Writing Athena: My Cambridge Lent Term

As I write this post, I’m aware that it might be the final one I write on this Athena: Sharing Current Research blog in Cambridge, where I’ve spent an Athena-themed Lent Term. That term is now over, and spring is coming into bloom.

In King's College yesterday, photographed by Rachel Bryant Davies.
Edmund Leach House on King's Parade, where I've been staying, is behind me, to the right 

What I had hoped to achieve was time engaging with a research topic that has been part of my working life, and that runs deep into who I am - and has for a long time.

And that has happened. In my first blog post in Cambridge, I set out what I was anticipating and hoping for.

One thing was library time to reflect and write on Athena, specifically, an Athena that might be read through a prism of sexuality. I anticipated these reflections being achieved by access to the Classics Faculty Library, one of the best libraries for a classicist in the UK, and indeed the wider world.

I also hoped for the opportunity to try out my ideas among colleagues - especially in the Greek Dialogues research paper I was to give as a Lewis-Gibson fellow.

The time in Cambridge has given me this opportunity, and I’ve come away with the products of days researching and writing in the Classics Faculty Library, my reserved books at my side.

I shall miss these books and 'my' desk.

Conversely, when I realised that this very intensity was risking the onset of writer’s block, I took a step back.

I began doing what I’d never quite had the time for: I sat in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and there made unexpected discoveries, including those I reflected on in my previous post.

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Athena gazes on the aegis wearing Caryatid from Eleusis in the Fitzwilliam.

I also spent time in the Museum of Classical Antiquity, amid the pink tones of Tom de Freston’s exhibition poíēsis, sketching Medusas. As I did this, I reflected on how the paintings - placed among and between the reliefs and statues - were prompting me to engage with those sculptures in a way I had never experienced before.

These included the cast of the colossal Medusa from Corfu. This Medusa has her body still. She has not been beheaded. And yet she must have been: she is already a mother, standing beside her son. This Medusa, her son Chrysoar, and their accompanying panthers, are surrounded by paintings of the pregnant body of the artist’s wife, Kiran. The potential of new life, and the precarity of new life, is reflected in Tom de Freston’s own creativity as an artist.

The sketch I made of the Corfu Medusa in the Classical Antiquity Museum.
I found myself focusing on her head and the serpents round her waist.
Are those serpents acting as her belt, or are they squeezing her? James Looseley thought that they look like her intestines.  

I’ll explain somewhere else - over on another blog - why Medusa became my focus of the sketching, rather than Athena. For now, let me just say that focusing on the Medusa on the Lemnian Athena led me to reflect on the goddess from the perspective of her ‘monster’ self (if monster is the right word: more on that over on the other blog).

As I’m writing this post, I’m sitting in a café, Fitzbillies, near where I’ve been staying on King’s Parade. But what you are reading will be in printed form, typed up later. I’ve been aware for a while that when I write longhand - especially with my fountain pen on ivory paper - this can trigger more complex cognitive processes than writing directly on a computer.

Drafting this post in my notebook.

I was able to reflect on this from a new perspective on Saturday morning, when I attended a workshop for the VIEWS Project, run by Pippa Steele and her collaborators, on writing and how music might shape how one writes. I’ve come away with a deep sense of how it is the flow of my pen that creates and shapes what I’m thinking, and how that thinking takes shape.

Sometimes I am surprised, as I type something up, at how deeply I’ve gone into a topic - deeper than my non-writing self subsequently remembers.

That event also prompted a possible new research approach into an aspect of Athena that I have never really tackled. This is the image of the goddess as a power of writing, who herself can be depicted holding a stylus, and who is represented on the coins of Athens as a piece of writing.

These coins depict a helmeted head of the goddess on one side. On the reverse side there is an owl, one of her attributes. There is also an olive branch, another of her attributes. There is also a crescent moon - an attribute I've not managed to explain - not yet at least. 

In addition, there is an inscription, ΑΘΕ, the first three letters of the name of the goddess and the name of the city: the goddess as a set of letters.

Fifth century BCE Athenian tetradrachm, sourced from Wikimedia Commons here

As well as extending my interests into aspects of Athena, already a goddess whose varied roles I have been seeking to make sense of for years, I have also renewed my interest in the goddess as she figures in a text that has long been intriguing me: the epic poem the Dionysiaca by the 5^th century CE poet Nonnus.

In this poem, perhaps more than anywhere else, Athena’s duality as at once parthenos (maiden is the best English equivalent for this term) and mother is expressed. As a PhD student, I wondered why, but didn’t have the space then to take this further.

Now, building from a comment made by Anna Lefteratou at the paper I gave in Cambridge last month, I am beginning to get a sense of where the path to an answer might start. And it is by exploring how the Athena of the Dionysiaca aligns with Mary, the parthenos-mother of Nonnus’ other surviving poem, the Paraphrase of the Gospel of John.

