The Birth of Athena


In the pantheon of Greek mythology, Zeus was king of the gods on Mount Olympus, god of thunder and sky, and a prolific rapist who made Harvey Weinstein look like a Boy Scout. In Hesiod's 8th century BC poem the "Theogony" young Zeus and the Titaness Metis were married, and she became pregnant (in some versions of the story, he raped her), but when the child was prophesied to be even wiser than him, he decided to play it safe by swallowing his pregnant wife whole (no really, the child was going to be wiser than him). Six wives later into his career, Zeus was married to his queen, Hera, when one day he experienced a terrific headache. That pregnant wife he'd eaten a while back was now coming back to haunt him, and suddenly an armor-clad goddess of wisdom with a pet owl exploded out from his head, landing on the ground right before his eyes to the astonishment of all the other gods and completely ruining Zeus's hair. Yes, this was Zeus's daughter, who they called Athena, goddess of wisdom. Hera, understandably upset that her husband had been hiding a secret daughter inside his melon and given birth to her all by himself (not accounting for the Titaness mother who gave birth inside of Zeus first) decided to get back at him by conceiving and bearing a child all by herself, but when the result was the god of metalworking, Hephaestus, and he was ugly with shriveled feet, Hera threw him off of Mount Olympus like so many banana peels.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Good King Wenceslaus Looked Out on the Feast of Dying At Age 24

Image
In order to have a happy, harmonious family get-together during the holidays, it's a good idea to steer away from topics like religion and politics. Unfortunately for the family of "Good King Wenceslaus," the Přemyslid dynasty that ruled the Duchy of Bohemia in the early 10th century, this was rather difficult given that Wenceslaus's dad, Vratislaus I, was a second generation Christian, his mother, Drahomíra of Stodard, was the pagan daughter of a chief, and everyone in the family was constantly vying for greater political sway over the country. When Wenceslaus was 13, his dad died in battle against the Hungarians, making his grandmother Ludmila (Vratislaus's mother) regent until Wenceslaus could come of age. Drahomíra, doing what any of us would do in similar circumstances, hired assassins to strangle her mother-in-law Ludmila to death with her own scarf. After Christian nobles overthrew Drahomíra to place 18-year-old Wenceslaus on the throne, he...
Read more

The Fall of Ixion

Image
Before you can understand why Zeus is blasting Ixion off of Mount Olympus with a thunderbolt to then be bound to an eternally spinning wheel of fire, you need to understand how Ixion came to be on Mount Olympus in the first place.  Ixion was a classic A-hole.  It all started when Ixion decided to not pay Deioneus for his daughter's hand in marriage, which might seem like a progressive move on Ixion's part, but he was doing it for purely selfish reasons.  Deioneus, now Ixion's father-in-law, decided to take the bride price in the form of a few horses stolen from Ixion's stables, and Ixion decided to push his father-in-law into bed of of smoldering coals, burning him alive.  Even though he was an a-hole, Ixion couldn't help but go mad from the guilt of slaying his own kin.  Zeus, King of the Gods, felt bad for Ixion (maybe because Zeus was something of an a-hole himself) and invited him to hang out on Mount Olympus, home of the gods.  Now, as bad as most of...
Read more

The Plague of Athens

Image
Disclaimer: The publisher wishes to note that he has been warned that this series may be ill-conceived and in bad taste.  If, for whatever sick reason, you still wish to proceed, know that I was warned and advised against this. The Plague of Athens was not the first plague in human history, but it's the earliest one with a surviving reliable historical record.  The year was 430 BC, and those goofy Greeks were at each others throats in a little thing we're going to call the Peloponnesian War.  For a bunch of complicated reasons that basically boil down to Athens becoming the dominant empire in the Mediterranean and Sparta (whose balls were always tingling for a war anyway) deciding that was stupid.  Together with their respective alliances, Spartans and Athenians were having so much fun killing each other that, like the proverbial little sibling, Mother Nature decided she wanted to get in on the fun, at which point the Greeks decided it wasn't fun anymore.  ...
Read more