Athena's Surprising Portfolio
The Greek goddess of wisdom was Athena, famous in mythology for having sprung full-grown from the head of her father, Zeus, instead of making her earthly debut in the usual way, and for remaining a virgin. There were only three virgin goddesses in the entire Greek pantheon, and Athena (sometimes called Pallas Athena) was one of the three.
Athena became associated with wisdom for three reasons. One was her mother, Metis, whose name means “thought” in Greek. Zeus, as king of the gods, liked to fool around with pretty girls both divine and human, and one of those girls was Metis. When Metis became pregnant, Zeus swallowed her so that his wife, Hera, would not find out about the affair. Metis gave birth to Athena inside Zeus, and there the young goddess remained until another god hacked at Zeus’s head with an axe and Athena burst forth. Second, Athena’s companion animal was the owl, glaux in Greek. Homer and other Greek poets described Athena as glaukopis: “owl-eyed” or “silvery-eyed.” Owls were thought to be highly intelligent for their ability to see in the dark of night — that is, to see clearly what others can’t — the essence of wisdom.
Athena’s third link to wisdom came through her patronage of arts and crafts. The Greek word for wisdom, sophia, can also mean technical skill, and Athena watched over potters, goldsmiths, carpenters, makers of chariots and weapons, and practitioners of medicine. Above all, Athena ruled over the womanly arts of weaving and embroidery, at which she excelled. The Roman poet Ovid tells the story in his Metamorphoses of a mortal maiden named Arachne challenging Athena to a weaving contest. Athena changed Arachne into a spider.
Ironically, or perhaps not, Athena was originally as much a war goddess as a patroness of wisdom. When she sprang from her father’s head, she was wearing a helmet and armed with a spear or shield. In the Iliad Athena not only dispensed strategic advice to her preferred side, the Greeks, but also fought among them against the Trojans. Athena favored the Greeks and despised the Trojans because, although she was very beautiful, she and her stepmother, Hera, had been losers in the Judgment of Paris, the beauty contest that had launched the war.
In her namesake city, Athens, Athena was worshipped as Athena Promachos, or “Athena at the Front Line of Battle.” The Athenians gave her credit for helping them win key battles in their war against the Persians during the early fifth century BC, and for Athens’s swift postwar rise to military and political dominance among the Greek city-states. They also honored Athena for having facilitated Athens’s economic prosperity during that period by, as their civic legend maintained, giving the Athenians the olive tree. Athena’s chief temple in Athens, the Parthenon (parthenos means “virgin” in Greek) was the city’s architectural glory during the fifth century. It housed a colossal gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess, and every year the city’s young women paid tribute to her by presenting the statue with a new dress that they had woven themselves. The Athenian tragedian Aeschylus, in his Oresteia trilogy, made Athena a protectress of the legal justice and rule of law on which his city prided itself.
By the end of the fifth century, Athens was in military, political, and economic decline, having lost the Peloponnesian War to its rival, Sparta. But the city lived on as a center of philosophy, home of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and, in the second century BC, the Stoic philosopher Zeno. It was during those centuries, when young men flocked to Athens to study at its philosophical schools, that Athena became closely identified with the kind of intellectual savvy that has made her, among other things, the presiding goddess of Bryn Mawr College to this day. The German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel famously wrote that “the owl of Minerva [Athena’s Roman name] spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” — which means either that philosophers have to burn a lot of midnight oil, or that philosophers don’t understand history until it is behind them.
The story of Athena’s birth is an allegory of the birth of wisdom: springing from the head, seat of the mind, after being nurtured by thought. Through Athena/Minerva the Greeks and Romans personified wisdom as a female figure in contrast to their male gods of war (Ares/Mars) and the literary and musical arts (Apollo). By imagining wisdom as a woman, they seemed to recognize that the acquisition of wisdom entails the reflection and calm associated with women, in contrast to the agonistic aggression that characterizes the male psyche. The history of Athena’s cult, in which she was worshipped as a goddess of wartime strategy and the practical arts as well as of intellectual brilliance, might be viewed as another kind of allegory of wisdom: that wisdom is not just an ivory-tower phenomenon but the collective insights of a culture deeply committed to the life-and-death project of defending itself and producing the artifacts that make up its own civilized life.
