IV

A great diversity of opinion prevailed with regard, to the birthplace of Dionysius and Athena. Wheresoever a river or a fountain was discovered that bore the name of Tritonis, as in Crete, Thessaly; Arcadia, Bœotia, the inhabitants maintained that Athena was born there.

Not a few mythographs believed that Bœotia had serious claims to such an honour, and that the worship of the goddess had spread over Attica from the banks of the river Tritonis, which flows into Lake Copais: Strabo, Pausanias, and other writers record a tradition preserving the memory of two small towns, Athens and Eleusis, situated on the borders of Lake Copais, that were swept away by a winter flood. Considering that incessant warfare was carried on by the savage tribes of primitive Greece; that the towns, in consequence, were built like eagles’ nests, high up amid the rocks, and hence could not easily have been stormed, it is improbable that these two towns should have been built on the borders of a lake. It is true that the towns may have been built on the lake itself, as was the case with the lake habitations of pre-historic Switzerland and New Guinea: the likelier that Herodotus (v, 16) mentions such a city built on Lake Prasias by the Pœonians, who had their women in common and fed their horses on fish. Very possibly the Bœotian Athens, and Eleusis were two lake cities, the rather that [sic] Lake Copais was rich in fishes, and that in the time of Aristophanes and Pausanias its eels were considered very delicate eating. These towns, whose savage inhabitants very probably had their women in common, as had the Lybians living around Lake Tritonis, in Africa (Herod. iv. 180), were a suitable birthplace for such a goddess as Athena.

The Greeks, not unlike other nations, looked upon themselves as being the centre of the universe, whence learning and civilisation flowed over the rest of the world: they held that the Argive king Apis, who gave his name to Peloponesus, once called Apia, land of Apis, had colonised Egypt and imported there the arts of civilisation, in recognition of which the Egyptians worshipped him under the name of’ Serapis. When we bear in mind that the worship of Isis, Osiris, and Apis is as old as the oldest monument of Egypt, and that their names occur in the times of the IVth dynasty, i.e., more than 5000 years before Christ, the probability is that it was Egyptian art which civilised primitive Greece, and Egyptian religion which has had an influence on the formation of the Greek divinities.

The Egyptians having a superstitious horror of the sea, this action was not a direct one, but exercised through the medium of the Phœnicians, Karians, Koushites, Lybians, and other Mediterranean peoples Dr. Schliemann, in his excavations at Tiryus and Mycenæ among other objects of Egyptian origin discovered a number of golden masks in the tombs. Homer and later writers who abound in descriptions of funeral rites, make no mention of the use of such masks so common in Egypt. The soil of Greece bears everywhere the traces of the influence of Egypt: in Acro-Corinthus, the ancient acropolis of Corinth, situated further inland, there were two temples of Isis, one styled Pelasgian and the other Egyptian, and two temples of Serapis, one of the name of Canobus, the town where Menelaus is said to have been wrecked on his return from Troy. (Pausanias Cor. § iv) Among the ruins of the ancient city of Hermione, Pausanias found, contiguous to the sanctuary of Athena, the temples of Isis and Serapis, and a ring of huge unhewn stones, in the interior of which the sacred rites of Demeter were performed. (Cor., § xxxiv.) Serapis had a temple at Copæ, a small town on the banks of Lake Copais, mentioned by Homer. (Tel. ii, 503; Paus. Bœot., § xxxiv) On . the top of Mount Pontinus, near Lerna, was the temple of Saitian Athena, built by Danaos.

Ancient tradition described Athena as a foreign goddess. The Phœnician Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, imported into Bœotia the worship of Athena Onga, a word of Phenician origin, the sense of which is lost. At Delphi and elsewhere she was worshipped under that name. Another tradition has it that the daughters of Danaos, on their flight from Sais, on the fifty-oared vessel built by their father, under the guidance of Athena, had introduced her worship into Lindus, in the isle of Rhodes, where they landed on their way to Lerna, in the neighbourhood of Mycenæ and Tiryus.

When. the Greeks of. historic times came into contact with Egypt, they identified Athena with the great goddess of Sais, Neith or Neitha, by inversion Athena, whose emblem was the ewe. No ewe lamb was sacrificed to Athena. Neitha was the mother of Rà, the Sun; Athena was the mother of Apollo, the Greek sun-god. A weaver’s shuttle was employed to express the name of Neitha, because, like Athena, she was supposed to have invented the art of weaving. Athena is admittedly not a word of Greek origin. M. Ch. Lenormant, in his Galerie mythologique, compares the name of Athena with that of Tanath, the Phenician goddess with whom she has much in common. Neitha and Tanath belong to the primitive group of goddesses who were self-born.

