Athena
Athena leaped from the forehead of her father Zeus, fully grown and armed, and the gods stood awestruck. Helios, the god of the sun, stopped his chariot in the sky. Pindar wrote that she cried aloud with a mighty shout, and that the Sky and mother Earth shuddered before her. This is the entrance of an ancient Greek goddess linked to wisdom, warfare, and handicraft, later joined to the Roman goddess Minerva. She is often given the epithet Pallas, her most renowned one. Her symbols include owls, olive trees, snakes, and the gorgoneion. In art she generally wears a helmet and holds a spear. How does a single goddess hold together the wisdom of philosophers, the bridle of a war-horse, the loom of a weaver, and the strategy of armies? Why did one city above all others claim her as its own? And how did a deity who blinded a hunter and turned women into spiders become, since the Renaissance, an international symbol of wisdom and democracy? The answers begin where her name does.
Ἀθῆναι, Athȇnai, is a plural toponym, the place where myth says she presided over the Athenai, a sisterhood devoted to her worship. Scholars once argued whether Athena was named after Athens or Athens after Athena. They now generally agree the goddess takes her name from the city. The ending -ene is common in place names but rare for personal names. The same pattern appears elsewhere. At Mycenae there was a goddess called Mykene, whose sisterhood was the Mykenai. At Thebes an analogous deity was called Thebe, the city itself known as Thebai. The name Athenai is likely of pre-Greek origin, since it carries the presumably pre-Greek morpheme star-ān-. In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato gives imaginative etymologies, linking Athena to noũs, mind, and diánoia, intelligence, and to a theonóa, she who has the mind of God. The second-century AD orator Aelius Aristides tried to draw natural symbols from her names: aether, air, earth, and moon. Long before these wordplays, though, Athena was something older than the city she came to guard.
A single Mycenaean Greek inscription, a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, appears at Knossos in Linear B tablets from the Late Minoan II-era Room of the Chariot Tablets, the earliest Linear B archive anywhere. Athana potnia is often translated Mistress Athena, though it could mean the Lady of Athens, and any link to the actual city remains uncertain. She began, the source says, as the Aegean goddess of the palace, presiding over household crafts and protecting the king. The undeciphered Linear A corpus holds a sign series, a-ta-no-dju-wa-ja, written in the unclassified Minoan language. It may connect to expressions yielding Athena of Zeus or divine Athena. A Mycenaean fresco shows two women extending their hands toward a central figure covered by an enormous figure-eight shield, perhaps the warrior-goddess with her palladium. Martin Persson Nilsson argued that the Minoan snake goddess figurines are early representations of Athena. Nilsson and others claimed she was once an owl herself or a bird goddess in general. In Book III of the Odyssey she takes the form of a sea-eagle. Jane Ellen Harrison observed that by the time she appears in art, Athena has shed her animal form, reducing snake and bird to attributes, though in black-figure vase-paintings she still occasionally appears with wings. Her cult may preserve aspects of the Proto-Indo-European transfunctional goddess, and may have drawn on Near Eastern warrior goddesses such as Ishtar and Anat. Plato noted that the citizens of Sais in Egypt worshipped Neith, a goddess of war, hunting, and weaving, whom he identified with Athena.
Burkert notes that Athenians sometimes simply called her the Goddess, hē theós, an ancient title. The catalogue of her epithets reads like a map of everything she touched. She was Atrytone, the Unwearying, and Promachos, she who fights in front. Polias marked her as protectress of the city, while Ergane, the Industrious, named her patron of craftsmen and artisans. After judging the trial of Orestes, acquitted of murdering his mother Clytemnestra because he followed Apollo's orders, she won the epithet Areia. As Hippia, of the horses, she was credited with inventing the bit, bridle, chariot, and wagon. Pausanias records a temple of Athena Chalinitis, the bridler, in Corinth, near the tomb of Medea's children. As Aethyia she was worshipped in Megara, the word aíthyia meaning a diver or diving bird, and figuratively a ship, pointing to her teaching of shipbuilding or navigation. Plutarch describes Pericles dedicating a statue to her as Athena Hygieia, Health, after she inspired in a dream his treatment of a man injured building the gateway to the Acropolis. She was also Mechanitis, skilled in inventing. Her most renowned epithet, Pallas, comes either from páll-o, to brandish a weapon, or more likely from words meaning youth or young woman. Later Greeks, forgetting the original sense, invented a slain companion to explain it.
Pallas, in one telling, was the daughter of the sea-god Triton and a childhood friend of Athena. Zeus watched the two girls in a friendly sparring match, and, not wanting his daughter to lose, flapped his aegis to distract Pallas, whom Athena accidentally impaled. Distraught, Athena took the name Pallas for herself as a sign of grief, and Zeus gave her the aegis as an apology. Other versions make Pallas a Giant slain in the Gigantomachy and flayed for a cloak, or Athena's own father, killed for attempting to assault her. The grief gave shape to an object. Athena carved a statue in the likeness of her dead friend Pallas, and that palladium stood in her temple on the Trojan Acropolis. It carried talisman-like properties, and while it remained in the city, Troy could never fall. When the Greeks captured Troy, Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, clung to the palladium for protection, but Ajax the Lesser tore her away and raped her. Athena, infuriated by this violation, sent a storm at Cape Kaphereos that destroyed almost the entire Greek fleet and scattered the survivors across the Aegean. Her other Homeric names guard their own mysteries. Glaukopis, bright-eyed, shares a root with glaúx, little owl, and Tritogeneia carries a significance that remains unclear, perhaps Triton-born, perhaps triple-born, perhaps the three things on which all mortal life depends.
