Sparta and Athens are the counterparts and complements of one another: Sparta drilled, orderly, efficient, and dull; Athens free, noisy, fickle, and brilliant. Sparta’s watchword in history is Eunomia (order); the motto of Athens is Eleutheria (liberty) and Parrhesia (free speech and free thought). But Sparta was orderly and powerful over all the Peloponnese long before Athens was free or cultured.
Both Apollo and Athena were deities specially concerned with cities and good government. If Apollo was the god of prophecy, music, poetry, and athletics, Athena’s arts were those of the craftsman, the potter, and the weaver. Athena, though a fair, grey-eyed goddess, was nevertheless an enemy to love, wise in counsel and fond of battle. So strictly maidenly was she that they gave her a virgin birth. No female had a hand in her making, for she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus at a blow from the hammer of Hephæstus. That was the scene depicted on the front gable of the Parthenon. The worship of Athena is singularly pure and civilised; it is almost
Plate XXIV. ATHENA PROMACHOS. FROM A PANATHENAIC AMPHORA
entirely free from magic and mystery, for Athena is emphatically a civic goddess, having hardly any connection with the powers of Nature. She is pure intellect. True, she has a pugnacious aspect, she is armed with spear and shield, and with a breastplate, or ægis, bearing the Gorgon’s head and snaky coils of hair.[29] It has been ingeniously suggested that the ægis had been evolved by art from the skin of a beast worn over the shoulders, with the fierce head hanging over the breast of the wearer, and the legend of Medusa the Gorgon invented to explain it. Anyhow, Athena is a hoplite goddess. Whatever connection she may have with water elsewhere, at Athens she is armed for land warfare.
All these signs convince us that the Athena worshipped on the Acropolis of Athens is not a primitive goddess. Her character, her weapons, and her cult all point to a Northern origin, like that of Zeus and Apollo. Moreover, we have, in the legend of her successful strife with Poseidon for the patronage of the city, a clear account of her importation, and she shared a temple with the old earth-born hero of Athens, Erechtheus. How then did she come to give her name to the city? Is it true that Athens had been called Cecropia in times past? It is hard to believe that the goddess was called after the city, for there were strong local cults of Athena elsewhere, so markedly individual in character that the name cannot have been due to a mere identification of local heroines with the famous goddess of a famous city. It is not in the least likely that the Spartans, of all people, would call the goddess who played a very important part in the life of their State by the name of an essentially Athenian deity. Nor, again, can we believe that a goddess could completely change her character and become civilised without leaving distinct traces of her past. The only conclusion is that Pallas Athene was an Achæan goddess who came rather late upon the Acropolis of Athens. It is true that the Athenians boasted themselves to be an aboriginal people of the old stock, and it is very probable that the main bodies of Northern invaders did, as Thucydides alleges, pass by that stony promontory of Attica as beneath notice. But they can hardly have left a strong citadel unconquered, and though Athens and her king Menestheus play a rather humble part in the Iliad, yet there was an Athenian contingent in the Achæan host. It is probable that Athens received an Achæan king and that the Acropolis itself passed into Achæan hands. But the population of Attica received little Northern intermixture. Herodotus tells us that the Athenian maidens going down from the citadel to draw water were liable to constant attacks from the Pelasgians who lived on Mount Hymettus.
In all the elaborate rebuilding of Periclean days the rock of Acropolis was pretty thoroughly scoured of ancient remains. But we still see traces of Cyclopean masonry, as at Tiryns and Mycenæ, forming what the Athenians called “the Pelasgic Wall.” To that period belong such traditional royalties as Cecrops, Erechtheus, and Pandion, possibly real names of prehistoric kings who ruled over the rock and part of the plain below, but by no means over the whole of Attica. In artistic representation these ancient worthies are rather apt to develop serpents’ tails in place of their lower limbs. As they worshipped Poseidon, we may be sure that these Cecropians or Pelasgians were a trading, seafaring people, having intercourse with Crete and their kinsmen of Caria and Ionia. Poseidon was always the common deity of the Ionian people, who looked to Athens as their head, probably because she had suffered so little infusion of Northern blood. It is not likely that Athens was ever a citadel of equal importance with Mycenæ or Cnossos in pre-Achæan days. Attica has yielded but few important relics of the Bronze Age, but, on the other hand, the Attic sites contain an unbroken series of artistic design from the earliest to the latest times.
The great legendary King of Athens was Theseus, a figure much embroidered by later mythologists because he had been made the patron hero of the Athenian democracy and the synœcist of Athens—that is, the man who made Attica into a city-state instead of a congeries of village demes. Of course that is not history. All the legends seem to admit that Theseus was originally an alien. His descendants were said to have been driven out by the Homeric King of Athens Menestheus. After the Persian wars the bones of a giant were discovered in the island of Scyros; they were at once recognised as those of Theseus, and brought with great ceremony to be reinterred at Athens.