Ancient gods and heroes
Home Categories Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Scandinavian gods Slavic gods Japanese gods Other gods
Movies Books Send material Miscellaneous Miscellaneous materials Plays
About us Site Map
Enter
New articles The most famous gods of sex.
part 3 The most famous gods of sex.
part 2 Polycrates the favorite of fortune Priam - a" gift " for Paris Basilisk a mythological monster with the head of a rooster Female love and loyalty in the image of Penelope Pygmalion in the myths of Greece Pyrifoy - the mighty king of the Lapiths Theseus — a great hero, the winner of the Minotaur.
part 4 Theseus — the great hero, the winner of the Minotaur.
part 3
Archives November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 October 2014 September 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 July 2007
Statistics
August 21, 2013 • 12 816 review.
Athena, daughter of Zeus, goddess of wisdom and victorious war, defender of justice Rubrics: Ancient Greece Tags: Agamemnon, Acropolis, Ares, Attica, Athena, Athens, Bellerophon, war, Hermes, Hesiod, Hephaestus, Homer, Greeks, Diomedes, defenders, Zeus, art, Cecropus, Metis, Minerva, wisdom, Odysseus, Olive, Orestes, Palladium, Panathenaea, Paris, Perseus, victory, law, Prometheus, craft, justice, Telemachus, Troy Athena, greek.
- daughter of Zeus, goddess of wisdom and victorious war, defender of law, justice, art and crafts.
The old myths speak rather sparingly about the birth of Athena: Homer only says that she was born by Zeus without a mother.
You can already find details from later authors.
According to Hesiod, Zeus was predicted that the goddess of wisdom Metis would give birth to a daughter who would surpass him in wisdom, and a son who would surpass him in strength and dethrone him from the throne.
To prevent this, Zeus swallowed Metis, after which Athena was born from his head.
Even later myths even know how this happened.
After Zeus ate Metis, he felt that his head was just splitting with pain.
Then he called Hephaestus (according to other versions — Hermes or the titan Prometheus), he split his head with an axe — and Pallas Athena was born in full armor.
Thus, according to the symbolism of the myths, Athena was the embodiment of the wisdom and power of Zeus.
He also loved her more than all his daughters: he talked to her as if with his own thought, did not hide anything from her and did not deny her anything.
For her part, Athena understood and appreciated her father's favor.
She was always close to him, never got carried away by any other god or man, and for all her beauty, majesty and nobility, she did not marry, remaining Athena Virgo (Athena Parthenos).
Thanks to her origin and the favor of Zeus, Athena became one of the most powerful goddesses of the Greek pantheon.
Since ancient times, she was, first of all, the goddess of war, being a defender from enemies.
True, the war was in the competence of Ares, but this did not interfere with Athena.
After all, Apec was the god of fierce war, bloody battles, while she was the goddess of a reasonably, prudently conducted war that invariably ends in victory, which could not be said about the wars of Ares.
Athena, the goddess of war, was revered by the Greeks under the name of Athena Enoplos (Athena armed) or Athena Promachos (Athena of the advanced fighter or Athena challenging to battle), as the goddess of victorious war, she was called Athena Nike (Athena the Victorious).
From the beginning to the end of the ancient world, Athena was the protector goddess of the Greeks, especially the Athenians, who were always her favorites.
Like Pallas Athena, the goddess guarded other cities, especially those where her cult statuettes, the so called palladias, were in the temples; as long as palladium remained in the city, the city was impregnable.
The Trojans also had such palladium in their main temple, and therefore the Achaeans who besieged Troy certainly needed to steal this palladium (which Odysseus and Diomedes did).
Athena protected the Greeks and their cities both in war and in peace.
She was a defender of people's assemblies and rights, took care of children and the sick, gave people well being.
Often her help took purely specific forms.
For example, she gave the Athenians an olive tree, laying the foundation for one of the main branches of the Greek national economy (by the way, until today).
In the photo: the painting of the Brighton Riviera "Pallas Athena and the Shepherd's Dogs".
In addition to these important functions, Athena was also the goddess of art and crafts (the Greeks, as a rule, did not distinguish between these two concepts; they designated the work of a sculptor, a mason and a shoemaker with the word "techne").
She taught women to spin and weave, men blacksmithing, jewelry and dyeing crafts, helped builders of temples and ships.
For her help and protection, Athena demanded respect and sacrifices — this was the right of every god.
She punished disrespect and insults, but it was easier to appease her than other goddesses.
In the life of the gods and heroes, Athena intervened often and effectively, and each of her interventions led to exactly the result that she herself desired.
With the god of the sea Poseidon, Athena had a dispute about the domination of Attica and Athens.