The Egyptians and Phœnicians may have had a part in the formation of the myth of Athena, but the decisive influence was that exercised by the Lybians. How the savage tribes of Africa came into contact with the pre-historic Greek remains to this day an unsolved historical problem. The Greeks could not but recognise the resemblance which their own goddess bore to the divinity worshipped on the banks of the Lybian river, Tritonis, and that this region was considered as the birth-place and abode of Athena. Herodotus tells us that Athena was a goddess held in high honour among the Lybians. The country girls had the manners and customs of Amazons, just as Athena had before she grew to be the personification of wisdom. They indulged in rough sports among themselves, fighting with stones and sticks; those who died of their wounds were reputed false virgins. The Lybian women, like the Australians, studied by Messrs. Fison and Howitt, had for husbands all the men of their marital group, the children being reared by the mothers ; when grown up they were taken to the assembly of the men held every month, arid the man whom a child resembled was considered his father. Probably when the Greeks came into contact with the Lybians they were greater savages than the African tribes: according to Herodotus they borrowed from them the costume and “the ægis of Athena ... with this difference that the fringe of their ægis consisted not of snakes but of thongs of leather ... The Lybian women wore over their clothes hairless goat skins, bordered with red fringe, and it is from those skins that the Greeks have drawn the name of œgis. I believe also that the piercing shrieks heard in the temples of this goddess derived their origin from Lybia.” (iv, 189) “The Lybian Athena is the daughter not of Zeus, but of his brother Poseidon; but having quarrelled with her father she goes to Zeus and is adopted by him.” (iv. § 180)

On a closer study of the history of Athena we find that she is characterised by certain features which render her the fitting goddess of a savage people, like the pre-historic Greeks.

A legend preserved by Tzetzes represents Athena killing her father Pallas, in order to escape his lust, flaying his corpse and decking herself with his skin, after the manner of Herakles with the hide of the Nemean lion. During the long period of Athena’s infancy the women were doubtless constantly exposed to the danger of violation; as indeed were all the women of these savage tribes in which marriage by group obtained; numberless nymphs and goddesses had fallen victims to such a fate; nor did Athena escape it. She was violated by Hephæstios and bore Erichthonius, whom Ghè was good enough to go pregnant with for her. The fact of having borne a child or two in no way nullified the claim to the title of virgin. Her temple in the Acropolis of Athens, the Erechtheum, was consecrated to the virgin mother. There is nothing calculated to shock the savage mind in this confusion of virginity and motherhood; and the prerogative of being a virgin mother Athena shared with many Asiatic and Egyptian divinities who gloried in their power to conceive children without the co-operation of the male. Sacred animals shared the same privilege: the divine bull Apis was born of a virgin cow impregnated by the rays of the sun; vultures were rendered fertile by the wind; and Horapollo informs us that the vulture stands for the hieroglyphic symbol of motherhood.

The costume of this primitive Athena no doubt resembled that of the Juno of Lanuvium, as we find it represented on medals and as it is described by Cicero (De nat. Deor. i, § 29). It was composed of the skin of a goat, covering the head and falling over the back, drawn in at the waist, and there tied into a knot formed by the forelegs of the animal. We may presume that her ægis, which has so greatly exercised the minds of the German and French Sanskrit scholars, was nothing else than a goat’s skin wound round her left arm in the way that the Spaniards wrap their cloaks about their arms in their duels with the navaja (bowie-knife). To impart a character of ferocity to this ægis, a border formed of serpents’ heads was added to it, and from the centre of it hung a human head horribly mutilated. The Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology, now in course of publication under the direction of W.H. Roscher, reproduces an antique Gorgon’s head having the lips and nose cut off and stretching out its tongue. The later poets and artists, forgetting or disregarding the earlier conception of the ægis, represented it as a breastplate covered with metallic scales and extending from shoulder to shoulder. If this coarse and ferocious costume was little worthy of the Athena destined to become the goddess of divine wisdom, the primitive religious images of her were equally unworthy of that perfect work of art which the Greek statuary was ultimately, to produce in representation of her.

The statue of Athena, left by the daughters of Danaos at Lindus, was, if we credit Callimachus (frag. 105), a mere log of wood. The oldest statue of Athena polias, namely protectress of the city, which was preciously preserved at Athens, and which was said to have fallen from heaven on the day of the foundation of the Acropolis, was like the Athena of Lindus, a shapeless block of wood. At Mantinea Athena was represented by an erect quadrangular stone, to which were added two stumps of arms. Rude images of a similar kind were used to represent other primitive divinities: the Hera of Pharis was a lump of wood; the renowned Aphrodite of Cyprus was represented under the form of a stone pyramid (Tacitus, Hist. ii. § 3). The Dionysius worshipped at Thebes was a piece of wood ornamented with brass (Pausanias, Bœoti. xii). The pre-historic Greeks, like other savages, did not, worship mystic gods personifying the hidden forces of nature; stones, bits of wood or bones endowed with magical properties were the gods of their divinity. It required long ages of development before man gave to his superior beings the animal or human form.

