Athena in Oxford Bibliographies

A nice piece of news to begin a new month. I'm currently working down my inbox having been away in Dublin external examining - and have just seen the notification that an article I wrote on Athena for Oxford Bibliographies is just out (DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195389661-0196). Here's the link to the article - to read it one needs to subscribe.

What does Athena REALLY say when she explains her vote in the Eumenides?

In this posting, I want to share one thing I'm currently writing about in my OUP book and which I mentioned briefly in the discussion at a conference at Leuven last month on classics and psychology. These comments were  made in response to a paper about Orestes in the Oresteia from a psychoanalytical perspective.  The paper included an exploration of the meaning of Athena's words at Eumenides 736-8 where the goddess explains why she uses her deciding vote to acquit Orestes of matricide. As usually read - indeed, I think as read by anyone else who has written about the passge - what Athena is saying is that she makes her decision because her origins and her disposition make it inevitable that she will act in such a way. Thanks to the circumstances of her birth she is 'of the male' literally and she is also 'exceedingly of the father' literally. She also 'approves of the male in every respect, with all [her] heart':

Nobody is the mother that gave birth to me (mētēr gar outis estin ē m’egeinato), and I approve of the male in every respect, with all my heart, except for undergoing marriage (plēn gamou tuchein). I am exceedingly of the father (tou patros) (736-8). .

This looks like the most explicity pro-paternal and pro-patriarchal statement ever made by or about the goddess in Greek literature.  It has been taken to encapsulate the nature and mode of action of the goddess. It has also been taken as marking the turning point in the Oresteia between the old ways of vengeance and matriarchy and the new ways that her words inaugurate of justice and patriarchy.

For some years I was bothered about whether such a view can be upheld. Firstly, Athena's proviso, that she upholds all things male 'except for undergoing marriage,' struck me as sitting uneasily alongside the various patriachal statements she piles on. For a goddess seeking to inaugurate a new system that squeeze out powerful females, it makes her rather similar to the Amazons whose establishment of a rival polis is described earlier in the play - and the location of this polis was none other than the Areopagos where the lawcourt to try Orestes, and so start the move away from vengeance towards justice, is situated.

Then Alan Sommerstein pointed out something to me, also some years ago, that took these concerns to a whole new level. What follows are my musings in summary. Previous scholars have missed something vital.  It is not the case that Athena's words mark some kind of haven in the otherwise ambiguous word play of the Oresteia. What she says fits those many other instances in the Oresteia exploring the instability of language and the possibility of logos to deceive.

For at the very same time that Athena says that she does not have a mother she also says that she does have a mother. And she gives that mother a name - in contrast to her father who is not named here.  The mother is: Outis. The name means Nobody or No-one. Thus on the one hand the mother does not exist - and so in English this mother (or non-mother) is 'nobody' with a lower case first letter. But on the other hand Athena's mother is a goddess with the name of Outis. Thus Athena says both

• 'no-one is the mother that bore me'

and

• 'Outis is the mother that bore me.'

And what is Outis? It is the name also used by Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemos - it is at once a name and a non-name - a cunning name... a name of metis.

And there is more: it is also the name of Metis with a capital M. Ou-tis (No-one) is another way of saying Mē-tis (No-one), the goddess who is swallowed by Zeus when pregnant. What then happens? Is the pregnancy transferred to Zeus? Or does Metis continue pregnant and bear her child when ready - the child that grows inside Zeus until it bursts forth out of his head. Athena is - if this is right - twice born (just like Zeus was): from her mother's body then later from her father's body. I argue in the book, in a chapter on Hesiod, that the poet allows for all these possiblities - in ways that past scholars have overlooked. In fact, an overriding theme of the book is things that past scholars have overlooked about Athena.

One final point: it is not just Athena that both denies and names a mother. So does Apollo. As the god makes his case for the acquittal of Orestes he calls on Athena as witness of his case that the claim of the mother is weaker than that of the father - because the role of the mother is supposedly less important than that of the father in conceiving children. He exclaims: 'There may be a father without a mother' on the grounds that 'over here there is a witness, the child of Olympian Zeus, who was not even nursed in the darkness of the womb, but such an offspring to which outis...thea could give birth’ (Eum. 663-6). Outis thea! This is usually taken to mean 'no goddess', making Athena the kind of child that no goddess could have borne. But Apollo is also describing the goddess as ‘such a goddess that the goddess Outis could bear.’ Again, Athena's mother is being denied while simultaneously being named.

The Oresteia charts a progress towards an institutional framework for justice and father-right and the turning point comes with Athena as the child of the father.  But Athena's mother is named by the very gods who are overseeing the transition. Meaning what? That language is as deceitful as it ever was? That meaning remains contested? That the old ways cannot be squeezed out however much they might appear to be?

In the book I'll be considering the various implications of this doubleness for how to read Athena, and for how to read the complexities in Greek thinking around patriarchy in the texts that are usually read as establishing and validating patriarchy. Athena is the 'traitor to her sex' - more so in the Eumenides than anywhere else. But here she is also 'Athena the trickster.'

What is Greek Athena?

I'm currently looking at a piece by Fritz Graf for the first time in several years. It examines the relationship between Athena and Minerva and demonstrates how such a comparision depends upon sorting out what it means for there to be a Greek goddess, Athena, in the first place. The following consideration of what 'Greek Athena' means cuts through a lot of thinking about what it means to talk about a Greek goddess named Athena. There isn't one, there is one - it depends on how one looks:

"Greek Athena" is an abstraction from the many forms the goddess had in the single poleis of the Greek world (139).

Abstraction/many... single/poleis... This negotiation between singularity and multifacetedness could provide a starting point for studies of the goddess - and of other deities - from various angles.

Reference

Graf, F. 2001. “Athena and Minerva: two faces of one goddess?” In Athena in the classical world. Edited by S. Deacy and A. Villing 127-39. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

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.