ABSTRACT
The birth of Athena is typically recounted today as a story with humorous potential: Zeus has a ‘splitting’ headache, Hephaistos takes out his axe to relieve the pain, and out comes Athena. That such an interpretation was possible in antiquity is evident from one of Lucian’s second-century Dialogues of the Gods. ‘What’s this? A girl in armour?’ is what Hephaistos exclaims as he sees the result of his actions, ‘she’s got glaukos (‘fierce’) eyes, but they go very well with her helmet’. But the majority of the sources present Athena’s birth in less frivolous terms, as a story with strong aetiological (‘explanatory’) components. As this chapter will consider, it explained key things about Athena including how she came to be born, what her relationship was to her father, and how she acquired certain of her characteristics and attributes. It also dealt with larger events concerning the development of the Olympian pantheon and Zeus’s emergence as the sovereign power in the universe.
