Who Was Athena in Greek Mythology?

Zeus was warned that a child of the goddess Metis would be greater than him, so he swallowed Metis. Some time later he developed a terrible headache, his head was split open, and Athena stepped out fully armed.

It is a strange story, but it tells you what the Greeks thought Athena was. She came from thought itself, arrived complete, and needed no upbringing. In Greek mythology she is almost always the calm one in the room.

Greek mythology has two war deities and the contrast is deliberate. Ares represents the chaos and bloodshed of battle. Athena represents strategy, discipline and the defence of a city.

That is why heroes tend to receive help from Athena rather than Ares. She advises Odysseus, guides Perseus and steadies Heracles. Athena rewards planning, and the myths where she appears usually turn on cleverness rather than strength.

The most famous story about Athena is her contest with Poseidon for the patronage of a new city. Poseidon struck the ground and produced a spring of salt water. Athena produced an olive tree, offering food, oil and wood.

The people chose the olive tree, and the city took her name. Whether or not it happened, that story tells you what the Athenians valued and how they wanted to see themselves. The Parthenon was built for her, and her owl became a lasting symbol of wisdom.

Athena is easy to recognise in Greek art once you know what to look for:

• •The owl, standing for watchfulness and wisdom
• •The olive tree, her gift to Athens
• •The aegis, a protective cloak or shield
• •A spear and helmet, worn calmly rather than aggressively

One story complicates the picture of Athena as the reasonable one. A skilled weaver named Arachne claimed she could weave better than the goddess and was challenged to a contest.

Accounts differ on whether Arachne actually lost. In the best known version her weaving was flawless but depicted the gods behaving badly, and Athena destroyed the work and struck her. Arachne hanged herself, and Athena transformed her into a spider so she could weave forever. It is a reminder that Greek gods were not safe to compete with, however wise they were said to be.

The myths are only part of how the Greeks related to Athena. In Athens she was honoured through the Panathenaia, a festival held every year, with a grander version every four years that included athletic and musical contests. Prizes in some events were large painted jars filled with olive oil from sacred trees, decorated with an image of Athena striding forward with spear and shield. The festival linked the goddess, the olive and the prosperity of the city in a way that everyone taking part could see and taste.

At the heart of the festival was a procession that carried a newly woven robe, called a peplos, to an old wooden statue of Athena on the Acropolis. Women and girls of the city helped weave it, which fits her role as a patron of craft and especially weaving. The long carved frieze of the Parthenon is often interpreted as showing this procession, although scholars still debate exactly what it depicts. When the Romans absorbed Greek religion, they identified Athena with their own goddess Minerva, which is why both names appear in later art.

Athena's part in the Trojan War begins with a beauty contest. In the myth, the goddess of strife, Eris, threw a golden apple marked for the fairest among the guests at a wedding. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite each claimed it, and Zeus passed the decision to a Trojan prince, Paris. Each goddess offered a bribe. Hera offered power, Athena offered wisdom and victory in war, and Aphrodite offered the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. Paris chose Aphrodite, and his taking of Helen from Sparta led to the war.

Snubbed in the contest, Athena sided firmly with the Greeks. In the Iliad she intervenes in battle, restrains Achilles from drawing his sword on Agamemnon, and helps Diomedes so effectively that he wounds gods. The Odyssey describes the wooden horse as built by Epeius with Athena's help, which fits her role as patron of craft and clever planning. Yet she was also angered when Greek warriors violated her temple during the sack of Troy, and many of them suffered difficult journeys home as a result. Her favour, even for her own side, had conditions.

One of Athena's most important appearances comes in a play rather than an epic. In the Eumenides, the final part of Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy, first performed in Athens in 458 BCE, the young Orestes has killed his mother Clytemnestra to avenge his father Agamemnon. The Furies, ancient spirits of vengeance, hunt him without mercy. He flees to Athens and begs Athena for help. Instead of deciding the case herself, she sets up a court of Athenian citizens on the Areopagus, a rocky hill near the Acropolis, to hear both sides and vote.

Athena announces that she will vote for Orestes and that a tied vote will mean acquittal. The votes come out equal, and Orestes goes free. She then persuades the furious spirits to accept an honoured home in the city instead of laying waste to it. The play turns an endless blood feud into public justice, with a goddess of reason presiding over the change. The idea lasted. Roman lawyers spoke of the vote of Minerva, the principle that an equal split should favour the accused, and a real council did meet on the Areopagus to judge homicide cases.

The Parthenon was built to house an enormous statue, the Athena Parthenos, made by the sculptor Phidias and dedicated in 438 BCE. It stood around twelve metres tall, with a wooden core covered in ivory for the skin and sheets of gold for the clothing and armour. Athena held a figure of Nike, the winged goddess of victory, in her outstretched hand, with a shield and a great snake beside her. According to the historian Thucydides, Pericles reminded the Athenians that the gold could be removed if the city ever needed it in an emergency, so the statue also served as a store of public wealth.

The statue has been lost for centuries, so how do historians know what it looked like? Ancient writers such as Pausanias described it, and Roman-era copies survive, including a small marble version found in Athens known as the Varvakeion Athena, about a metre tall. Coins and gems also reproduce details of the shield and helmet. From these pieces scholars have built reconstructions, and in 1990 a full-size version, later covered in gold leaf, was unveiled inside a concrete replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Standing before it gives a sense of how overwhelming the original must have been in its dim temple.

Athena in Greek mythology is the goddess of wisdom, craft and strategy, patron of Athens and the steady adviser behind many famous heroes, which makes her one of the most useful figures to know when you start reading Greek myths.