Athena and the Birth of Erichthonius

Author: Pseudo-Apollodorus

Time Period: 1 CE–500 CE

Country or Culture: Greece

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The patron deity of the city of Athens, Athena is a powerful goddess of wisdom and warfare and an ally to just heroes and soldiers. She is also a virgin goddess, and her virginity is considered a mark of her virtue and strength. One day, Athena seeks out Hephaestus, the god of smiths, in order to obtain new weapons from him. Though Hephaestus has made many weapons for fellow gods before, when he sees Athena, he is so overcome by love and lust for the goddess that he begins to chase her. When he finally throws himself upon her, Athena manages to defend herself and fight off the sexual assault, although Hephaestus does ejaculate onto her leg in the process. Disgusted by this, Athena uses a piece of wool to wipe his semen onto the ground. The earth welcomes it, and from this union Erichthonius is born.

Erichthonius has the upper body of a human and the lower body of a snake. When Athena sees him, she decides to raise him in secret, hoping to make him an immortal like herself despite the fact that he is not her true son. She places the baby in a wicker basket in order to hide him from the other gods and gives him to Pandrosus (Pandrosos,) the daughter of the Athenian king, Cecrops (Kekrôps). Athena orders Pandrosus never to open the basket, trusting that the young woman, a faithful follower of the goddess, will obey her.

However, Cecrops’s other daughters, Herse and Aglaurus (Aglauros), are not as obedient as their sister is. They are overcome by curiosity about what might be in the basket and eventually convince Pandrosus to let them open it. The sisters are driven mad by the sight of the serpent child and the holy wrath of Athena, and they throw themselves off the side of the Acropolis of Athens, perishing on the city streets. Athena then raises Erichthonius herself, training the young man in politics and military strategy. When he comes of age, he overthrows Amphictyon, who had usurped the throne of Athens, and becomes ruler of the city, establishing festivals and temples that will praise Athena for all time.

SIGNIFICANCE

The myth of the birth of Erichthonius is one of the most dominant myths concerning the history of Athens, and the establishment of the mythic king as the city’s ruler was an important moment in the legend of the metropolis. It is notable, then, that the myth is only superficially concerned with Erichthonius and masculine rulers and instead focuses on the virgin goddess and her priestesses.

Athena occupies a complicated and uniquely gendered role within the Greek pantheon. She is a goddess of warfare and heroism, qualities typically associated with masculinity by the ancient Greeks. While Athena is famously beautiful, she does not engage in the affairs, marriages, and scandalous romances that occupy the other gods and goddesses. These tensions between traditional ideas of gender and gendered behavior are likely rooted far back in the history of Greek mythology. Some scholars believe that the goddess originated in ancient, largely lost matriarchal religions and was subsumed into the patriarchal Greek pantheon centuries later. Discrete ideas regarding gender and sexuality, then, remained unresolved in the mythology of Athena.

In the myth of the birth of Erichthonius, an elaborate moral of chastity and deference is woven into the baby’s origin. Athena uses her strength and military knowledge to fend off the attack by Hephaestus, and it is the earth rather than the body of the goddess that carries the child. In this way, her supposedly masculine qualities of strength and fortitude are seen as being in the service of her divine and untouched femininity, while the magical birth of Erichthonius allows her to raise a child without sacrificing her virginity. Likewise, Pandrosus and her sisters are not only royal citizens of Athens but also priestesses of Athena, ostensibly devoted to her worship above all else. In being given the wicker basket and the command to remain ignorant of its contents, the girls are expected to exhibit both strength of will and ultimate subservience, qualities that would make them ideal women in the ethics of the Athenian cult.

Ultimately, only Pandrosus exhibits these qualities, and her sisters are driven to madness and death by their sins. Pandrosus, however, was celebrated in Athenian cults for centuries; a temple dedicated to her existed alongside one of Athena’s own temples, and a yearly ritual in the city involved young women carrying baskets through the temple without opening them to view the contents. While it is often relatively easy to apply stereotypical ideas regarding gender to the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology, in the myth of the birth of Erichthonius, the complex character of Athena precludes any such simplifications. Instead, the myth presents a tale of power woven into subservience and of masculinity bolstering femininity, the priestesses and the goddess abstaining from sexuality and physical pleasure in order to bring about the divine birth of the legendary king.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Athena and the Birth of Erichthonius.” Theoi Greek Mythology. Aaron J. Atsma, 2011. Web. 28 May 2013.

Deacy, Susan. Athena. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Georgievska-Shine, Aneta. “From Ovid’s Cecrops to Rubens’s City of God in The Finding of Erichthonius.” Art Bulletin 86.1 (2004): 58–74. Print.

Neils, Jennifer, ed. Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. Print.

Rigoglioso, Marguerite. The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Print.