I have discussed the poems with Anna, and have followed up on some leads she gave me. I have also gained a sense of the wealth of scholarship on Nonnus over recent decades, including in Cambridge by Tim Whitmarsh and others, and by scholars such as Fonteini Hadjittofi from the University of Lisbon, whose Erasmus Lecture on the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrase I went to last week in the Divinity Faculty.

As well as time in the libraries, museums and research events of Cambridge, I managed trips away.

One was to Leicester, to talk about Athena at the School of Archaeology and Ancient History Research Seminar. The discussion afterwards was wonderful, including some thought-provoking questions from the graduate students on areas such as theoretical approaches to ancient sexuality and on why it might be that some of the visual evidence I showed of Athena’s birth shows the goddess not only being born from her father, but dressed like him.

I also went to Nottingham, to examine a PhD thesis on these very two deities (Athena and Zeus).

And I spent a wonderful few days back in North America - in Las Vegas - where I found an Athena near the Bridge of Sighs just over from Five Guys.

Athena in Vegas.

In Vegas, my personal life took a new turn, which was continued in Cambridge. More on that in due course!

For now, I’ll sign off by noting how much I have gained from my time in Cambridge.

I hope to come back soon.

Walking through the museum while thinking about Athena

I hadn’t intended to go silent on this blog. When I arrived in Cambridge, I imagined posting at least weekly - perhaps more - charting my discoveries as they unfolded. I had in mind the blog I kept during a fellowship in Durham two years ago, where writing regularly helped me reflect on my adventures as they happened.

But things have not quite turned out that way. Although I drafted several posts, most of my time here has been devoted to writing the article I came to Cambridge to work on. Recently I found myself somewhat stuck. So here I am - returning to blogging.

Today I have come to the Fitzwilliam Museum. With less than a fortnight left in Cambridge, I realised I would regret not making more of the city’s many cultural offerings. There is still plenty I want to do in the Classics Faculty Library before I leave, but it felt important to take some time to explore.

I am drafting this first in a sketchbook I bought in the museum shop. I have just discovered that the museum lends out folding chairs so visitors can sit anywhere in the galleries to sketch. I plan to do exactly that, with a particular theme in mind: Athena, and, more specifically, the question of Athena’s sexuality.

So I shall chart my journey through the museum and sketch it out, metaphorically at first but later literally.

Entering through the original, austere, main entrance, I found myself in the large central space confronted by images that reflect a very particular kind of sexuality: the neoclassical nude, the Aphrodite/Venus-like female form. 

Only the other day I heard about a project in Cambridge (at least I think in Cambridge) proposing that nude statues in the city be clothed, in part to challenge the assumption that looking at the naked female body in public space is somehow neutral or unproblematic. That idea came back to me as I stood there.

I began looking around the entrance gallery for Athena, but she was nowhere to be seen. Eventually I looked up. There she was: at the centre of a pediment above one of the doorways leading into the galleries. Over the opposite doorway there was another.

So there you have it: Athena presiding over the threshold. The goddess marking the moment one passes from the entrance space into the galleries beyond - Athena as guardian of culture, perhaps, or at least as the figure who presides over the transition into it.

I entered the gallery through the doorway beneath the Athena to the left. Inside were a range of paintings that I will not go into here. But while I was there I looked up and found something I had been told to look out for by my friend Sarah Hardstaff: Medusa in the ceiling.

There she was, set within a space otherwise occupied by flowers, Medusa herself forming the centre of a floral motif.

Returning to the stairwell through the other Athena doorway, I headed downstairs and found myself in the Greece and Rome Gallery.

While I have been in Cambridge, I have been asking myself some specific questions: what is a god? What is a goddess? And what might the sexuality of a goddess be, specifically in the case of Athena?

I noted that one of the displays in the gallery asks a related question: what does a god look like?

In the discussion after a talk I gave in Cambridge last month as a Lewis-Gibson fellow, one of the comments made was that a goddess is not a woman. But perhaps she can be.

One vase in the gallery shows, according to the caption, a warrior woman fighting a man. The label identifies the warrior woman as Athena. The scene is described as providing one possible answer to the question of what a god looks like. And the answer is: like Athena.

What marks Athena out as divine here is not nudity - far from it - but her many layers of clothing and armour. These attributes signal her identity: helmet, armour, and patterned garments marking her out as a deity. They also make her recognisable. Athena’s divinity is, in a sense, something that can be signalled through costume and attributes.