Cecrops, the king of Athens, had to judge a gift. Athena competed with Poseidon for the city's patronage, each offering one gift for the king to weigh. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt-water spring sprang up, giving access to trade and water, though the water was salty and undrinkable. In Vergil's Georgics he instead gave the first horse. Athena offered the first domesticated olive tree, which brought wood, oil, and food and became a symbol of Athenian economic prosperity. Cecrops accepted her gift and declared her patron goddess. Poseidon, enraged, sent his son Halirrhothius to cut down the tree, but the axe missed its aim and fell on himself, killing him, which gave the sacred olive its name moria, from moros, fate or death. The matter of his death was settled on the Areopagus, the hill of Ares, in favour of Ares, who was thereafter named after the event. The city also gave her a son she did not bear. When Hephaestus tried to rape her, Athena pushed him away, and his seed fell on Gaia, who gave birth to Erichthonius, whom Athena raised. She placed the infant in a chest entrusted to the three daughters of Cecrops, Herse, Pandrosos, and Aglauros, warning them not to open it. They opened it and found a serpent, or a child guarded by serpents, and in Pausanias's account two sisters went mad and hurled themselves from the Acropolis. That serpent may be the one coiled at Athena's feet in Pheidias's statue, and Herodotus records that the Athenians left a honey cake each month for a serpent in a crevice on the Acropolis. On the eve of the Second Persian invasion in 480 BC, it did not eat the cake, and the Athenians read it as a sign that Athena had abandoned them.
Nike, the goddess of victory, personally attended Athena in the Iliad, where she was the divine form of the heroic, martial ideal. Zeus assigned the sphere of war to both Ares and Athena, but she represented its intellectual and civilised side, the virtues of justice and skill, while Ares stood for mere blood lust. She favoured those who used cunning over brute strength. Her aid was hands-on. She advised Argos, the builder of the Argo on which Jason and the Argonauts sailed, and helped construct the ship. She helped Bellerophon tame the winged horse Pegasus with a bit. She guided Perseus to behead Medusa, lending him her polished bronze shield to view the Gorgon's reflection while Hermes lent his harpe, and guiding the blade so it cut the head clean off. In four of the twelve metopes on the Temple of Zeus at Olympia she aids Heracles, watching him slay the Nemean lion and helping him hold up the sky itself. Odysseus won her favour through cunning. In the Odyssey she long aids him only from afar, implanting thoughts during his journey from Troy, until he washes up among the Phaeacians, where she enters Nausicaa's dreams to ensure the princess rescues him. When he reaches Ithaca she appears disguised as a herdsman, lies that Penelope has remarried, and is impressed when Odysseus lies back to protect himself. Walter Friedrich Otto dubbed her the goddess of nearness for this mentoring closeness, a quality she also extended to his son Telemachus.
Tiresias came to a spring on Mount Helicon at midday searching for water and inadvertently saw Athena bathing naked. She struck him blind so he would never again see what man was not meant to see, then, moved by his mother Chariclo's pleas, gave him the ability to understand the language of birds and foretell the future. Athena's anger and her pity often ran together. When Arachne, daughter of a famous dyer in Tyrian purple in Hypaipa of Lydia, claimed her weaving surpassed the goddess who invented the craft, Athena wove her own victory over Poseidon while Arachne wove twenty-one episodes of the gods' sexual affairs. Outraged at the subject, Athena destroyed the tapestry and struck Arachne four times across the face, and when the girl hanged herself, took pity and brought her back as a spider. She showed the same mixed hand to mortal women in danger. When Poseidon pursued the maiden Corone by the seashore, the source says the virgin goddess feels pity for a virgin, and Athena saved her by turning her into a crow. After Tiresias and Arachne, her story did not end with antiquity. Early Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria condemned her as immodest and immoral, yet many of her attributes passed to the Virgin Mary, sometimes depicted wearing the gorgoneion. During the French Revolution, statues of pagan gods were torn down across France, but statues of Athena were not, and she became the personification of freedom and the republic, standing in the centre of the Place de la Revolution in Paris. Sigmund Freud kept a small bronze of her on his desk, and in 1990 the curators of the full-scale Parthenon replica in Nashville, Tennessee added a gilded forty-two-foot replica of Phidias's Athena Parthenos, built from concrete and fiberglass.
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Common questions
Who is the Greek goddess Athena?
Athena, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft. She was the patron and protectress of various Greek cities, particularly Athens, and was later syncretised with the Roman goddess Minerva.
How was Athena born in Greek mythology?
Athena was born from the forehead of her father Zeus, often emerging fully grown and armed. In Hesiod's Theogony, this happened after Zeus swallowed his pregnant consort Metis, fearing her child would overthrow him.
Why is Athena connected to the city of Athens?
Athena most likely received her name from Athens, since the city name Ἀθῆναι is a plural toponym and the ending -ene is common in place names but rare for personal names. She won the city's patronage by giving the Athenians the first domesticated olive tree, which Cecrops judged better than Poseidon's salt-water spring.
What are the main symbols of the goddess Athena?
Athena's major symbols include owls, olive trees, snakes, and the gorgoneion. In art she is generally depicted wearing a helmet and holding a spear, often with a shield bearing the head of the gorgon at its centre.
What heroes did Athena help in Greek mythology?
Athena aided the heroes Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, and Jason. She guided Perseus to behead Medusa, helped Bellerophon tame Pegasus with a bit, advised the building of the Argo, and was the tutelary deity of Odysseus in the Odyssey.
Why did Athena turn Arachne into a spider?
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Arachne claimed her weaving skill was greater than Athena's and challenged the goddess to a contest. Outraged at Arachne's tapestry depicting the gods' affairs, Athena destroyed it and struck her, and when Arachne hanged herself, Athena took pity and brought her back as a spider.
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