Athena

“ So slight is thy regard for thine ally?
[Aias appears in the tent door, with a blood-stained
scourge in his hand.]
AIAS
Oh hail, Athena! Hail thou Zeus-born maid!
Nobly hast thou stood by me. Now will I crown thee
With trophies all of gold for this rich conquest.
ATHENA
Thy words are welcome. But now tell me this:
Hast thou dyed well thy sword in the Argive host?
AIAS
Such vaunt is mine. I disclaim not that glory.
ATHENA
Against the Atreidæ didst thou arm thy hand?
AIAS
So that Aias nevermore shall they insult.
ATHENA
The men are dead, if rightly I take thy meaning. ”

“ But for men at least, the Zeus must have lacked some attributes possessed by the Athena. She was in all her etherial loveliness, a woman still, but without a woman’s weakness, or a single taint of earth. The Athenians paid the highest possible compliment to womanhood when they gave wisdom a female form; and the delicacy of the thought was enhanced by surrounding this mythological creation with an atmosphere of purity which no other divinity of the pagan heaven could lay claim to. Nor in beauty did Athena yield even to Aphrodite herself. ”

“ Since thou, young god, o'erridest my hoar age,
The issue I await with list'ning ear,
And doubtful stay my wrath against the town.
[After the twelfth Areopagite has dropped his pebble into the urn, Athena takes one from the altar, and holds it in her hand.]
Athena.
With me it rests to give the casting vote,
And to Orestes I my suffrage pledge.
For to no mother do I owe my birth;
In all, save wedlock, I approve the male,
And am, with all my soul, my father's child.
Nor care I to avenge a woman's death
Who slew her husband, guardian of the house. ”

“ Yet, once we have rid our minds of trivial mythology, there is religion in Athena also. Athena is an ideal, an ideal and a mystery; the ideal of wisdom, of incessant labour, of almost terrifying purity, seen through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus ”

“ Now that practically all the evidence has been brought it is time to investigate the theories propounded by these modern scholars and the various interpretations which they put upon this strange birth of a deity.
Preller looks upon Athena as the goddess of the clear sky. In the cloudy sky, in the midst of the storm and lightning the clear bright heaven appeared, and this was the birth of Athena. The sky is of the greatest beauty in Greece, especially in Attica, so Athena was most honored in this land. ”

“ Throughout the Iliad, Athena is herself the will or Menis of Achilles. If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms him; if angered, it is she who inflames him. In the first quarrel with Atreides, when he stands at pause, with the great sword half drawn, "Athena came from heaven, and stood behind him and caught him by the yellow hair." Another god would have stayed his hand upon the hilt, but Athena only lifts his hair. ”

“ On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the Athenian people. Her magnificence represented their pride and fondness, more than their piety; and the great artist, in lavishing upon her dignities which might be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, resigned, apparently without regret, the awe of her ancient memory; and (with only the careless remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud) even the perfectness of his own art. ”

“ The grave Athenian master taught to men,
Self-poised, self-centred, and self-comforted,
To watch the world’s vain phantasies go by with unbowed head.
Alas! that serene brow, those eloquent lips,
Those eyes that mirrored all eternity,
Rest in their own Colonos, an eclipse
Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne
Is childless; in the night which she had made
For lofty secure flight Athena’s owl itself hath strayed. ”

“ The two drums of columns in shadow in the foreground reflect the pure blue of the early morning sky. Over their tops may be seen part of the Propylæa, and the mountains of Daphni and Megara.
Athena appears to have been worshipped as a powerful and beneficent deity in many places, but it was at Athens that the more intellectual aspects of her nature were brought into the greatest prominence. How she came to be so closely associated with Athens as to give her name to the city (previously known as “Cecropia”) is a question that is not easily answered. ”

“ From side to side what pains be these that thrill?
Hearken, O mother Night, my wrath, mine agony!
Whom from mine ancient rights the gods have thrust,
⁠And brought me to the dust—
Woe, woe is me!—with craft invincible.
Athena.
I will not weary of soft words to thee,
That never mayst thou say, Behold me spurned,
An elder by a younger deity,
And from this land rejected and forlorn,
Unhonoured by the men who dwell therein. ”

