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.