ATHENE invented the flute, the trumpet, the earthenware pot, the plough, the rake, the ox-yoke, the horse-bridle, the chariot, and the ship. She first taught the science of numbers, and all women's arts, such as cooking, weaving, and spinning. Although a goddess of war, she gets no pleasure from battle, as Ares and Eris do, but rather from settling disputes, and upholding the law by pacific means. She bears no arms in time of peace and, if ever she needs any, will usually borrow a set from Zeus. Her mercy is great: when the judges' votes are equal in a criminal trial at Areiopagus, she always gives a casting vote to liberate the accused. Yet, once engaged in battle, she never loses the day, even against Ares himself, being better grounded in tactics and strategy than he; and wise captains always approach her for advice.
b. Many gods, Titans, and giants would gladly have married Athene, but she has repulsed all advances. On one occasion, in course of the Trojan War, not wishing to borrow arms from Zeus, who had declared himself neutral, she asked Hephaestus to make her a set of her own. Hephaestus refused payment, saying coyly that he will undertake the work for love; and when, missing the implication these words, she entered the smithy to watch him beat out the red-hot metal, he suddenly turned about and tried to outrage her. Hephaestus, who does not often behave so grossly, was the victim of a malicious joke: Poseidon had just informed him that Athene was on her way to the smithy, with Zeus’s consent, hopefully expecting to have violent love made to her. As she tore herself away, Hephaestus ejaculated against her thigh, a little above the knee. She wiped off the seed with a handful of wool, which she threw away in disgust; it fell to the ground near Athens, and accidentally fertilized Mother Earth, who was on a visit them. Revolted at the prospect of bearing a child which Hephaestus had tried to father on Athene, Mother Earth declared that she would accept no responsibility for its upbringing.
c. ‘Very well,’ said Athene, ‘I will take care of it myself.’ So she took charge of the infant as soon as he was born, called him Erichthonius and, not wishing Poseidon to laugh at the success of his practical joke, hid him in a sacred basket; this she gave to Aglauros, eldest daughter of the Athenian King Cecrops, with orders to guard it carefully.
d. Cecrops, a son of Mother Earth and, like Erichthonius-whom some suppose to have been his father-part man, part serpent, was the first king to recognize paternity. He married a daughter of Actaeus, the earliest King of Attica. He also instituted monogamy, divided Attica into twelve communities, built temples to Athene, and abolished certain bloody sacrifices in favor of sober barley-cake offerings. His wife was named Agraulos; and his three daughters, Aglauros, Herse, and Pandrosos, lived in a three-roomed house on the Acropolis. One evening, when the girls had returned from a festival, carrying Athene’s sacred baskets on their heads, Hermes bribed Aglauros to give him access to Herse, the youngest of the three, with whom he had fallen violently in love. Aglauros kept Hermes’s gold, but did nothing to earn it, because Athene had made her jealous of Herse’s good fortune; so Hermes strode angrily into the house, turned Aglauros to stone, and had his will of Herse. After Herse had borne Hermes two sons, Cephalus, the beloved of Eos, and Ceryx, the first herald of the Eleusinian Mysteries, she and Pandrosos and their mother Agraulos were curious enough to peep beneath the lid of the basket which Aglauros had cradled. Seeing a child with a serpent’s tail for legs, they screamed in fear and, headed by Agraulos, leaped from the Acropolis.
e. On learning of this fatality, Athene was so grieved that she let fall the enormous rock which she had been carrying to the Acropolis as an additional fortification, and it became Mount Lycabettus. As for the crow that had brought her the news, she changed its colour from white to black, and forbade all crows ever again to visit the Acropolis. Erichthonius then took refuge in Athene’s aegis, where she reared him so tenderly that some mistook her for his mother. Later, he became King of Athens, where he instituted the worship of Athene, and taught his fellow-citizens the use of silver. His image was set among the stars as the constellation Auriga, since he had introduced the four-horse chariot.
f. Another, very different, account of Agraulos’s death is current: namely that once, when an assault was being launched against Athens, she threw herself from the Acropolis, in obedience to an oracle, and so saved the day. This version purports to explain why all young Athenians, on first taking up arms, visit the temple of Agraulos and there dedicate their lives to the city.
g. Athene, though as modest as Artemis, is far more generous. When Teiresias, one day, accidentally surprised her in a bath, she laid her hands over his eyes and blinded him, but gave him inward sight by way of a compensation.
h. She is not recorded to have shown petulant jealousy on more than a single occasion. This is the story. Arachne, a princess of Lydian Colophon-famed for its purple dye-was so skilled in the art of weaving that Athene herself could not compete with her. Shown a cloth into which Arachne had woven illustrations of Olympian love affairs, the goddess searched closely to find a fault but, unable to do so, tore it up in a cold, vengeful rage. When the terrified Arachne hanged herself from a rafter, Athene turned her into a spider-the insect she hates most-and the rope into a cobweb, up which Arachne climbed to safety.
