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The threatening uproar was stopped by the intervention of Athena who thus completed the restoration of her favourite as she had begun it. It is strange that this poem, which is such a favourite with modern readers, should have made a less deep impression on the Greeks. To them, Homer is nearly always the Iliad, possibly because Achilles was semi-divine, whereas Odysseus was a mere mortal.
In this last part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained the official centre of worship.
And next—but here the people leaned from parapet, house-roof, portico, and shouted louder than ever: “The car and the robe of Athena! Hail, Io, pæan! hail!” Up the street on a car shaped like a galley moved the peplus, the great robe of the sovran goddess. From afar one could see the wide folds spread on a shipyard and rippling in the breeze. But what a sail!
It is curious that the British city which has somewhat saucily styled itself the Modern Athens is indeed more under her especial tutelage and favor in this respect than perhaps any other town in the island. Athena is first simply what in the Modern Athens you practically find her, the breeze of the mountain and the sea; and wherever she comes, there is purification, and health, and power.
In the dawn of a literature at least, we expect roughness and crudity, an uncertain judgement and a faltering hand; but the first known Greek poem, like Athena in the myth, is born full grown and mature. Yet its makers made the story and the rich language and the elaborate and unrivalled metre for themselves.
Athena appeared to him disguised as a shepherd, telling him he was indeed in Ithaca: "Thou art witless or art come from afar, if thou enquirest about this land. It is not utterly unknown; many know it who dwell in the East and in the West. It is rough and unfitted for steeds, yet it is not a sorry isle, though narrow. It hath plenteous store of corn and the vine groweth herein.
But the Draconian image of evil is established in the serpent Apap; while the bird's wings, with the globe, become part of a better symbol of deity, and the entire form of the vulture, as an emblem of purification, is associated with the earliest conception of Athena.
But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the two main ones, of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs, one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow, the much enduring, and the long-suffering.
Poor Perdix fell headlong through the air, and he would have been dashed in pieces upon the stones at the foot of the cliff had not kind Athena seen him and taken pity upon him. While he was yet whirling through mid-air she changed him into a partridge, and he flitted away to the hills to live forever in the woods and fields which he loved so well.
Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give accurate distinction between the intellectual rule of Athena and that of the Muses; but, broadly, the Muses, with their king, preside over meditative, historical, and poetic arts, whose end is the discovery of light or truth, and the creation of beauty; but Athena rules over moral passion, and practically useful art.
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