#erectheus

The Erectheion in Athens with the stunning Caryatid porch 🏛🏛

“Children have nothing sweeter than their mother.

Love your mother children, there is no kind of love anywhere

Sweeter than this one to love.”

Yes, I have thoughts, and yes, that is not fair.

One of my thoughts is that categorizing specific classical deities as ‘patriarchal’ and others as not so is an unhelpful division; an ahistorical one, which effaces the actual structures of power at work in the Greek pantheon - while it’s not as though it is never a label which has any root in reality, it obscures too much nuance in the process (and, yes, this goes for Froma Zeitlin’s Oresteia article too).

Athena is literally patriarchal, in that she supports of the rule of her father. What’s important about this is especially is that she is Olympian, that her loyalty lies there. She is not at all a chthonic goddess, and she is not affiliated with the pre-Olympian power structure. These divisions do not neatly divide into male-female, though many, many people have tried to make them so; we must remember the agony of Rhea, of Demeter and Hera and Hestia immured in the darkness of their father’s body, when we are tempted to claim that Zeus’ reign represents the downfall of female power. Where was female power, before? Hesiod’s Theogony is like a chronicle of Gaia’s suffering - everyone rends at her body, everyone spills the blood of her children. There’s no way for her to win, and that is part of the point.

Athena is a civic goddess, though we see her so particularly intensely because we simply have so much material from Athens through which to view her. I do think that her relation to power and loyalty must be understood in the context of a world of city-states, where pride in one’s country has a closed feeling to it, a smaller scale. This is one reason why she is so easily invoked in universities, which are sometimes the size of city-states, or at least of their citizen body.

Athena is a fierce advocate for those mortals who are her own, but she will be stunningly cruel to those who are not. The clearest example of this I think is not some distorted Ovidian retelling of Arachne or Medusa, in which Athena herself, I think, appears hazy and hard to reach, but rather the prologue of the Ajax, where she speaks in triumph to her protegee, Odysseus, about the vengeance she has wrought on behalf of his honor: Ajax tangled up in madness, surrounded by the reeking corpses of cattle he saw as enemies, made to a grotesque mockery. Now, we know that Odysseus is not a squeamish man, and he can be enormously cruel himself, in any version, and yet, however much he loves Athena (and he is devoted to her, they are a near-perfect match of god and mortal, as close as we can get), he is struck with pity for his humiliated enemy, shocked at what Athena has done. She sees no harm in it. She is a goddess. Their displeasure is as sheer as a cliff’s edge.

(We need to stop trying to call some Greek gods good and some bad; just altogether, period, full stop. All of them do horrible things to mortals, because that is the nature of divinity; the flavor and atmosphere of their atrocities varies as their nature does. We can learn a lot by looking at how Athena is in her cruelty compared to Zeus, compared to Dionysus, compared to Artemis, compared to Apollo, compared to Hera, and so on. But as long as we are invested in our dichotomous labels, we cannot explore the subtlety of those distinctions, just throw the lists of their actions at one another like call-out posts.)

I would not ever call Athena ‘patriarchal,’ not while she was one of the greatest sites for the civic participation of women in the Greek world, while young girls learned that they had visible importance in their city by weaving a tunic for her statue, while her priestess was probably the most politically powerful woman in Athens, sitting in state at the front row at the Dionysia. Her domain tangles together the ‘male’ and ‘female’ spheres of action into a strong thread, reveals them as inextricable. Women’s crafts share with rhetoric and battle strategy the beauty of human invention, of insight, of resourcefulness. Odysseus, out in the world talking his enemies in circles, and Penelope at home weaving and unweaving her shroud are both beloved to Athena.

Yes, Athena has hurt women. We talk about Arachne and Medusa a lot; we can think also of the daughters of Aglauros, dead for breaking a command not to look in a basket, and then, a generation later, Erectheus’ daughters, sacrificed for their city. We can think of their mother, Praxithea, unrelenting as bronze, speaking with a horrific pride of how she would let all her daughters die for Athens, just as she would all her sons. After her children’s deaths, Praxithea becomes the first great priestess of Athena, one of that line I mentioned before, residing in the Parthenon and honored forever. She is very fit for that role (her name itself honors the goddess!). Yet we can also imagine how awful it must be to have her as a mother.