Pallas-Athene, Athena, Minerva
"Pallas-Athene is in Homer, and in the general popular system, the goddess of wisdom and skill. She is in war opposed to Ares, the wild war-god, as the patroness and…
From: 1836 C.E. To: 1838 C.E.
Location: Athens, Greece
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“Pallas-Athene,” from The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy by Thomas Keightley, 1838.
Chapter X
Pallas-Athene, Athena, Minerva
The Pallas-Athene of both the Homeric poems is the daughter of Zeus; in one place it seems to be intimated that she had no other parent. In the Theogony Zeus swallows Metis, and the “blue-eyed Tritogeneia” is born from his head, which Pindar says Hephaestos opened with a brazen axe. Athena then sprang forth with a shout which terrified Heaven and Mother Earth, while the king of the gods poured a shower of gold on Rhodes, the sacred isle of the Sun-god. Stesichorus had already sung how the goddess issued from the head of her sire in perfect panoply,—a circumstance however evidently to be understood in the narrative of Pindar.
According to the Homerid, Olympos shook at the divine birth, the earth resounded, the sea was moved, and Helios checked his steeds in their career till the new-born goddess took off her radiant armour. Later authorities assign the task of opening the head of Zeus to Prometheus, or Hermes.
Pallas-Athene is in Homer, and in the general popular system, the goddess of wisdom and skill. She is in war opposed to Ares, the wild war-god, as the patroness and teacher of just and scientific warfare. She is therefore on the side of the Greeks, and he on that of the Trojans. But on the shield of Achilleus, where the people of the besieged town are represented as going forth to lie in ambush, they are led by Ares and Athena together, possibly to denote the union of skill and courage required for that service.
Every prudent chief was esteemed to be under the patronage of Athena, and Odysseus was therefore her especial favourite, whom she relieved from all his perils, and whose son Telemachos she also took under her protection, assuming a human form to be his guide and director. In like manner Cadmos, Heracles, Perseus, and other heroes were, as we shall see, favoured and aided by this goddess.
As the patroness of arts and industry in general, Pallas-Athene was regarded as the inspirer and teacher of able artists. Thus she taught Epeios to frame the wooden horse, by means of which Troy was taken; and she also super-intended the building of the ship Argo. Athena was likewise expert in female accomplishments; she wove her own robe and that of Hera, which last she is said to have embroidered very richly. When the hero Jason was setting forth in quest of the Golden Fleece, Athena gave him a cloak wrought by herself. She taught this art to mortal females, who had won her affection. When Pandora was formed by Hephaestos for the ruin of man, she was attired by Pallas-Athene.
By the Homerid, Athena and Hephaestos are united as the benefactors and civilisers of mankind by means of the arts which they taught them, and we shall find them in intimate union in the mythic system of Attica.
Homer thus describes Pallas-Athene arraying herself in the arms of Zeus, when preparing to accompany Hera to the plain where the Greeks and Trojans were engaged in conflict.
But Athenaee, child of Zeus supreme, The aegis-holder, on her father's floor Let fall her peplus various, which she Herself had wrought, and laboured with her hands. The tunic then of cloud-collecting Zeus She on her put, and clad herself in arms For tearful war; and round her shoulders cast The fringed aegis dire, which all about Was compassed with fear. In it was Strife, In it was Strength, and in it chill Pursuit; In it the Gorgon-head, the portent dire,— Dire and terrific, the great prodigy Of aegis-holding Zeus. Upon her head She placed the four-coned helmet formed of gold, Fitting the foot-men of a hundred towns. The flaming car she mounted, seized the spear, Great, heavy, solid, wherewith the strong-sired Maiden the ranks of heroes vanquisheth, With whom she is wroth.
A Maeonian maid named Arachne, proud of her skill in weaving and embroidery, in which arts the goddess had instructed her, ventured to deny her obligation, and challenged her patroness to a trial of skill. Athena, assuming the form of an old woman, warned her to desist from her boasting; and when she found her admonitions were vain, she resumed her proper form and accepted the challenge. The skill of Arachne was such, and the subject she chose (the love-transformations of the gods) so offensive to Athena, that she struck her several times in the forehead with the shuttle. The high-spirited maid unable to endure this affront hung herself, and the goddess relenting changed her into a spider .
The invention of the flute or pipe is also ascribed to this goddess. When Perseus, says Pindar, had slain Medusa, her two remaining sisters bitterly lamented her death. The snakes which formed their ringlets mourned in concert with them, and Athena hearing the sound was pleased with it, and resolved to imitate it: she in consequence invented the pipe, whose music was named many-headed, on account of the number of the serpents whose lugubrious hissing had given origin to it.
Others say the goddess formed the pipe from the bone of a stag, and bringing it with her to the banquet of the gods began to play on it. Being laughed at by Hera and Aphrodite, on account of her green eyes and her swollen cheeks, she went to a fountain on Mount Ida, and played before the liquid mirror. Satisfied that the goddesses had had reason for their mirth, she threw her pipe away: Marsyas unfortunately found it, and learning to play on it, ventured to become the rival of Apollo. His fate has been already related.
