mother of wheat” (her daughter Persephone was the “child of wheat”), was the goddess of the harvest and, by association, agriculture and fertile soils. As the goddess of agriculture, she made various long journeys accompanied by Dionysus to teach man how to care for the land and the plants. When Hades, the god of the Inferno, kidnapped her daughter Persephone and took her down to his underworld kingdom, Demeter, in desperation, decided to abandon Olympus. As a consequence, the land became infertile, the cattle died, the ploughs broke and the seeds failed to germinate.

Demeter is usually depicted with torches or a serpent, holding a sickle in one hand and a handful of wheat and poppies in the other. Her attributes are the sheaf of wheat and the narcissus.

The goddess Demeter is always depicted on the obverse of the coins in the Gulbenkian Collection and never full-bodied. On coins almost certainly minted to pay for the reconstruction of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, destroyed by the earthquake in the year 373/2 BC, Demeter can be seen with a crown of wheat, with Apollo on the reverse. On the Peloponnesian coin, it is Hermes who appears on the reverse, holding the little Dionysus, recalling the Praxiteles group marble in Olympia. The young god was abandoned by his mother and Hermes delivered him into the care of the nymphs of Mount Nysa. Lastly, on a coin from Byzantium, again with Demeter on the obverse, we can see Poseidon sitting on rocks on the reverse alongside his usual attributes.