The Council of the gods appointed the first Athenian king Cecropus as an arbitrator, and Athena won the dispute by giving an olive tree and thereby securing the favor of Cecropus.
When Paris insulted Athena with his unwillingness to recognize her primacy in the dispute about beauty, she repaid him by helping the Achaeans defeat Troy.
When her admirer Diomedes had a hard time in the battle under the walls of Troy, she herself took the place of a charioteer in his war chariot and forced her brother Ares to flee.
She helped Odysseus, his son Telemachus, Agamemnon's son Orestes, Bellerophon, Perseus and many other heroes.
Athena never left her wards in trouble, always helped the Greeks, especially the Athenians, and she later provided the same support to the Romans, who revered her under the name of Minerva.
On the photo: the Acropolis of Athens.
In the photo: a copy of the work of Phidias, a colossal bronze statue of Pallas Athena in the center of the Acropolis.
The goddess Athena is already mentioned in the monuments of the Cretan Mycenaean script of the 14th 13th centuries BC (the so called linear letter "B"), discovered in Knossos.
In them, she is called the goddess of the defender of the royal palace and the nearby city, an assistant in battle and the giver of the harvest; her name sounds like "Atana".
The cult of Athena spread throughout Greece, traces of it remain even after the victory of Christianity.
Above all, she was honored by the Athenians, whose city still bears her name.
Since time immemorial, festivals have been held in Athens in honor of the birth of the goddess Panathineia (they fell on July — August).
In the middle of the 6th century BC, the Athenian ruler Pisistratus established the so called Great Panathenaea, which took place every four years and included competitions of musicians, poets, orators, gymnasts and athletes, riders, rowers.
The Lesser Panathenaea were celebrated annually and more modestly.
The culmination of these celebrations was the offering of gifts of the Athenian people to the goddess, primarily a new garment for the ancient cult statue of Athena in the Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis.
The Panathenaic procession is masterfully depicted on the frieze of the Athenian Parthenon, one of the authors of which was the great Phidias.
In Rome, celebrations in honor of Minerva were held twice a year (in March and in June).
In the photo: the statue of Athena ("Pallada Giustiniani") in the gardens of Peterhof.
Architectural structures in honor of Athena belong to the treasures of universal culture — even if only ruins have been preserved from them.
First of all, this is the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, built in 447-432 BC by Ictinus and Kallikrates under the artistic direction of Phidias and consecrated by Pericles already in 438 BC.
For more than two millennia, the Parthenon stood almost untouched by time, until in 1687 it was damaged by an explosion of gunpowder that the Turks kept in it during the war with Venice.
Nearby there is a small temple of Nike, dedicated to Athena the Victorious; during the Turkish occupation it was completely destroyed, but in 1835-1836 it again rose from the ruins.
The last of these buildings on the Acropolis is the Erechtheion, dedicated to Athena, Poseidon and Erechtheus (Erechtheus).
Once the Athenian palladium was stored in it, and the "olive of Athens" was planted next to the Erechtheion (the current one was planted in 1917).
The magnificent temples of Athena were also built by the Greeks on the Acropolis of Sparta, in the Arcadian Tegea, on the Marble Terrace at Delphi, in the Asian cities of Pergamum, Priene and Assa; in Argos there was a common temple of Athena and Apollo.
The remains of her temple are preserved in the Sicilian Kefaledia (present day Cefalu) and in the ruins of Himera; the twelve Doric columns of her temple in Syracuse still stand as an integral part of the cathedral there.
Her temple was also in Troy (not only in Homer's, but also in the historical new Ilium).
It is possible that the oldest of the three surviving temples in Poseidonia, the southern Italian Paestum, which is now called Pesti, was also dedicated to her in the 6th century BC, but traditionally called the "temple of Ceres".
In the photo: Pallas Athena (Minerva).
Author: freelance Lutinsky Slawa.
Greek artists depicted Athena as a serious young woman in a long robe (peplos) or in a shell.
Sometimes, despite the women's clothes, she had a helmet on her head, and next to her were her sacred animals, an owl and a snake.
Of her ancient statues, the most highly valued were: "Athena Parthenos", a colossal chrysoelephantine statue (i.e. made of gold and ivory), which stood in the Parthenon since 438 BC; "Athena Promachos", a colossal bronze statue of about 451 BC, standing in front of the Parthenon, and "Athena Lemnia" (after 450 BC), erected on the Acropolis by grateful Athenian colonists from Lemnos.
All these three statues were created by Phidias; unfortunately, we know them only from descriptions and late copies and replicas, mostly of a not very high level.
