Twenty years ago today

I realised something today that has shocked me - it was twenty years ago today that a conference I organised along with Karen Pierce took place in Cardiff at the institution that was then the University of Wales College of Cardiff and which is now Cardiff University. The conference topic - Violence and Power: An International Symposium on Rape in Antiquity - grew out of the work that Karen and I were each doing in Wales on aspects of rape in the ancient world. What I was focusing on at this time was Athena's vulnerability to rape at the hands of Hephaistos. From memory, the paper I gave at the conference was called 'abusing Athena' and it grew into a chapter on 'the vulnerability' of Athena for the book that grew out of the event, Rape in Antiquity (1997, 2002). My thinking has become increasingly sophisticated over the decades (DECADES!) but there was a freshness to my work then that I'm finding it interesting to recall.  I'm also enjoying remembering the range of participants at the event many of whom are still active practitioners in classics and other fields.  But a lot of us will always deeply miss one of the speakers, Keith Hopwood, my doctoral supervisor, who died in 2007. I kept one of the posters, which is up on my office wall. I hopefully have the progamme and abstracts somewhere, and, somewhere, at least one version of my paper.

 

Stop press! Karen has blogged on this anniversary too at http://darksideofthecatalogue.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/rape-in-antiquity-twenty-years-ago/

Athena in books not about Athena

I am currently compiling a list of uses of Athena in the titles of book, publishers' series etc etc. What interests me are books and other publications that do not actually discuss the ancient goddess or the postclassical reception of that goddess but that are using the goddess as a symbol to convey in a snappy way what the purpose of the project is.  I have previously discussed in postings to this blog two such examples - the Head of Athena Press and Martin Bernal's Black Athena. The latter example does concern ancient evidence for the goddess - in fact Bernal's derivation of Athena from the Egyptian divine name Neith is key to his case that Greece was colonised by settlers from Egypt in the second milennium BCE. However, Athena is also played out in Black Athena as a symbol of a) the elite basis of classics and classicism and b) the new ('ancient') model Bernal proposes with a view to wiping out what he saw as centuries of Eurocentrism and sometimes racism.

Here are a few further examples:

Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism. Edited by Franco Marcucci and Emma Sdegno, 175–194. Milan: Cisalpino, 2000.

• Edited volume coming out of a conference in the late 90s on myth, religion and ideology.

Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age. Edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, 1–20. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997.

• Edited volume, again from the 90s, this time from beyond the humanities - on the potential for conflict from cyber operations.

Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology. Edited by Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Flint, 37–58. University of Notre Dame Studies in the Philosophy of Religion 7. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.

• Yet another edited volume from the 90s, this time in biblical studies - drawing on Hermes and Athena as symbols for schoalrship and philosophy.

Athena Press of London - "an author-funded book publisher mainly dedicated to the publishing of books by new authors" which uses the head of Athena as its logo.

The Athena series of Holt, Rinehart and Winton of NY which publishes works in Maths, Physics and Engineering.  The one book I've looked at from the series to date includes no explanation for the name of the series.

More examples to follow...
 

Putting Athena into *Black Athena*

I'm writing after a class on the implications of Martin Bernal's Black Athena for an understanding of a) classics, b) western civilisation, c) Athena - these are three discrete areas but on one level different ways of saying the same thing. As we considered, Athena has long been used a symbol of classical, and so western civilisation. So by arguing that classicists were a group of elite, ideologically 'white' in-groupers who had inherited a subject with Eurocentrist origins that they were unconsciously or otherwise perpetuating, he was effectively saying that how Athena has been received was at best partial, at worst a fabrication. 

As well as thinking about how Bernal's work impacts on how Athena is understood, we reflected on what it means to study classics and to be a classicist. And several people shared the experiences reported by Frances Foster (available here) that I mentioned - of feeling uncomfortable about describing themselves as a classicist when asked what they 'do'.  Students mentioned responses like 'but isn't that a subject done somewhere else?' and the perception of classics as a 'posh' subject responated with their own experiences of justifying what they do to friends, family and strangers. 