The worship rendered to the savage Athena was in keeping with the coarseness of her images. In the Troade she was a sanguinary divinity, and human blood was spilt upon her altars; yet an object of such profound veneration was this Trojan Athena, that Alexander stopped at Ilios to bring offerings to her, and that Xerxes sacrificed to her a holocaust of a thousand bulls. Porphyrios recounts that it was customary to immolate virgins to the Athena of Laodicea, in Syria (De Abst. ii. § 56). And not only to her, but to her companion Agraulos, daughter of Kekrops were human sacrifices offered: in the temple she inhabited at Salamis, together with Athena and Diomedes, a man was immolated to her.

Before taking up her habitation in the towns, and dwelling in the temples, Athena had climbed the mountain-tops, and lived in caves, in attestation whereof we have her epithet Agraulos, wild, rustic, and the Orphic hymn. She was then “the goddess who strikes doubt and terror into the souls of men”; she resembled the Eumenides, these antique goddesses who, later on, were to choose her for umpire in their quarrel with Apollo, the new god, who violated the ancient usages. (Æschylus, Eumenides). Zeus and the gods of the new Olympus had had for predecessors other divinities that successively had been dethroned and consigned to inferior functions or simply suppressed. The savage Athena and the Eumenides belonged to those antique divinities that had been compelled to submit to Zeus. Hesiod relates that when Zeus married Metis, and gave birth to Athena, he was already the uncontested lord of the heavens. Popular traditions describe Athena as taking part in the struggle with the Titans, burying Enceladus under a rock, and helping Zeus to triumph over his enemies: the child-bed scene, played by the master of men and gods, was but the shamming of his adoption of her, after which Athena consents to recognise his patriarchal authority. It is because Athena belonged to this antique class of divinities that she possessed such virile qualities, and that; according to the Orphic hymn (xxxii, 10), she was “arsen kai thélus,” male and female. Though it is impossible to identify Athena with Dionysius, we cannot help remarking the curious analogies of the two myths: not only is Dionysius thrice-born like Athena, but like her he has a double nature (diphues, Orphic Hymn, xxx, 2). Furthermore, Dionysius was bull-headed (tauropos), and as Schliemann concludes, from certain idols found at Ilios, that glaucopis Athena does not mean blue-eyed, but owl-headed, we may infer that she was a totem goddess of a savage tribe, whose women had the habits of Amazons, and who recognised the owl for its ancestor.

The epithet Tritogeneia meant that Athena was thrice-born – for she belonged originally to the group of antique self-born goddesses – but, in the course of time, when her savage adorers reached the stage of development in which the matriarchal family was constituted, she was endowed with a mother, who bore different names, according to the people who worshipped Athena; and at last, when on earth, and afterwards in heaven, man bad become the ruling power in the family, she consented, to the great joy of the gods, to recognise the authority of Zeus, who went through the ludicrous ceremony of giving her birth, as was the custom in case of an adoption. Hera, to adopt Herakles, went to bed, hid the child under her clothing, and let it drop as in a natural accouchement. (Diod. Sic. iv, § 39) Savages and barbarians always want to have the material scene reproduced. Plinius (In Paneg. § 8) relates that even in his time adoption was made in front of the nuptial bed, in order to make believe that the adopted person was the real offspring of the conjugal bed.

Thus, the epithet Tritogeneia not only takes us back to the remotest times of Greek history, but marks three most important epochs of human pre-historic evolution.

Philosophers and grammarians of antiquity have diverted themselves by transfiguring Athena into a divinity as imponderable as wisdom and as it impalpable as the air; but the popular traditions, the coarse fables, the meaningless epithets which cling to her, enable the unbiased student to reconstruct a primitive Athena adapted to the character of a savage tribe, war-loving and ferocious, who sent colonies from Africa to Greece and Asia Minor.

The myth of Athena was not produced all of a piece, nor does it present the immutability of t mathematical formula. In common with all things, both in the natural and the intellectual world, it has been subject to the laws of evolution. Athena had the same fate as other supreme beings who evolve as their savage creator evolves, and are informed with a higher life as man advances in civilisation: like the soul in the Egyptian hell, she has passed through so many states that the goddess of the savage tribes is barely discoverable in the divinity of the poets and in the agia sofia of the philosophers.