The question is generally put thus, Are they statues of Athena, or are they statues of mortal women dedicated to her? priestesses or merely worshippers? Statues of Athena they are, I think, certainly not; they have neither helmet, spear, shield, nor even aegis. Athena may appear sporadically without characteristic attributes, but that a series of fifty statues of Athena should be dedicated without a single hint of anything that made Athena to be Athena is scarcely possible.
Are they, then, mortal maidens? For priestesses their number, restricted as they are by style to a short period of years, is too many. If they are mere mortal worshippers, it is at least strange that in the only two cases where we have inscribed bases they are dedicated by men. In one case we have the simple statement: ‘Euthydikos son of Thalearchus dedicated[110]’; on the other, Antenor, it is stated, makes the statue, Nearchos dedicates it as ‘firstfruits of his works[111].’ Would Nearchos dedicate a statue of mortal woman as ‘firstfruits of his works’? We seem to be at an impasse.
But there is surely a third solution open to us. The maidens need not be mortal because they are not Athena. There was a time before the armed maiden with spear and shield and aegis came from Libya or the East, a time when another maiden ruled upon the hill and was ‘The Goddess.’ Is it not at least possible that the maidens are made in her image, and that when the armed goddess took possession of the hill, when the ancient Kekropidae and Erechtheidae became Athenaioi, the maidens of the old order passed into the service of the maiden of the new? that we must think of their type as shaped at least for the worship of Pandrosos rather than Athena? The type of the warlike goddess was not fashionable in Greece. The Greeks, if any people, held firmly the doctrine that
A woman armed makes war upon herself.
The woman armed and disarmed, the Amazon in defeat, they made beautiful and poignantly human, but the woman armed and triumphant, Athena Nikephoros, remained a cold unreality. The korè of Eleusis is not armed, but at Corinth and at Sparta there was that strangest of all sights—the image of Aphrodite armed[112]. Whence she came is, as will later be seen ([p. 109]), not doubtful. In Cythera[113], Pausanias tells us, ‘the sanctuary of the Heavenly Goddess is most holy, and of all Greek sanctuaries of Aphrodite this is most ancient. The goddess is represented by a wooden image armed.’ The Cythereans called their armed Oriental goddess Cytherea. Did the Athenians call the same armed goddess ‘Athenaia’? Be that as it may, before her coming they worshipped the unarmed maiden.
Before we pass from Kekrops and Pandrosos to the later order under Erechtheus, the traditional events reputed of the reign of Kekrops must be noted. There are three:—
1. The contest between Athena and Poseidon, of which Kekrops acted as judge.
2. The introduction of the worship of Zeus.
3. The institution of marriage.
The discussion of the contest between Athena and Poseidon really belongs to the Erechtheid period, and must stand over till then. The introduction of the worship of Zeus and the institution of marriage are probably but the religious and social forces of the same advance, and may be taken together.