I'd welcome feedback on how this outline fits with the experiences of those reading this posting - and how all this bears on what the purpose of classics is, on who receives (or owns) the classical world, and how Athena fits into all of this. Many figures from classical myth have been reclaimed by new users from non-dominant groups in light of the 'democratic turn' in classics - Antigone is one strong example here, Medea another. But Athena has been suprisingingly little used. Could this because, despite Bernal's argument that she was originally African and perhaps black, the goddess has remained too far associated with connotations of elitism to be appropriated in new ways?

 

"The ludicrously named Head of Zeus"

Publisher homepage link

The birth of any deity serves as a good place to start an account of that deity - birth myths both describe a particular stage in a god's 'life' and express what that god 'was'. What, then, does Athena's birth express about Athena?

One thing it shows is that there were as many Athenas as there were representations of the birth of the goddess. There is no 'right' version or 'wrong' version - instead what we have are sources that, for varying reasons, describe the goddess as Zeus-born, motherless, the daughter of specific mothers (not just Metis), the offspring of gods other than Zeus - including Poseidon, Hephaistos, Brontes, the Nile and Pallas - who tried to rape her, and whom she killed and flayed. And this list is not exhaustive. What is more - the relationship created between Zeus and Athena varies - from an image of closeness to conflict and many things in between.  When anyone claims to be relating "the Greek myth" of Athena's birth, warning bells should start to ring.

Intrigued to discover that a new publishing how should call itself Head of Zeus, I went to their website, clicked 'About Us' and found that: "if you want to know why we are called Head of Zeus, enquire here." What's "here" is an explanation from the Chairman including the following:

According to Greek myth, Zeus, an incorrigible philanderer, is told by one of his many girlfriends that she is pregnant. He thereupon swallows her in order to conceal the evidence of his infidelity from his long-suffering wife Hera. But the unborn child, unlike her unfortunate mother, is immortal. In due course Athene is delivered, fully formed and armour clad, from a cyst on her father's head, and adopted as their patron deity, first by the citizens of Athens and latterly by a nascent publishing enterprise in Clerkenwell Green.

According to which Greek myth? Zeus is "an incorrigilble philanderer," but Metis is not invariably "one of his many girlfriends" - sometimes she is, but in Hesiod she is the first wife of the god. The reason given for the swallowing doesn't fit with ancient accounts. Hera can be furious at the birth of Athena, but not because Zeus is trying to cover up his infidelty, but because he puts its product on show - though I can see that one might equally argue that Zeus could be covering up his infidelity by trying to pass of the offspring of his relationship with Metis as his own, self-born, child.

"The unborn child, unlike her unfortunate mother, is immortal".  This would work largely for Dionysos whose mother Semele is blasted to death - but also immortality - in the birth story of that god; but Metis is immortal. That's why Zeus swallows her in some accounts: so that she will be kept away inside himself for all time, to prophecy for him, and/or so that she will not produce any future offspring. In many sources Athena is, indeed, born "fully formed and armour clad" but born from a "cyst"?

This account of Athena's birth is offered with the authority of "according to Greek myth," but includes details that don't match ancient Greek versions. Thus it is wrong - but all versions are wrong in some ways: there never was a single version of the myth of Athena. Instead each teller would shape it to suit particular needs - just as Head of Athena does. They write their own foundation myth leading to the appearance of an audacious young deity who is first the symbol of Athens and thereafter the patron of a "nascent" publisher.

Their title is "ludicrous" - to quote from the industry commentator the Chairman quotes at the opening of his piece. Athena's birth is equally "ludicrous" - for Jane Harrison for example it looked a suspiciously artificial attempt to mesh together two opposing conceptions of a female deity (e.g. Themis p.500 - further refs to follow).  But it provides an interesting instance of a contemporary adaptation that, like ancient accounts and like centuries of postclassical receptions, uses a myth to serve some purpose - here to show that a newly-formed publisher is following an august tradition of Athena as a new-born addition to a pantheon, but also an apparently timeless symbol of classical and Western civilisation.