“ Athena's city be not conquest-crowned.
Chorus. Strophe I.
Pallas, thy chosen seat henceforth be mine!
⁠No more the city I despise
Which Zeus omnipotent and Ares prize,
Stronghold of gods, altar-protecting shrine
⁠Of Hellas' deities, ⁠880
For which, with friendly augury I pray;
⁠ to light from earth's dark womb,
⁠May life's fair germs prolific bloom,
⁠Lured by the solar ray.
Athena.
I for my citizens with gracious mind
⁠These blessings mediate; these deities
Installing here, mighty and hard to please.
⁠For unto them hath Fate assigned ⁠890
The destinies to fix of human kind. ”

“ The present custodianship of the priceless relics of antiquity in Athens is admirably careful and satisfactory. If, therefore, Greece had only come into her own a century or so earlier than she did, the famous sculptures of the miraculous birth of Athena, springing full grown from the head of Zeus, and the colossal representation of the strife between Athena and Poseidon for possession of the Attic land, might still adorn as of yore the eastern and western gables of the great temple; or if not that, might still be seen in the very excellent museum at the other end of the city. ”

“ These alien Powers that thus are made
Athenian evermore. To you
Fair be their will henceforth, to do
⁠Whate'er may bless and aid!
Chorus.
Hail to you all! hail yet again,
All who love Athens, Gods and men,
⁠Adoring her as Pallas' home!
And while ye reverence what ye grant—
My sacred shrine and hidden haunt—
⁠Blameless and blissful be your doom!
Athena. ”

“ It has been ingeniously suggested that the ægis had been evolved by art from the skin of a beast worn over the shoulders, with the fierce head hanging over the breast of the wearer, and the legend of Medusa the Gorgon invented to explain it. Anyhow, Athena is a hoplite goddess. Whatever connection she may have with water elsewhere, at Athens she is armed for land warfare.
All these signs convince us that the Athena worshipped on the Acropolis of Athens is not a primitive goddess. Her character, her weapons, and her cult all point to a Northern origin, like that of Zeus and Apollo. ”

“ He is the most splendid and awful of Homer's Olympians.
[52]
The case of Pallas Athena is even simpler, though it leads to a somewhat surprising result. What Apollo is to Ionia that, and more, Athena is to Athens. There are doubtless foreign elements in Athena, some Cretan and Ionian, some Northern. [52:1] But her whole appearance in history and literature tells the same story as her name. Athens is her city and she is the goddess of Athens, the Athena or Athenaia Korê. In Athens she can be simply 'Parthenos', the Maiden; elsewhere she is the 'Attic' or 'Athenian Maiden'. ”

“ To these wise words the gods were forced to agree, so to Minerva was granted the privilege of naming the city; and as she was called Athena, by the Greeks, she named the place Athens, which it is called to this very day. Before many years passed a splendid marble temple was built on the hill just above the city, and this was dedicated to Athena, whose colossal statue, carved by the famous sculptor Phidias, adorned the interior. They called this temple the Parthenon,7 and from the ruins that still remain we know that the hand of man has never built anything to equal it in beauty. ”

“ Athena is as much a part of Attica as gray Hymettus or white-crowned Pentelicus; and the very fact that comedians, like Aristophanes, make good-natured fun of the divinities indicates that “they are members of the family.”
Thirdly, notice that this religion is one mainly of outward reverence and ceremony. There is no “Athenian church”; nobody has drawn up an “Attic creed”—“I believe in Athena, the City Warder, and in Demeter, the Earth Mother, and in Zeus, the King of Heaven, etc.” ”

“ The goddess casts her vote for Orestes, who is thus saved and restored.
The Chorus threaten that ruin and sterility shall visit Athena's city; they are elder gods, daughters of night, and are overridden by younger deities. But Athena by the power of her persuasion offers them a full share in all the honours and wealth of Attica if they will consent to take up their abode in it. They shall be revered by countless generations and will gain new dignities such as they could not have otherwise obtained. Little by little their resentment is overcome ”

