Athena in Athenian Literature and Cult Author(s): C. J. Herington Source: Greece & Rome, Vol. 10, Supplement: Parthenos and Parthenon (1963), pp. 61-73 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/826896 Accessed: 23-05-2020 06:06 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Classical Association, Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Greece & Rome This content downloaded from 73.97.157.116 on Sat, 23 May 2020 06:06:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ATHENA IN ATHENIAN LITERATURE AND CULT By c. J. HERINGTON IF the subject of this article is to be fully appreciated, it is necessary to begin with a contrast. The still centre of Athena-worship at Athens lay towards the north side of the Acropolis, in the eastern half of the shrine nowadays called the Erechtheion, and in the predecessors of that building. There, from the time of our earliest records of Athenian history until the downfall of the classical world, sat an olive-wood image of Athena. It could be dressed and undressed, like a doll. This in fact was done towards each midsummer, at the feast Plynteria. High summer saw a moment of great glory for the image, the festival of the Panathenaia; now cattle and sheep were slaughtered in its honour within the temple, while every fourth year a new-woven robe, the peplos, was presented to it. In early autumn, probably, the shrine witnessed a mysterious night-ritual, the Arrephoria, when unknown objects were carried to and from the sanc- tuary of Aphrodite in the Gardens. And there were other ceremonies of which we know little, such as the Kallynteria, and that unnamed rite wherein the priestess carried the goddess's aegis to welcome newly wed Athenian couples. So far as our records extend this olive-wood Athena (like Auden's lunar beauty) 'has no history, is complete and early'. The only exception, the only break in the placid recurrence of ritual, is significant: when the Persians came in 480, it was the only divine image that is recorded to have been carried to safety from the doomed city. This piece of wood was evidently valued above the marvellously fashioned statues in marble and bronze that had accumulated on the Acropolis during the past four generations. And six hundred years later, when Pausanias wrote his guide-book to Greece, the piece of wood was still, in his words, 'the holiest thing' of all Attica. The importance of the image and of the cults connected with it was therefore demonstrably great in the life of the people; especially, no doubt, for the simple folk, the class who, like it, continued much the same before, during, and after the flowering of classical Athenian culture. A recent discussion of the olive-wood Athena (often miscalled 'Athena Polias') is to be found in C. J. Herington, Athena Parthenos and Athena Polias This content downloaded from 73.97.157.116 on Sat, 23 May 2020 06:06:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 62 ATHENA IN ATHENIAN LITERATURE AND CULT It, and its worshippers, may in fact be thought of as the steady thoroughbass above which the articulate class composed the tremen- dous music of the sixth to fourth centuries. But such an Athena could make little imaginative appeal to statesman, poet, or artist; and it is with the evolution of their Athena that this article is henceforth con- cerned. The outlines of that goddess had long been drawn for them by Homer and Hesiod. The fundamental distinction between her and the Athenas of local cult (whether at Athens or elsewhere) is that she is no still and secretive numen but a person, vivid and outgoing, capable of development just as mortal persons are. Her attributes, also, are far more clearly defined: she is an ebullient armed warrior (e.g. Iliad, v. 733- 47), a shrewd companion of hero-kings (e.g. Odyssey, xiii. 296-302), and a patroness of the crafts (e.g. Odyssey, vi. 232 ff., xx. 72). Clearly defined, too, is her place in the family of Panhellenic gods: she is the favoured daughter of Zeus. On this last point Hesiod knows, or says, more than Homer, namely that she was born from the head of the Lord of the Gods (Theogony, 924-6). We may say at once that the personality of this epic Athena was never radically altered in Athenian literature or cult; it was only modified according to contemporary needs. But the history of the modifications in the sixth and fifth centuries, so far as the evidence allows us to trace it, is of extreme interest. The first extant mention of Athena by an Athenian is this:' TllJETpa BE "r6UtS KCi(rT aJEV iAt5 O0rTOT' 6ELITatC aioav Kai XlaKO&PCoV 0E&Sv pEvas &Cav'rTCV" Toirl yp lAEydrOuaoS TrriOK0rroS 0 3pWltorra'rpO T c-aX&s 'AOrvafir XElpas "TrrEpOEv EXEL. In these famous lines Solon describes the epic goddess in epic language, reminding us, especially with the traditional epithet 6ppipoTrrdTpl, that she is the daughter of Zeus and a member of the Hellenic pantheon.2 (Manchester, 1955). The account there given of the architecture of the sixth- century Acropolis should be modified in the light of W. H. Plommer's article, 'The Archaic Acropolis: Some Problems', in J.H.S. lxxx (I960), 27 ff.; an article which has seriously weakened the writer's belief in the existence of a large sixth-century Athena-temple on the south side of the Acropolis, though not his suspicion, on non-architectural grounds, that a specific cult of Athena Parthenos once existed there in some form. Solon, Fr. 3, lines I-4 in E. Diehl, Anthologia Lyrica Graeca (Leipzig, 1922). 2 For the full list of Solon's epic borrowings in this passage, cf. the commen- tary in E. Buchholz and R. Peppmfiller, Anthologie aus den Lyrikern der Griechen, is (Leipzig, 1900), 46 ff. This content downloaded from 73.97.157.116 on Sat, 23 May 2020 06:06:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ATHENA IN ATHENIAN LITERATURE AND CULT 63 But at the same time he departs entirely from Homer in representing her as the champion of Athens in particular, assuring her city's pros- perity under the Olympian regime. Thus by implication we have the hierarchy, Zeus-his favoured daughter-that daughter's favoured city. This concept of Athena, which tactfully reconciles the local and the Panhellenic goddess, will hereafter be referred to, for brevity's sake, as the 'Solonian'. In the absence of earlier Athenian literature we cannot, of course, be certain that it was Solon's own invention, but this seems quite possible; in which case it would appear that his flair for compro- mise was not restricted to economic and constitutional matters. Is it too fanciful to draw a parallel with his change to the Euboic standard of weights and measures, to see an attempt to attach Athens to a wider spiritual besides a wider economic community? Once Athena's possibilities as an epic and political goddess had been thus grasped, no thinking citizen could neglect them. Most unfortu- nately, we can call on no contemporary literature for evidence about the undoubtedly crucial period in the evolution of the Athenian Athena which extends from the old age of Solon to the maturity of Aeschylus. Such evidence as we have is derived from the material monuments and from later literary notices; and not much even of this evidence is immune from dispute. Yet two significant developments are, in their outlines, certain: the interest which the Athenians began to take in the story of the Birth of Athena, and the successive reforms (accompanied by in- creasing secularization) of the Panathenaic festival. The primitive-looking story of the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus was both created and developed outside Athens. It is first found in Hesiod; and according to an apparently well-informed Alexandrian source the standard legend was completed-with the detail that the goddess was born fully armed-by Stesichoros of Himera.' But it is clear from the vase-paintings that the developed theme acquired a rather sudden popularity at Athens early in the second quarter of the sixth century B.C., and maintained it for some fifty years thereafter.2 Now in the light of the 'Solonian' interpretation of Athena the impor- tance of this legend, with its graphic insistence on the miraculous and unparalleled origin of Athena from Zeus alone, is obvious: if Athena stands in such a unique relationship with the Father of the Gods, so will the city which Athena uniquely favours. As it happens we cannot x D. L. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford, 1962), No. 233, and scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius there cited. 2 See J. D. Beazley, Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters (Oxford, 1956), Index II, s.v. 'Athena'. This content downloaded from 73.97.157.116 on Sat, 23 May 2020 06:06:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 64 ATHENA IN ATHENIAN LITERATURE AND CULT show that it was in this sense that the story was understood or employed by the Athenians before the fifth century, when Aeschylus wrote his Eumenides and Pheidias designed the East Pediment of the Parthenon.