You can't sew when you're angry

I arrived in work this morning frustrated at a journey that took twice as long as usual thanks to heavy traffic. But there was one interesting upshot - I got to hear one of the guests on Midweek on Radio 4 mentioning support he has given to a charity that helps prisoners turn around their lives by doing activities including needlework.  This will soon start being relevant to a blog on Athena. I was half listening while also musing on what to blog on in response to yesterday's Athena the Trickster class. The guest mentioned a comment by one of the prisoners which went something like: 'you can't sew when you're angry'. This sounds perfectly right and got me reflecting on how the goddess has been viewed through many lenses - where what she keeps being construed as is a power of restraint, moderation - a power that complements, civilises and tames elemental power, and also a power that offsets a series of more elemental (including angry) deities associated with a particular field of activity.  For instance, Detienne and Vernant's structuralist vision of Athena is as the power that offsets powers like Demeter as crop goddess by providing the inventions that let men toil the soil. Or Athena is identified as a power through which humans master the power indicated by Poseidon in relation to horses or the sea by enabling the horse to be tamed or the sea to be navigated. If there is a field of operation that is properly that of Athena - one that she is principally associated with as opposed to one where she enters into the sphere of another deity, this is going to be weaving - an act that requires patience and skill - where Athena is Ergane (Worker) in a field where she is the key operator.

 

How to read Athena as a power of wookworking....

 

One possibility: as a woolworker, Athena brings to bear the same kind of restraining power that Detienne and Vernant focus on - and they are hardly alone there. I could add a host of other scholars who, though some different lenses, have made the same argument for the goddess as the reconciler and harnesser and mediator.  A weaver can do subversive things (Arachne... Persephone... any symbolic weaver of wiles...) but through planning rather than spontaneous action. So any anger will be channelled.  Weaving can be a source of contention.

 

http://imgarcade.com/1/arachne-weaving/

That said (with Athena there is always a 'that said'), weaving can be associated with power struggle - the contest between Athena and Arachne is called by Athena angered at Archne's claim to be a superior weaver; Athena's anger fulled by Arachne's subject matter - scandalous divine stories - causes Athena to turn her into the permanent weaver: the spider.

 

 

There is a really good fit with what we discussed yesterday concerning how Athena was thought to 'take action' - in Detienne and Vernant's phrase - in a variety of spheres of activity as a varied but logically coherent deity that recurrently emerges as a power of order and restraint. However, if one homes in on different evidence this model doesn't work. Another starting point for an analysis of Athena would be her anger - that leads to terrible consequences - for example the death/suffering of the Greeks after the sacrilege of Little Ajax in her sanctuary that calls up a storm at sea to wreck their homecomings; this is Athena in the role of a sea power like Poseidon.  There's also what happens to Big Ajax when he refuses the patronage of Athena on the battlefield at Troy; there's also the anger of the goddess at Zeus's actions that leads her to disobey her father in the Iliad. What Clay calls the Wrath of Athena is an organisating motif of the Odyssey. The woolworking Athena of the contest with Arachne is an angry goddess as much as a weaver of a beautifully-skilled artefact.

 

The conclusion I think: depending on where one starts, one will get a particular sense of what or who Athena was.  The Detienne/Vernant vision of Athena, or any deity, as a networker within a complex system of divine relations is but one way of looking at that deity.  But in another respect, Detienne and Vernant were right. They were on a mission to show that the quest for deities as coherent individuals with peculiar histories, myths and cults was misguided - this was the approach taken before they started investigating the pantheon as a network. They show this approach will take the scholar on a wild goose chase because no single divine unit exists in isolation from others.

 

Or: the conclusion is this: Athena does sew when she's angry. The result: she is outdone in a weaving contest.

 

A brief bibliography:

Clay's book - details here

A sample of Detienne and Vernant's work - Detienne on Athena 'of the horse' (Hippias) can be read here.

