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.