Athena

Born from the head of Zeus

Hesiod tells the birth in the Theogony. Zeus's first wife was Metis, “Counsel”, wisest of gods and men. Gaia and Uranus warned him that her second child would be a son who would rule gods and men; so when Metis was about to bear Athena, Zeus tricked her and swallowed her whole. In time the child came out of his own head: the bright-eyed Tritogeneia, terrible, rouser of the battle's din, unwearied leader of armies. Later poets added the midwife: Hephaestus (or Prometheus) split Zeus's skull with an axe, and the goddess leapt out with a war cry, in full armour.

Homer knows none of this. In the Iliad and the Odyssey she is simply “daughter of Zeus who bears the aegis”, closer to her father than any other god, and she wears his aegis; no mother is ever named. The two accounts agree on the point that matters: Athena is Zeus's own, made of his intelligence, and she has no mother to soften her.

Wisdom, craft and the measured war

Her mother's name is the key to her: metis is cunning intelligence, the knack of finding the right move. Athena is the goddess of everything done with skill. She taught weaving and gave the olive; she showed Bellerophon the bridle with which he tamed Pegasus, and she helped build the Argo, the first ship. Potters, carpenters and shipwrights prayed to Athena Ergane, the Worker; Hephaestus is her only peer among the gods, and the Athenians honoured the two together.

She is a war goddess too, but of a particular kind. Ares is bloodlust and noise; Athena is the phalanx, the plan, the moment to strike. In the Iliad she brings Ares down twice, once through Diomedes's spear and once with a boulder of her own, and mocks him as he falls. She is Promachos, who fights in the front line, and on the Acropolis Nike, victory, stood in her palm. She is the intelligent side of war, the side that wins.

Her epithets say the rest. Pallas is old and unexplained: a girl, a playmate killed by accident, a giant she flayed, depending on who tells it. Parthenos, the Maiden, is her refusal of marriage. Glaukopis, bright-eyed or owl-eyed, gave her the owl, and the owl gave Athens its coins.

The goddess of the city

Athena was worshipped all over Greece — at Sparta as Athena Chalkioikos, “of the bronze house”, at Argos, at Troy as the Palladium, the small image on whose safety the city was said to depend — but she was above all the goddess of Athens, Athena Polias, the city's own. On the Acropolis her ancient olive stood beside the Erechtheion, next to the mark of Poseidon's trident. The Athenians answered her with the Panathenaia, a midsummer festival at which the whole city walked up the rock to bring her a newly woven robe, the peplos, and, every fourth year, held games in her honour.

The Parthenon, built between 447 and 432 BC under Pericles, was her greatest house. Inside stood Phidias's Athena Parthenos, ≈ 12 m of gold and ivory over a wooden core, helmeted, a Nike on her palm and the aegis on her breast; the statue is lost, known only from copies and descriptions. The frieze around the building showed the Panathenaic procession itself. Athens's silver tetradrachms carried her helmeted head on one face and her owl on the other, so that across the Mediterranean the coins were simply called “owls”.

Minerva, and after

Rome knew her as Minerva, an Italic goddess of crafts who took over Athena's stories and her armour, and sat with Jupiter and Juno in the Capitoline triad. Ovid's Metamorphoses, the source of the Arachne tale, is where medieval and Renaissance Europe most often met her. She survived the end of the old religion better than most of the Olympians: as the allegory of Wisdom itself, the owl on a book, the helmeted woman on a seal or on the fountain in front of the parliament in Vienna. Athena is the Greek idea that intelligence is a divine power in its own right, that a city is something made, and that even war can be won by thinking.