Reliefs give an idea of some of the statues: for example, we know what the sculpture of Myron "Athena and Marsyas" looked like from its image on the so called "Finlay vase" (1st century BC), stored in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Perhaps its best relief of the classical era is "Pensive Athena", leaning on a spear and looking sadly at the stele with the names of the fallen Athenians (Acropolis Museum).
The so called "Athena Varvakion" (Athens, National Archaeological Museum) can probably be considered the most faithful, although not too skillful and also a ten fold reduced copy of the cult statue "Athena Parthenos".
In general, there are many statues of Athena, whole or in the form of torsos, preserved.
The most famous of them, Roman copies of Greek originals of the classical era, are located in Italy and are traditionally called by the names of their former owners or by their location: "Athena Farnese "(Naples, National Museum)," Athena Giustiniani "(Vatican)," Athena of Velletri " (Rome, Capitoline Museums and Paris, Louvre).
The most artistically valuable copy of the head of "Athena Lemnia" is located in the City Museum in Bologna.
The image of Athena has been preserved on about two hundred vases, many of them dating back to the 6th century BC.
An archaic image of Athena decorated all the amphorae awarded to the winners of the Panathenaic Games.
Of the works of modern times, no less numerous and no less diverse level, we will name only two paintings: "Pallas and the Centaur" by Botticelli (1482) and" The Birth of Athena from the head of Zeus " by Fiamingo (1590s).
Of the statues, there are also two: the work of Dros at the beginning of our century, which stands on a high Ionic column in front of the Athenian Academy, and the work of Houdon at the end of the 18th century, which adorns the Institute of France.
In the photo: the statue of Athena at the Austrian Parliament building in Vienna.
Other related articles: Pallas, Greek.
— one of the names (epicles) of the goddess Athena.
Cecrops (Cecrops), the founder of Athens, half man, half snake, who solved the dispute between Athens and Poseidon, Mentes (Mentes), a friend of Odysseus, the king of the Tafian Islands, who turned into Athena Metis (Metis), the goddess of reason, the first wife of the god Zeus Erichthonius (Erichphonius), the king of Athens, the son of Hephaestus, and the king of Dardania, the father of Tros Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and just war Melanippus, a warrior from Thebes who wounded Tydeus, who sucked his brain Mentor, tutor and mentor of Telemachus on Ithaca Marsyas, a musician who lost to Apollo, and who was flayed alive by Macarius, the daughter of Hercules and Deianira, who voluntarily sacrificed herself
Share with your friends!
11
2 comment.
to the entry "Athena, daughter of Zeus, goddess of wisdom and victorious war, defender of justice" Karina: 19.12.2015 at 18:35 super site Reply
Kamila: 20.01.2016 at 17: 43 Super!
Many thanks to the site for the full story and the photos provided.
To answer
Add a comment Cancel a response Log in with:
Your e mail will not be published.
Required fields are marked * Comment text
Name * E mail * 1 + 5 =
Interesting video
Polls Best film about the ancient Gods: The Gods of Egypt Hercules The War of the Gods: The Immortals The Wrath of the Titans Troy
Discussions Eve Mousehouse to record Medea, the mighty sorceress, the daughter of the king of Colchis, the central figure of the myths about Jason and the Argonauts Vladimir to record Everything is not as it seems...or scary fairy tales of the Middle Ages.
part 1 George to the recording of Lelya the Slavic goddess of spring Domovik to the recording of Imhotep — the first genius of Egypt Leonid to the recording of Tyr — the Scandinavian god of war
Popular articles TOP 10 best films about the Greek gods Achilles, the greatest Greek hero in the Trojan war Catalog of films on the subjects of Greek mythology Top 10 films about Ancient Egypt Top 9 films about mythical and fabulous water creatures Catalog of cartoons on the subjects of Greek mythology Top 10 films about Ancient Rome Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, born from sea foam Top 10 computer games about ancient civilizations Dionysus, Bacchus, Bacchus.
God of wine, winemaking and viticulture
Article tags Agamemnon Hades Apollo Ares Artemis Athena Athens Aphrodite Achilles Hera Hercules Hermes Gaia Homer Dionysus Elena Zeus Italy Crete Mycenae Ovid Odysseus Ocean Poseidon Priam Rome Theseus Troy Trojan War Thebes Aeneas argonauts Achaeans gods goddesses heroes nymphs islands rivers titans princes tsarevna tsars queens monsters
Random article
Minos (Mino), the mighty Cretan king, son of Zeus and Europa
×Authorization
User name
Password
Remember me
© 2013-2016 Ancient gods and Heroes Dictionary encyclopedia of mythology for reading, studying and entertainment Copying of the site materials, in full or in part, is strictly prohibited!
<div><img src="https://mc.yandex.ru/watch/25033688" style="position:absolute; left:-9999px;" alt="" /></div>
Authorization
Xregistration