The favourite plant of Athena was the olive, to which she had given origin. Among animals the owl and the serpent were sacred to her. Athena was most honoured in Athens, the city to which she gave name, where the splendid festivals of the Panathenaea were celebrated in her honour. She had also temples at Thebes, Argos, Sparta, and elsewhere. At Tegea she was worshiped under the title of Alea. She contended, as we have seen, with Poseidon for Athens and Troezen, and, according to one account, for Argos.
This goddess is represented with a serious thoughtful countenance, her eyes are large and steady, her hair hangs in ringlets on her shoulders, a helmet covers her head; she wears a long tunic and mantle, she bears the aegis on her breast or on her arm, and the head of the Gorgon is on its centre. She often has bracelets and ear-rings, but her general air is that of a young man in female attire.
Pallas-Athene was called by the poets, 1. Blue- or rather Green-eyed; 2. Town-destroying; 3. Town-protecting; 4. Plundering; 5. Unwearied or Invincible; 6. People-rouser, &c.
We are now to inquire into the signification of the name of this goddess and her original nature.
The simplest and most natural interpretation of Pallas Athenaee appears to be 'Athenian Maid,’ and she thus forms a parallel to the ‘Eleusinian Maid' Persephone. As this is her constant title in Homer, it is manifest that she had long been regarded as the tutelar deity of Athens. We may therefore safely reject the legends of her being the same with the Neith of Sais in Egypt, or a war-goddess imported from the banks of the lake Tritonis in Libya, and view in her one of the deities worshiped by the agricultural Pelasgians, and therefore probably one of the powers engaged in causing the productiveness of the earth. Her being represented in the poetic creed as the goddess of arts and war alone, need not cause us any hesitation, as that transition from physical to moral agents, of which we shall presently give an explanation, was by no means uncommon.
The most probable theory, in our opinion, is that which views in Pallas-Athene the temperate celestial heat and its principal agent on vegetation, the moon. This idea was not unknown to the ancients:
Athena is by Aristotle expressly called the moon. On the coins of Attica, anterior to the time of Pericles, there was a moon along with the owl and olive-branch. There was a torch-race at the Panathenaea, a contest with which none but light-bearing deities were honoured. At the festival of the Skirophoria the priest of the Sun and the priestess of Athena went together in procession. A title of Athena was All-dew (Pandrosos). In the ancient legend of Athens there was a Sacred Marriage between Athena and Hephsestos, in whose temple stood a statue of the goddess.
She was also said to have given fire to the Athenians; perpetual flame was maintained in her temples at Athens and Alalcomense. It could hardly have been from any other cause than that of her being regarded as the moon, that the nocturnal owl, whose broad full eyes shine so brightly in the dark, was consecrated to her; the shield or corselet with the Gorgon's head on it seems to represent the full-orbed moon; and finally the epithet Glaucopis, which is as it were appropriated to Athena, is also given to Selene.
To these proofs respecting the Athenian goddess we may add that at Tegea Athena was called Alea, that is probably Warmer. At Sparta she was named Ophthalmitis or Eyed, and at Argos Sharp-sighted.
If this theory be correct, the best explanation of the perplexing epithet Tritogeneia would seem to be that which derives it from the three phases of the moon. There are two other interpretations of this name which have had more general currency. The one supposes it to signify Head-sprung, as the word is said to have signified Head in some of the obscurer dialects of Greece. But accounts like this are very suspicious, and the later Greeks would have made little scruple about coining a term if they wanted it to suit any purpose.
The other interpretation, which makes the banks of the river or lake Triton the birth-place of Athena, has found a greater number of supporters. But as so many countries sought to appropriate the Triton to themselves, the choice among them might seem difficult. The contest, however, has lain between the river or lake Triton in Libya and a small stream of the same name in Boeotia. The ancients in general were in favour of the former. But as there is no reason to suppose that the Greeks knew anything of the Libyan Triton in the days of Homer, or probably till after the colony had been settled at Cyrene, this theory seems to have little in its favour. Miiller therefore at once rejects it, and fixes on the banks of the Boeotian brook as the natal spot of the goddess.
Here, however, again Homer presents a difficulty, for, as we have already observed, the practice of assigning birth-places on earth to the gods does not seem to have prevailed in his age. Indeed we strongly suspect that the streamlet that flowed by Alalcomenoe got its name in the same manner as the hill Delos at Tegyra, and the grove Ortygia at Ephesus.
The moon-goddess of the Athenians probably came by her moral and political character in the following manner. It was the practice of the different classes and orders in a state to appropriate the general tutelar deity to themselves by some suitable appellation. The Attic peasantry, therefore, named Athena the Ox-yoker, the citizens called her Worker, while the military class styled her Front-fighter. As these last were the ruling order, their view of the character of the goddess became the prevalent one; yet even in the epic poetry we find the idea of the goddess presiding over the arts still retained.
Some of the ancients regarded Athena as the air, others as the earth. There are some mythes which can be explained with so much more ease on this last hypothesis, that we think it not improbable that the Pelasgian goddess of Argos and other places, who had been identified with the Athenian Maid, may have originally been the same with Hera and Demeter.
Keightley, Thomas. The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. Whittaker, 1838.
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