Let us turn for a moment to Greece. Once more we find woman’s handiwork holding an honorable place, for the patron goddess of spinning, weaving, and needle-work is none other than Pallas Athene, the warrior goddess of wisdom, founder and protector of Athens, and herself a spinner acknowledging no rival among gods or men. Who does not know how the full fury of her godhead was let loose upon the luckless Arachne, that mortal woman who dared challenge her to a competition in spinning and weaving? Overhearing Arachne’s boast that not even Pallas Athene herself could surpass the beauty of her handiwork, and that she would try her skill with the goddess, or suffer the penalty of defeat, the wrathful divinity assumed the form of an old woman, and tried to induce the reckless girl to desist. Arachne persisted in her defiance, even when the goddess revealed herself in all her majesty. They then proceeded to the competition. Ovid tells us how they wrought, each surpassing the other in the wonderful living pictures woven into the web, until at last the insulted goddess shattered the mortal’s loom to atoms, and revealed to Arachne the full extent of her impiety. Unable to endure the thought of her guilt and shame, she hanged herself forthwith. The goddess pitied her as she hung, and touching her said: “Live: and that you may preserve the memory of this lesson, continue to hang, both you and your descendants, to all future times.” To this day the spider, Nature’s busy spinner, bears witness to her fate, and to the outraged dignity of the goddess who thus honored the spinster’s art by competing therein with a mortal. Surely the much abused epithet of “spinster” is entitled to respect, more especially as this divine spinster honored also the unmarried state in choosing ever to “pursue her maiden meditations fancy free.”
Thus does Theocritus apostrophize the distaff:—
“O distaff, practised in wool-spinning, gift of the blue-eyed Minerva,
Labor at thee is fitting to wives who seek the good of their husbands!
Trustfully come thou with me to the far famous city of Neleus,
So that, O distaff of ivory cunningly fashioned, I give thee
Into the hands of the wife of Nicias, the skilled and the learned!
So shalt thou weave mantles for men and transparent tissues for women.
And at the sight, O my distaff, shall one woman say to another:
Surely great grace lies in trifles, and gifts from friends are most precious!”