Death—extinction—stares us in the face. We can expect no sensible response until that is accepted.

Who Lies Sleeping?

Athena—Minerva

Athena—Minerva

The next most important god for Greeks after Zeus on Olympus is Athena, the Grey Eyed, the Ægis Bearer. Zeus and Athena are always especially close, for she is his motherless daughter, having sprung full grown, fully armed, from the head of her father, though neither the Iliad or the Odyssey says so. The miraculous birth was the subject of one of the Homeric Hymns.

The longer form of Athena’s name, Athenaia, is simply a feminine adjective, “She of Athens”, the maiden of Athens. The other name, Pallas, simply means virgin. Athena is maiden through and through, so her temple is called the maiden sanctuary, the Parthenon. This maiden is singularly of Athens and no other city.

Plato, in the Laws, says Athenaia is but the local Korê, or maiden, the incarnation of Athens. Only after Homer’s epic had come to Athens from Ionia, could the change of Korê to Athena have been made. The rising democracy took Korê and set her as rival and counterpoise to Poseidon, the god of the aristocracy. Of course, a warrior woman is a negation of Korê. She remains unreal because she is an invented goddes, for all her dependence on Korê. Really, she is the Tychè, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not a goddess, but the city, “Based on a crystalline sea of thought and its eternity”.

Athena is 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.
Professor Gilbert Murray

She has her ancient snake crouching beneath her shield. This snake was the primeval earth born guardian of the city, and probably the goddess herself was at first imaged as a snake. Herodotus tells us that, when the Persians besieged the citadel, the guardian snake left the honey cake, its monthly sacrificial food, untouched, and when the priestess told this the Athenians the more readily forsook their city, inasmuch as it seemed that the goddess had really abandoned it.

The primitive Athenian Korê or maiden had her olive-tree, and Athena had her owl, like those that still hoot by moonlight in the ruined Parthenon on the Acropolis. The goddess herself bore the title Glaukopis, Owl Eyed, and on her coins, current everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean, was stamped the image of her owl. When Athena rose to be the goddess of Light and Reason, the owl got wise with her and became the Bird of Wisdom.

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.

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