This also makes her a particularly accessible deity in another sense. One can imagine dressing as Athena and being recognised as such. In ritual contexts something like this could indeed happen: men as well as women might perform roles associated with the goddess: groups of men across different age categories would perform the dances associated with her, the very she dances here as she fights. This is the armed dance, the Pyrrike, first danced as she fought the 'man' she fights here.

As for this 'man'. He is a Giant - like her, a non-human personage: one of those who is seeking to supplant the Olympian gods as cosmic rulers.

As the two figures fight, or perhaps dance, they are flanked by two human figures. This makes me wonder whether the battle for Olympos is being imagined as happening on earth. Perhaps divine time and human time are being blurred here, or perhaps they are existing alongside, or within, one another.

Following the imagery around the vase, there is a large flower to the left of Athena when one faces the scene. It seems to mark some kind of boundary between what is happening here and what appears on the other side of the vase. 

The flower suggests to me the continuing space of Athena’s authority - an aspect of the goddess that may be overlooked. She is, in fact, quite frequently associated with flowers.

Curious about what lay on the other side, beyond the flower. I peered as well as I could but the other side is not on display. So I walked around the vase, to the right of Athena and the giant. Beyond another giant flower, there is a satyr. I can't see what lies beside this figure.

Are we now in a different realm? Something more associated with Dionysus and the world of satyrs and excess? Or is the vase connecting these worlds rather than separating them? It is often tempting to contrast the world of Athena with that of Dionysus, but perhaps the imagery here suggests something more continuous.

At this point I had to leave the café where I had been writing my draft because it was closing. But I want to return briefly as I type it up what might be going on in this scene.

Is this meant to represent an epiphany of Athena at the gigantomachy? If so, perhaps that would explain why Athena and the giant are represented at a larger scale than the humans nearby.

One detail I noticed is that Athena’s helmet breaks the frame at the top of the vase. That might be another indication that something extraordinary is taking place.

I am also intrigued by the cross-shaped decorations on her dress. I have the feeling that I have heard something about such patterns on vases before, though I cannot quite remember what.

Fortunately I will be seeing my friend Tyler Jo Smith next week while she is in Cambridge. As a classical archaeologist, she may well know something about it. I shall ask her.

For now, though, I leave the question open - another small thread in this ongoing exploration of Athena.

I will also research the vase - to find out among other things what is on the other side. And, I plan to say something about the other Athenas I saw in the museum.

Sharing New Research (Again): Athena, Cambridge, and why I’m revisiting divine sexuality

For years now, I have been working on Athena. One outcome of that research, around a decade ago, was starting this blog. Its title, Sharing New Research, was chosen to reflect a moment of collective energy: a conference on the goddess I was organising at my then workplace, the University of Roehampton.

With this post, I am reviving the blog, again to share new research on Athena - this time my own.

This spring, I am in Cambridge as a Lewis-Gibson Fellow, to work on the goddess, and to reflect consistently on the topic in a way I haven’t been able to for a while. Indeed, not since I was a graduate student in the 1990s have I had the luxury to return to ideas with this level of intensity.

Part of what I’m doing in Cambridge, indeed, is to engage with that earlier self. I shall be revisiting my doctoral thesis – to ask how questions I explored there now look in light of the many shifts in understandings of Athena, and about gender and sexuality.

The main goal of the fellowship is to write a chapter for an upcoming Companion to Ancient Sexuality, edited by Allison Glazebrook and Antony Augoustakis. My focus for that chapter will be the sexuality of Athena and Athena as a gendered divine figure. I shall be considering how a deity might inhabit spaces between male and female for instance, and about how mechanisms of power, normalcy, and social order operate, and how Athena, as goddess who is considered to police order, might be, herself, shaped and constrained by it.

As the Centre for Greek Studies describes the project:

Drawing on literary and visual sources and modern gender theory, the research explores contested binaries, gender inversion, and alternative masculinities, contributing to wider debates on identity and the nature of the divine.

Over the next couple of weeks, I shall be developing and testing my initial ideas in two academic talks, each titled What is the sexuality of Athena? These papers in turn follow on from an initial exploration of the topic at Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario last year, chaired by Allison Glazebrook.

The first of these papers will take place at the University of Leicester Wednesday of this week. 

Then, in early February, I will give a version of the paper in Cambridge. The Centre summarises my talk as follows:

Challenging modern assumptions of permissiveness or rigid binaries, the lecture explores how myth and religion reveal more fluid, symbolic ways of thinking about identity and difference. Focusing on Athena, Professor Deacy examines how ancient audiences negotiated ambiguity, inversion, and the spaces between male and female.

Over the coming months, this blog will be a place where I share my research as it unfolds, including how it unfolds from asking the question posed by the upcoming talks: What is the sexuality of Athena?

I plan to blog next with an overview of my Leicester paper.

More soon!