Athena

Born from the head of Zeus

Athena’s mother was Metis. While Metis was pregnant, Zeus swallowed her. The early Greek poet Hesiod explains why. Zeus feared the children foretold for her. First would come a daughter equal to him in strength and judgement, and then a son who would rule gods and mortals. With Metis inside him, Zeus stopped the son from being born and took control of the daughter’s birth.

Athena did not vanish with her mother. She grew inside Zeus and came out through his head, already in armour. Metis stayed hidden inside him and was still wise enough to advise him about good and evil.

The story turns a threat to Zeus’s power into one of its main supports. Athena carries her mother’s intelligence. Yet in public she begins as the daughter Zeus produced on his own.

How the birth was told

Later writers on myth tried to explain how a goddess in armour got through a skull. Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, says a blow from an axe opened the way. He then names four figures who might have struck it: Prometheus, Hephaestus, Palamaon or Hermes. He does not choose between them.

Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, makes Athena the daughter of Zeus. He does not mention Metis or describe the birth at all.

So the famous scene of Athena springing from her father’s head is a tradition. The early sources do not share one single account of it.

Two gods arrive in Attica

Athena’s claim to Athens began with another dispute over who owned what. In Apollodorus, the god Poseidon reached Attica, the land around Athens, first. He struck the Acropolis, the rocky hill above the city, with his trident, his three-pronged spear. Salt water appeared, a feature people called the Erechtheis.

Athena came next. She planted an olive tree and asked Cecrops, the serpent-bodied king of the region, to witness what she had done.

Zeus appointed 12 gods to judge between them. Cecrops’s evidence proved what Athena had done, and the court gave her the land. Poseidon flooded the Thriasian plain in anger, but the verdict stood, and the city took Athena’s name.

The contrast between the gifts is familiar: salt water against the farmed olive. Apollodorus’s story also depends on how the case was run. Athena did more than produce the more useful gift. She made sure somebody saw her plant it. Her victory suits a goddess of strategy, because she had her evidence ready before the case was heard.

Who had the right to decide

The Parthenon, Athena’s great temple on the Acropolis, showed the contest on its west pediment, the carved triangle under the roof at that end. This made it one of the great public images of Athens. Even so, the judges change from one telling to another.

Apollodorus puts 12 gods on the court and uses Cecrops as a witness. In a local Athenian tradition, the mythical kings Kekrops and Erechtheus decide in Athena’s favour, together with other local heroes.

Both versions keep the two rival gods and their gifts. They differ on who had the authority to turn a gift into ownership of the city. In one tradition it is a court of the Olympian gods. In the other it is figures who stood for Attica itself. This changes the city from a prize handed out by gods into a community whose own ancestors recognise its protector.

What kind of power Athena held

The Greeks called on Athena by titles, names that each described a part of her power. These titles link the contest to her wider role. Polias and Poliouchos tie her to the city and its safekeeping. Ergane places her over skilled work. Her warfare is disciplined and tactical, and it serves to defend an ordered community. That sets it apart from the uncontrolled hunger for battle that the god Ares stands for. The olive story brings these sides of her together: farming, forethought and the lawful recognition of the city’s protector.

The broken statue

Only fragments survive of the Athena carved for the Parthenon’s west pediment. The pieces held in the Acropolis Museum come from her head and neck, right shoulder, aegis, right calf and left foot. The aegis was part of the armour she wore. The figure was made of Pentelic marble in the workshop of the sculptor Pheidias. It dates to 437 to 432 BC, and as reconstructed it stood more than 3 metres high.

The statue is broken, and the ancient accounts disagree about the court. Neither gap weakens Athena’s hold on the place. The Acropolis kept the contest alive in its buildings, its worship and its stories.

Athena was born from a crisis over who would rule among the gods. In Athens she became the goddess through whom the city explained how its own right to rule had been awarded.