1. The Athenians made their goddess’s maidenhood symbolic of the city’s invincibility; and therefore disguised early myths of her outrage by Poseidon, and Boreas; and denied that Erichthonius, Apollo, and Lychnus (‘lamp’) were her sons by Hephaestus. They derived ‘Erichthonius’ from either erion, ‘wool’, or eris, ‘strife’, and chthonos, ‘earth’, and invented the myth of his birth to explain the presence, in archaic pictures, of a serpent-child peeping from the goddess’s aegis. Poseidon’s part in the birth of Erichthonius may originally have been a simpler and more direct one; why else should Erichthonius introduce the Poseidonian four-horse chariot into Athens.
2. Athene had been the Triple-goddess, and when the central person, the Goddess as Nymph, was suppressed and myths relating to her transferred to Aphrodite, Oreithyia, or Alcippe, there remained the Maiden clad in goat-skins, who specialized in war, and the Crone, who inspired oracles and presided over all the arts. Erichthonius is perhaps an expanded form of Erechtheus, meaning ‘from the land of heather’ rather than ‘much earth’, as is usually said: the Athenians represented him as a serpent with a human head, because he was the hero, or ghost, of the sacrificed king who made the Crone’s wishes known. In this Crone-aspect, Athene was attended by an owl and a crow. The ardent royal family of Athens claimed descent from Erichthonius and Erechtheus, and called themselves Erechtheids; they used to wear golden serpents as amulets and kept a sacred serpent in the Erechtheum. But Erichthonius was also a procreative wind from the heather-clad mountains, and Athene’s aegis (or a replica) was taken to all newly married couples at Athens, to ensure their fertility (Suidas sub Aegis).
3. Some of the finest Cretan pots are known to have been made by women, and so originally, no doubt, were all the useful instruments invented by Athene; but in Classical Greece an artisan had to be a man. Silver was at first a more valuable metal than gold, since harder to refine, and sacred to the moon; Periclean Athens owed her pre-eminence largely to the rich silver mines at Laureium first worked by the Cretans, which allowed her to import food and buy allies.
4. The occasion on which Cecrops’s daughters leaped from the Acropolis may have been a Hellenic capture of Athens, after which an attempt was made to force monogamy on Athene’s priestesses, as in the myth of Halirrhothius. They preferred death to dishonour- hence the oath taken by the Athenian youths at Agraulos’s shrine. The other story of Agraulos’s death is merely a moral anecdote: a warning against the violation of Athene’s mysteries. ‘Agraulos’ was one more title of the Moon-goddess: agraulos and its transliteration aglauros mean much the same thing, agraulos being a Homeric epithet for shepherds, and aglauros (like herse and pandrosos) referring to the moon as the reputed source of the dew which refreshed the pastures. At Athens girls went out under the full moon at midsummer to gather dew-the same custom survived in England until the last century- for sacred purposes. The festival was called the Hersephoria, or ‘dew-gathering’; Agraulos or Agraule was, in fact, a title of Athene herself, and Agraule is said to have been worshipped in Cyprus until late times (Porphyry) with human sacrifices. A gold ring from Mycenae shows three priestesses advancing towards a temple; the two leaders scatter dew, the third (presumably Agraulos) has a branch tied to her elbow. The ceremony perhaps originated in Crete. Hermes’s seduction of Herse, for which he paid Aglauros in gold, must refer to the ritual prostitution of priestesses before an image of the goddess-Aglauros turned to stone. The sacred baskets carried on such occasions will have contained phallic snakes and similar orgiastic objects. Ritual prostitution by devotees of the Moon-goddess was practised in Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Asia Minor, and Palestine.
5. Athene’s expulsion of the crow is a mythic variant of Cronus’s banishment-Cronus means ‘crow’-the triumph, in fact, of Olympianism, with the introduction of which Cecrops, who is really Ophion-Boreas the Pelasgian demiurge, has here been wrongly credited. The crow’s change of colour recalls the name of Athene’s Welsh counterpart: Branwen, ‘white crow’, sister to Bran. Athene was, it seems, titled ‘Coronis ‘.
6. Her vengeance on Arachne may be more than just a pretty fable, if it records an early commercial rivalry between the Athenians and the Lydio-Carian thalassocrats, or sea-rulers, who were of Cretan origin. Numerous seals with a spider emblem which have been found at Cretan Miletus-the mother city of Carian Miletus was the largest exporter of dyed woollens in the ancient world-suggest a public textile industry operated there at the beginning of the second millennium BC. For a while the Milesians controlled the profitable Black Sea trade, and had an enterprises at Naucratis in Egypt. Athene had good reason to be jealous of the spider.
7. An apparent contradiction occurs in Homer. According to the Catalogue of the Ships (Iliad), Athene set Erechtheus down in her rich temple at Athens; but, according to the Odyssey, she goes to Athens and enters his strong house. The fact was that the sacred king had his own quarters in the Queen’s palace where the goddess’s image was kept. There were no temples in Crete or Mycenaean Greece, only domestic shrines or oracular cave.
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