the details of the god's legend with exclusive reference to that fancied elemental origin.
As usual, the oldest literary references to Athene are found in the Iliad and Odyssey. It were superfluous to collect and compare texts so numerous and so familiar. Athene appears in the Iliad as a martial maiden, daughter of Zeus, and, apparently, of Zeus alone without female mate.[1] She is the patron of valour and the inspirer of counsel; she arrests the hand of Achilles when his sword is half drawn from the sheath in his quarrel with Agamemnon; she is the constant companion and protector of Odysseus; and though she is worshipped in the citadel of Troy, she is constant to the cause of the Achæans. Occasionally it is recorded of her that she assumed the shape of various birds; a sea-bird and a swallow are among her metamorphoses; and she could put on the form of any man she pleased; for example, of Deiphobus.[2] It has often been observed that, among the lower races, the gods are either animals sans phrase or habitually appear in the form of animals. "Entre ces facultés qui possedent les immortels, l'une des plus frappantes est celle de se metamorphoser, de prendre des apparences non seulement animales, mais encore de se transformer en objets inanimes."[3] Of this faculty, inherited from the savage stage of thought, Athene has her due share even in Homer. But in almost every other
- ↑ Iliad, v. 875, 880. This is stated explicitly in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where Athene is said to have been born from the head of Zeus (Pindar, Olympic Odes, vii.)
- ↑ Iliad, xxii. 227, xvii, 351; Od. iii. 372, v. 353; Iliad, vii. 59.
- ↑ Maury, Religion de la Grece, i. 256.
