Metis (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Metis, in the words of the poet Hesiod, was 'wiser than gods and mortal men.' Yet for most of her existence she was hidden beneath the inward parts of Zeus, the king of the gods. Her name, Μῆτις in ancient Greek, translates as Wisdom, Skill, or Craft, and she belonged to the Oceanids, daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys. She served as Zeus's first wife and his advisor. She helped him free his siblings from Cronus's stomach, and later helped their daughter Athena escape from his own forehead. A prophecy attributed to Gaia and Uranus said Metis would bear a son mightier than his father. That single prophecy set every other fact about her in motion. How did a goddess entrusted with a king's most dangerous secrets end up erased from his own family line? She kept advising him from inside his own body. And why does a Greek word for cunning wisdom still surface in modern scholarship about the ancient world?

• 2. The Trickster's Wisdom

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  By the 5th century BC, in the age of Greek philosophy, Metis stood as the original goddess of wisdom and reflective thought. Her name had originally connoted something closer to magical cunning. That quality was tied just as easily to the trickster god Prometheus as to Zeus's own kingly cleverness. The Homeric poems even give Zeus the title Metieta for this trait. Stoic commentators later recast Metis as the embodiment of prudence, wisdom, and wise counsel, a reading of her that carried through to the Renaissance.

  Homer's Odysseus stands as the clearest human example of metis in action, most famously in his scheme against Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. Athenians of the Classical era prized this same blend of wisdom and cunning as one of the defining traits of their own character. Centuries later, the scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne took that same word and built a school of literary criticism around it. Their case study led straight back to Metis's marriage to Zeus.

• 3. Swallowed By Zeus

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  An emetic potion from Metis made Cronus vomit up the five children he had swallowed in fear of being overthrown. Those children were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. Cronus was the reigning ruler of the cosmos, the father who had swallowed them in the first place. Zeus and his freed siblings then fought the Titans for a 10-year war remembered as the Titanomachy. After the Olympians won, Zeus pursued Metis and married her.

  The prophecy from Gaia and Uranus actually came in two parts. Its first half warned that Metis would bear a daughter wiser than herself. Zeus already knew the second half, and he moved to stop both from happening. He tricked Metis into transforming herself into a fly, then swallowed her whole. Hesiod's Theogony describes the moment bluntly. Zeus, it says, 'seized her with his hands and put her in his belly, for fear that she might bring forth something stronger than his thunderbolt.' She was already pregnant with Athena, their first and only child, and Metis simply kept raising her from inside Zeus's mind, continuing to advise him as a ruler.

  Once Athena had grown to full size inside him, Metis set to work as a craftswoman. She made her daughter a set of robes, an armor, a shield, and a spear. Athena banged that shield and spear together, giving her father a headache so severe he could no longer bear it. Zeus finally sent for the smith god Hephaestus, son of his new queen Hera. Hephaestus cut his skull open on the banks of the river Triton. Athena stepped out fully grown, already dressed in the armor her mother had made, and was soon named goddess of wisdom, warfare, and crafts. That skull-splitting scene would become one of the most retold moments in Greek myth, though not every later teller agreed Zeus was even Athena's father.

• 4. Other Tellings

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  A scholiast, an ancient commentator writing notes on the Theogony, credited Metis with the power to change her shape at will. In this telling, Zeus tricked and swallowed his pregnant wife at the exact moment she transformed. The Greek text calls what she turned into a πικρὰν, or pikràn. As Keightley later observed, that word actually means 'bitter,' which makes little sense in context. He argued it should instead read μυῖαν, meaning fly, or μικρὰν, meaning a small thing. The mythographer Apollodorus told the story differently again. In his version, Zeus raped Metis, who shifted through many forms trying to escape him before her pursuit ended the same way. A separate strand of the tradition names the Cyclops Brontes, not Zeus, as Athena's father, placing his union with Metis before she was ever swallowed.

  Not every ancient author followed Hesiod's version to the letter. Acusilaus and the writers of the Orphic tradition did, going further still. They placed Metis on a throne beside Eros, as one of the primal forces that shaped the cosmos. Plato took the lineage in yet another direction, naming Poros, meaning creative ingenuity, as a son of Metis. Scholars have also drawn a close connection between Metis and Thetis, another shapeshifting sea power. Thetis, too, was bound by a prophecy that she would bear a son greater than his father.

• 5. Echoes And Namesakes

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  Several scholars have pointed out that Zeus swallowing Metis mirrors his own father's habit of swallowing his children. That parallel has stirred debate over what these reproduction myths were really about.

  Metis Island, in Antarctica, still carries her name today. So does 9 Metis, one of the larger bodies orbiting in the main asteroid belt. And so does one of Jupiter's moons, simply named Metis. It is a small and lasting trace of a goddess whose place beside Zeus was nearly written out of the story entirely.