“ No one has done so much to obscure the early history of Athenian religion as Athena herself, by her constant habit of taking over the attributes of other divinities [78] . The eponymous [45] hero of each victorious tribe, Kekrops and Erechtheus in turn, is a home-keeping, home-guarding snake (οἰκουρὸς ὄφις) . But by the time of Herodotus [79] the sacred snake supposed to live on and guard the Acropolis lives in the sanctuary of Athena, and is almost the embodiment of the goddess herself ”

“ Every Athenian is born into accepting the fact that Athena Polias is the divine warder of the city, as much as he is born into accepting the fact that it is his duty to obey the strategi in battle. To repudiate the gods of Athens, e.g. in favor of those of Egypt, is as much iniquity as to join forces against the Athenians if they are at war with Egypt;—the thing is sheer treason, and almost unthinkable. For countless generations the Athenians have worshipped the “Ancestral Gods.” They are proud of them, familiar with them; the gods have participated in all the prosperity of the city. ”

“ I am going to model a little image of the goddess Athena, for I think the folk will like to buy that, since that rogue Phidias has set up his statue of her in the Parthenon."
"Phidias, the prince of sculptors!" said the image-maker. "May the gods preserve his life; for he is the greatest glory of all Athens!"
"Ay," said Iris, as she prepared her father's food, "that is what we all call him—the greatest glory of all Athens."
"We think of him," said Aristæus, feebly, "and that helps us in our work. Yes, it helps even us poor image-makers. ”

“ Athena, perfect in intellect as in form, uniting the loveliness of Aphrodite, the majesty of Hera, the delicacy and chastity of Artemis with the wisdom of Zeus, constituted properly the ideal of womanhood, loftier than Eve before the fall and such as it can exist only in the imagination. ”

“ The chief object of this procession was to carry the Peplus, or embroidered robe, of Athena to her temple on the Acropolis. (Dict. of Ant. art. Panathenaea) In connection with this subject it is important to distinguish between the three different Athenas of the Acropolis. (Schol. ad Aristid. p. 320, Dindorf.) The first was the Athena Polias, the most ancient of all, made of olive wood, and said to have fallen from heaven; its sanctuary was the Erechtheium. The second was the Athena of the Parthenon, a statue of ivory and gold, the work of Pheidias. ”

“ Athens would seem better worth living for and dying for, when men realized that they held her in joint-possession with Gods, when they recognised that, in guarding as a sacred trust her immemorial institutions, in celebrating her splendid festivals, they were sealing to themselves the blessings intertwined with these, when they grasped the thought that in planning, toiling, and fighting for her, they were fellow-workers with Athena, Apollo, and the Twin Brethren. ”

“ Even the gods, in their patriotic partiality, were believed to look on Athens as the most lovely, no less than the most glorious city on the broad earth,—an idea which they expressed by representing Poseidon and Athena contending for the honour of becoming their tutelar divinity. ”

“ Phidias made so many statues of the virgin goddess Athena, that his name became associated with hers, as at a later day that of Raphael was with the Virgin Mary. In the first period of his artistic career, moved perhaps by his patriotic gratitude for her intervention in behalf of his native state, he had represented the goddess as a warlike divinity, as here at Platæa; but in his later conceptions, as in a statue made for the Athenians of Lemnos, Athena appeared invested with milder attributes, and with a graceful and winning type of beauty. ”

“ Though, of course, the worshippers weren't doing him any honor. That bow was not for him, but directed toward the Owl, the symbol of the Goddess embroidered on the breast of the white tunic. As an acolyte, after all, he rated just barely above a layman; he had no powers whatever.
Athena knew that, naturally. But somehow it was a little difficult to get it through his own doubtless too-thick skull. He'd often dreamed of power. Being a priest or a priestess, for instance—now that meant something. At least people paid attention to you if you were a member of the hierarchy, favored of the Gods. ”