Based on my obvious feminist leanings, you
might jump to the conclusion that I am a huge fan of Athena. And I have to
admit, she’s an attractive figure: a warrior goddess, imbued with a great deal
of force and obviously feared by weak mortal men. Charging across the
battlefield carrying a shield decorated with Medusa’s severed head, she makes a
nice power fantasy. I think the first time I heard of her was in sixth grade
world history, when we covered ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Of course,
sixth grade classes tend to cover Greek gods and goddesses in a safe and
sanitized way, when all the gods’ qualities are phrased as innocuously as
possible and the gods are freed from all their problematic baggage. Aphrodite
is the goddess of “love and beauty” (rather than the goddess of sex and
reproduction), and Hera is the “goddess of marriage and motherhood” (rather
than the goddess of atrocious punishments for her perceived enemies). When I
got to high school and started delving into mythology seriously by reading
genuine classical literature, I got to see all that problematic baggage that
had been omitted or cleaned up before. (“So when they said that Jupiter fell in
love with Callisto, they meant--oh, no…”)
Athena has her own problematic baggage,
which is why I’m not so crazy about her. Unlike her father, she doesn’t go
around raping everyone in sight, but she does have an extremely vindictive
side. One of the stories about how the famous seer Tiresias came to be blind
claims that Athena blinded Tiresias as punishment for seeing her naked. You may
have heard the story of how Athena came to be patroness of Athens: she was
competing against Poseidon for the honor, and she created the olive tree while
Poseidon created the horse. The horse, conventional wisdom says, should have
been the obvious winner, except that the women of Athens all voted in Athena’s
favor out of pure gender favoritism, whereby Athena won the contest. (In historical
Athenian elections, this was given as the reason why women were not allowed to
vote.) Unfortunately, Athena was not so loyal to her gender compatriots as they
were to her; in fact, she had a policy--as she expressly reports, serving as
the incarnation of divine justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides--that in any judgment she sides with a male over a female
by default. This policy of favoring males and attacking females is most
egregiously demonstrated when Medusa (at this time a beautiful woman, not the
more famous snaky-haired monster) is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena
is offended in principle (she’s a virgin goddess! An aggressively virginal
goddess! No one should be having sex in her temple, under any circumstances) but
is unable to gain satisfaction from Poseidon, who outranks her in the divine
hierarchy. In frustration, she takes out her anger on Medusa, who didn’t really
have control over the situation. (A similar rape occurs in Athena’s temple after
the sack of Troy, when Ajax the Lesser rapes Cassandra
in Athena’s temple. Here Athena is likewise offended, and since Ajax is a puny
mortal, Athena is free to kill him with impunity. Cassandra is not subject to
violent retribution from Athena, mercifully. Still, at this point Cassandra was
already under her famous curse, plus she was sold into slavery and presumably
raped again before she was murdered by her master’s wife. It’s not like being
spared Athena’s wrath meant that Cassandra lived happily ever after.) This is
what I mean: Athena is vindictive, but in particular she’s vindictive toward
women in their sexual roles, while overlooking the fact that women in ancient
Greece have very little control over their sexual lives. Most Greek women did
not have the social authority, much less the combat expertise, to choose like
Athena whether or in what circumstances they would have sex.
Maybe you would call attention to some of
the problematic women I have supported in the past: Medea, Hypsipyle,
Procris,
Camilla.
If I can cheer on Medea as she kills all the men who want to control her life,
why can’t I cheer on Athena as she aggressively enforces her own sexual
standards? I’d say mostly because Athena is unquestionably powerful, and
recognized as such. She’s an Olympian goddess, after all. Medea may have enough
magic powers to make a deadly burning robe and summon a dragon chariot, but she
is fighting without allies against the men who rule the state and control its
armed forces. They could certainly round up a mob to kill Medea, or at least
throw her out of town. Athena attacks weak humans who have no defense against
her, and certainly aren’t able to kill her. When a person has such a great
degree of power, I hold them to a higher standard of behavior. Even though
Greek gods are no moral paragons, and in ancient times were never conceived of
as being objectively good or moral in their behavior (at least not as
mythological characters--we can get into a long argument with Socrates over
whether his god is good or not), I evaluate these Greek gods through my own
cultural lens--and at the end of the day, I expect better from them.
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