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To the Trojans, Athena the War-Goddess was, of course, their War-Goddess, the protectress of their citadel. Zeus, the great father, had Mount Ida for his holy hill and Troy for his peculiar city. To suit the Greek point of view all this had to be changed or explained away. In the Iliad generally Athena is the proper War-Goddess of the Greeks.
Three Powers: the three Erinyes. I cannot help suspecting that the story arises from a real historical incident misunderstood. Troy, we are told, was still holding out after ten years and could not be taken, until at last by the divine suggestions of Athena, a certain Epeios devised a "Wooden Horse."
Four of the wooers fell to the ground at once and the remainder retreated to the farthest corner of the hall. Still they rallied for another onset. Odysseus rushed in upon them and cut them down right and left, while Athena from above shook her fearful ægis. The surviving wooers were stricken with terror and ran about like a herd of oxen chased by a swarm of gadflies.
Odysseus bathed in the fresh water of the river and washed the salt sea-foam from his hair, and when the bath was over he put on the robes that Nausicaä had sent. Athena shed a halo of beauty over him and caused him to look taller and stronger than before.
She had set up in the hall a great loom, and day by day she wrought there at the web, for she was a marvellous spinner, patient as Arachne, but dear to Athena. All day long she would weave, but every night in secret she would unravel what she had wrought in the daytime, so that the web might never be done.
When Odysseus had given them time to get home, he arose and found his way to the town. He had hardly entered it when Athena, in the form of a young girl carrying a pitcher of water, met him. "My daughter," Odysseus said to her, "canst thou show me the way to the king's palace? I am a stranger, and here for the first time." Athena answered him: "With pleasure, stranger; the king is our neighbor.
These deities are known to us chiefly through the names given to them by the Romans, who adopted them at a later period, or identified them with deities of their own. Zeus was called by them Jupiter; Hera; Juno; Athena, Minerva; Ares, Mars; Artemis, Diana; Hermes, Mercury; Cora, Proserpine; Hephaestus, Vulcan; Poseidon, Neptune; Aphrodite, Venus; Dionysus, Bacchus.
The ideal of Athena is in some ways more difficult for us to comprehend than that of Zeus, partly because it is less universally human, and more peculiarly characteristic of Greece and even of Athens.
The subject was a combat, in the presence of Athena, between Greeks and Asiatics, probably on the plain of Troy. A close parallelism existed between the two halves of the pediment, each figure, except the goddess and the fallen warrior at her feet, corresponding to a similar figure on the opposite side.
At the same time Athena was sitting in the sunlight, busily and carefully weaving over and under, and in and out, her dainty, beautiful silken threads, which seemed to have come from the very sunbeams themselves. The colors were most harmonious and exquisite. Even the rainbow was surpassed.
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