 

Furies in Oxford

The students who are taking the Athena the Trickster module I'm currently teaching at Roehampton might remember how, last year, while they were taking a 2nd-year module on mythology, two plays were put on in Kingston that had a very interesting fit with two of our sessions - on Medea, and on Oedipus. This year's module coincides with a production of a play - in Oxford later this month - which formed a focal point of last week's class - where we considered two differing ways to explore the depiction of Athena in Aeschylus's Eumendies. I was hoping to glean from the various bits of publicity material I've found to date (this, this and this) how Athena is represented in the production - but to date I've not found anything, although I do like the image to the left, which I found on the production website, for how it juxtaposes a fury, i.e. representative of 'older' gods, and a temple suggesting the more organised system that Athena represents. 

 

In class we considered how the Eumenides - along with the first two plays in the Oresteia - does two contradictory things, sometimes at once. One the one hand, it depicts the origins of Athenian justice and patriarchy and turns the furies, erstwhile powers of vengeance into deities that form part of the organised religious system of Athens. These figures are integrated into the law-based, patriachal order that Athena creates, watches over and symbolises. On the other hand, the play undermines this foundation myth by undercutting the very process of creating justice, patriarchy etc and defeating or suppressing or harnessing the powers that are inimical to progress. The basis of Athenian justice is undermined by the very deity who is establishing the first lawcourt.

 

I stressed that this reading is one that is not followed by most scholarship, including Rebecca Kennedy in her recent book looking at justice in Athenian tragedy through the vehicle of plays in which Athena appears as a character. The closest is the work by Simon Goldhill - and I stressed that I would take his arguments further still and show how just as Athena explains the rationale of her decision to cast her vote for the acquittal of Orestes, the goddess expresses her connection with the forces she is suppressing.  I'm interested in how the publicity for the production in Oxford deals with the depiction of justice in the play by stating that the play "challenges the core of our own legal system", and poses questions including  "Can guilt be judged? Can justice be wrong?"  Whereas scholarly interpretations of the play tend to focus on how it creates institutionalised justice and an ordered framework to contain previous inimcal forces, this production looks set to consider how the various issues are, also, held in tension. 

 

Athena: traitor to her sex or image of female empowerment?

I have just, today, begun teaching a module using Athena as a vehicle for thinking about various aspects of the classical Greek world and its postclassical reception. In the first class this morning, I mentioned the existence of the various initiatives promoting women's inclusion and advancement in science, technology, mathematics and engineering which have used Athena as their symbol, the most recent of these being, I believe this one: Athena SWAN.

When I first started to hear about initiatives like this, I used to get frustrated, not because of its goals, which are wonderful - founded as they are on supporting and finding new opportunities for women and girls in the sciences - but because of the use of the image of Athena to exemplify what the project stands for: empowering women and girls, and finding space for women within traditional male fields.

What follows is founded partly upon a posting I made a few months ago for another blog I write, on who 'owns' classical myth - I'm updating this original posting is light of the discussion earlier today and because it is such a key example of how selective any reception of an ancient topic invariably becomes.

First - some observations on just how extensively the image of Athena has been used in such initiatives.

An Athena Forum was established in 2008 "to provide a strategic oversight of developments that seek to, or have proven to, advance the career progression and representation of women in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) in UK higher education. The Forum explores gaps and challenges, and identifies and commends national and international excellence in supporting women in science. It is the expert voice from within and for the science community." This forum is the successor of an earlier organisation, the Athena Project (1999-2007), set up - to quote from a summary in the journal of the Society for Experimental Biology for 2008 "to reverse the consistent loss of women employed in science, engineering and technology (SET) at each stage of academia and increase the representation of women in senior posts in higher education."

A report in the same journal for also reports on an event that explicity engaged with its ancient symbolas follows: "Wisdom, justice and skill in science, engineering and technology: Are the objectives of the Athena Project mythology?" "Mythology" is being used here, I think, in the standard modern sense of something one might like to believe in but which is false. However, the word also points to the ancient Greek mythological figure that the Athena Project is symbolically associating itself with. The three terms that start the quotation - wisdom, justice and skill - are among the salient traits associated with this ancient deity; indeed they are among the aspects that came up in today's class during an initial brainstorming session.

Before the Athena Forum was set up, there was a Project Athena, based in California to further educational opportunies for young women in mathematics and science. Another initiative, the Athena Project, was established in Washingston State to develop science, mathematics and technology in schools. The links I have for these initiatives have both expired - I last looked at them in, I think, 2000. I'll see what I can find out about them, not least because I'd be interested to find out who first decided upon Athena as a symbol for women in science.

