ABSTRACT
The city of Athens was named after a goddess, Athena. In The City of God, St Augustine relates a story by Varro according to which the citizens themselves were allowed to vote whether they wanted to name the city after Poseidon or Athena. All men voted for Poseidon, and all women for Athena, but the women outnumbered the men by one. At least this decision in favour of Athena was very democratic, even though the city’s masculinity was not put at risk. 1 As Aeschylus remarked, the Goddess Athena had no mother, but was born fully armed from the forehead of Olympian Zeus. 2 Athena was at the same time ‘tritogeneia’, the daughter of Zeus, and ‘parthenos’, a virgin or – more precisely – an unwed young woman. 3
