Athena

Hesiod tells in the Theogony that Zeus took Metis as his first wife, the wisest of gods and men, and that when she was about to give birth he deceived her with flattering words and swallowed her: he had been told that she would bear a son able to overthrow him. Afterwards Zeus himself gave birth from his head to Tritogeneia, “the terrible, the rouser of the din of battle, the leader of the host”. The poet says nothing more about the birth. The axe blow comes from other authors: Pindar (Olympian 7) has Hephaestus split his head with a bronze axe and the goddess leap out with a cry that makes sky and earth shudder; Euripides, in the Ion, gives that role to the Titan Prometheus, and Apollodorus records both versions. The golden armour belongs to Homeric Hymn 28, where she is born brandishing her spear and Olympus reels. Pallas, the name that almost always goes with hers, is in Apollodorus that of a childhood companion: raised by the god Triton alongside his daughter Pallas, she killed her by accident in a mock fight and, grieving, carved a wooden image in her likeness, the Palladium. That image ended up in Troy, and the city could not fall as long as it kept it.

She is a virgin, and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite counts her among the three goddesses whom desire cannot bend, with Artemis and Hestia. She is a warrior, but not like her brother Ares: in Iliad 5 it is she who drives the spear with which Diomedes wounds him, and in Book 21 she fells him with a stone. Her arms are the helmet, the spear and the aegis of Zeus, which Homer describes with a hundred golden tassels, crowned by Terror and bearing the Gorgon's head amid Strife, Force and Onset. She is also Ergane, goddess of the crafts: Hesiod says she taught Pandora to weave; Apollodorus, that the ship Argo was built on her advice; and Pindar, that she gave Bellerophon the golden bridle with which he tamed Pegasus. The Athenians honoured her as Polias, guardian of the citadel, and every four years, at the Great Panathenaea, they brought her image a new peplos woven for her. Her bird is the owl, which ended up struck on the coins of Athens, and her tree is the olive.

Apollodorus tells of the contest for Attica: Poseidon struck the Acropolis with his trident and brought forth a sea, the salt water still shown there; Athena planted an olive tree, with King Cecrops as witness. Zeus appointed the twelve gods as judges, not Cecrops or Cranaus as others said; the land went to her because she had planted first, and Poseidon, enraged, flooded the Thriasian plain. The version in which the Athenians vote and the women win by one vote is Varro's, known to us through Saint Augustine. In the Iliad she upholds the Achaeans: she guides the spear of Diomedes, seizes Achilles by the hair so that he does not draw his sword on Agamemnon, and deceives Hector in the shape of his brother Deiphobus so that he stays to fight. In the Odyssey she protects Odysseus, appears to him as Mentor and as a young shepherd, and at the end raises the aegis so that the suitors flee in panic. She guided the hand of Perseus against Medusa and afterwards set the Gorgon's head on her shield. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Arachne challenges her to weave and the goddess can find no fault in her cloth; stung in her pride, she tears it and strikes her with the shuttle, and when Arachne hangs herself, she leaves her hanging, turned into a spider.