Looked at from one angle, Athena is the obvious symbol for the various 'Athena projects' that have been created over recent decades. The goddess erupted suddenly from the head of the ultimate patriarch shouting and dancing, making her presence felt in the male-dominated world of the gods, and even surpassing the prevailing order with light that temporarily replaced that of the sun (see notably, Homeric Hymn 28: To Athena). After this birth that was described as causing awe among the watching deities, the goddess is seen to live up to her warrior appearance by operating in a male world in numerous ancient sources. The goddess is the advisor and protector (and even  the successor) of Zeus. The goddess is also, in various myths, represented as a friend of numerous heroes - Odysseus, Herakles, Perseus, Bellerophon, Jason and many more. In numerous ancient sources, Athena is envisaged as a female figure at home in, and thriving in, a male-centred enviroment. What is more, the goddess was regarded as the patron of human endeavor including in *techne* ('skill', 'art'). As Hygieia, the goddess was envisaged as a power of good health.  The ancient Athena not only breaks through the glass ceiling of the ancient mythological world; she also is a fitting symbol for those in science and medicine.

In other respects, Athena is the most inappropriate symbol for such projects that I can imagine.

The ancient goddess is depicted in various sources as one who colludes in the suppression of women at male hands and who, even, actively intervenes to bring about the defeat of specific females. Moreover, in a sense, Athena symbolises the suppression of whole communities of women, not least those of her most celebrated ancient site of worship at its peak, the Athens in the fifth century BC. On this reading, Athena is the Mrs Thatcher of the ancient world - an exemplum of the woman who has broken through the glass ceiling only to use her status to ensure that no woman manages to break through after her. She is the anomalous female close to (at?) the heart of power who keeps herself an anomaly by refusing other women entrance, like the goddess on the front of the clubhouse of the Athenaeum (see image above), the London gentleman's club that excluded women from membership until recent years, and which was, according to its website, "established as a meeting place for men who enjoy the life of the mind" - that is the life of a male-oriented Athena.

From this perspective, there is irony in the appropration of a male-oriented female power by organisations set up to promote female education and achievement. This irony can be underscored by aspects of the mythology associated with the goddess, much of which involves not just promoting males as they go on quests or engage in battle, but also subduing other powerful or clever females. For instance, the sculpture of the western side of the exterior of the Parthenon juxtaposes Athena's arrival at Athens with the battle of Greeks (perhaps more specificially Athenians) and the Amazons, the warrior race of females who invaded Athens only, ultimately to be defeated and eventually wiped out at male hands. Furthermore, either by Athena's own hands, or through her proteges, notably Perseus, an array of females are defeated: Arachne, Medusa, Iodama and Pallas (her other self if not own self).

But it's far from the case that the receivers of Athena as a symbol for women in science, technology and other subjects are somehow using Athena wrongly. In acts of mythological reception, myths can be used by as/like metaphors - to convey a certain issue in a certain way, to stimulate new ways of thinking, and potenitally to change how the thing itself is conceived. Each time Athena is received, the goddess is being recast in a selective, incomplete, partial manner which involves cherry-picking those features that best suits the user. Rather than getting caught up in the question of how accurate or otherwise a particular instance of reception happens to be, the focus can shift to how the particular act of reception is adapting and appropriating earlier material to create a new meaning. 

There might be a disjunction between what specific senders, such as Athena SWAN intend and how a particular receiver (myself for example) might respond to what they do. This is not because one of us is right and the other is wrong.  Each time Athena is adapted, a new image of the goddess is created which variously draws from, updates and transforms earlier interpretations.

Athena in a Georgian house?

I've just received the link to an interview I recorded recently with Classics Confidential that bears on this blog's topic, although it does bear more directly on the topic of another blog I write on who "owns" myth (http://owning-myth.blogspot.co.uk/). I talk about my interest in a chimneypiece panel depicting the Choice of Hercules in the Adam Room in Grove House at Roehampton. One of the figures/virtues Hercules is contemplating between is an Athena-esque image of Virtue/Hard Work/Mind with helmet and serpent  Here's the link to the Classics Confidental site. Clicking here will take you directly to the video.

Is Athena boring?

 Seal,
Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro

When I mentioned to a friend who has a sound knowledge of ancient Greek culture, religion and myth that I was writing an article on Athena for an encyclopedia of Greek comedy, his response was that surely this would be a very short piece – as Athena was too boring for comedy.  This resonated with the view I held back in the early '90s when I was trying to get my head round as many aspects of perceptions of Athena as possible in an attempt to try to work out what the core meaning of the goddess might have been for the Athenians.  At least: I never considered that Athena might have been thought boring – quite the opposite. I was seeking to make a case that Athena, a topic had stimulated my interest sufficiently to want me to write a thesis on it, was a deity regarded by the Athenians as the most interesting of the gods, such that her representation went had in hand with the development of the city.  The Athenians considered themselves to be interesting and likewise they regarded the goddess thought to have named the city just as interesting. 

One proof of this, was, I considered, the richness of Athenian mythmaking about the goddess, including the popularity of her birth, itself among the most striking of myths, and the involvement of the goddess in another exceptional birth – here with herself as the progenitor – that of Erichthonios.  These were serious myths about the origins of the goddess, and the origins of the goddess’s child who was in turn the Athenians’ ancestral hero.  Athenian mythology – which I read in line with the 80s and 90s interest in civic mythmaking and identity – was, I thought, a serious business that depicted the goddess as appropriately serious. When I discovered that Hermippos had written a play that may well have poked fun at Athena’s birth – or possibly at the birth of Erichthonios, I found it hard to make this fit my vision of Athena: the title, Athenas Gonai could mean either ‘Athena’s birth’ or ‘Athena’s children’. 

Twenty plus years on, my view of Athena has moved on as follows – to see Athena as too boring for comedy is to make assumptions about the goddess that are belied by the evidence. Such notions of a 'boring' Athena are shaped by the postclassical reception of a specific aspects of the ancient goddess as, for instance, the patron of such 'serious' businesses as city-protecting - as received in the array of modern uses of the goddess on emblems, coins and and so forth. This posting is headed by one such 'serious' appropriation of the 'boring' goddess, on the seal of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

When I was going to give a paper on Athena beyond Athens in Nottingham in 2005, Alan Sommerstein suggested the title ‘multiple Athenas’ to capture the range of uses of the goddess across the Greek world.  Why not extend such an approach beyond how Athenian representations of the goddess differ from those of say Corinth or Sparta or Argos or Boiotia or Tegea to differences within Athens itself?  If I had started out in 1991 looking at how each particular genre, and each particular example, constructs the goddess, I would not have been held back for so long by a quest to understand one particular thing that the goddess ‘meant’ which I could then apply to the array of evidence.  My response to the array of previous attempts to pin the goddess down which I’d found limiting was to try to add my own – hopefully correct – one.  So I put the evidence that did not fit to one side.  I was playing the game that others had played - of trying to push understandings of Athena on by showing what was wrong about previous models before advancing my own.  The trouble with this approach is that it assumes that there is ever going to be some key to unlock the meaning of the goddess.  Hovering here is a sense that a deity is akin to a person, with a coherent, however complex, personality.  Deities are akin to persons, but such a model reduces them to this very specific meaning.  Athena has been skewed to fit the image modern scholars desire to hold – an image of a serious, boring, prude that says a lot about modern perceptions of the deity but little – and perhaps even nothing – about how the ancients constructed the goddess.

In this posting, I've shown why the concept of a boring Athena reveals more about modern uses of the goddess by serious institutions such as universities than it does about the ancient goddess. I've not said anything much, however, about what role Athena does actually play in comedy.  In the next posting, I plan to set out what I'll say in the encyclopedia entry - I'll show how aspects of Athena were exploited for comic effect in Aristophanes.  I'll also show how, as well as showing that the Athenians were not offended at humourous uses of their goddess, this shows just how seriously they took the public roles linked with the goddess that are coming in for comic treatment.