In front of the Erechtheion, Pausanias[114] tells us, was an altar dedicated to Zeus Hypatos, on which no living thing was sacrificed, but only cakes (πέλανοι). Pausanias does not here say that the altar was dedicated by Kekrops, but, in his discussion of Arcadia[115] and the human sacrifice of Lycaon, he says, ‘Kekrops was the first who gave to Zeus the title of Supreme, and he would not sacrifice anything that had life, but he burned on the altar the local cakes which the Athenians to this day call pelanoi.’ What probably happened was just the reverse of what Pausanias describes: there was an old altar to ‘the Supreme,’ the Hypatos; at some time or other this was taken over by the immigrant Zeus; the shift was attributed to Kekrops.
Zeus was essentially of the patriarchal order, i.e. of a condition of things in which the father rather than the mother is the head of the family, gives his name to the children, and holds the family property and conducts the family worship. Nothing could be more patriarchal than the constitution of the Homeric Olympus. Such a condition of things is necessarily connected with some form of the social institution known to us as marriage. Accordingly we learn from Athenaeus[116], quoting from Clearchus the pupil of Aristotle, that ‘At Athens Kekrops was the first to join one woman to one man: before connections had taken place at random and marriages were in common—hence as some think Kekrops was called “Twyformed” (διφυής) since before his day people did not know who their fathers were on account of the number’ (of possible parents). The story of the contest between Athene and Poseidon was later mixed up with the same tradition of the shift from patriarchy to matriarchy. St Augustine[117] says that the women voted for Athena, and their punishment was to be, among other things, that ‘no one was hereafter to be called by his mother’s name.’
We pass to the three tokens (σημεῖα), the first of which is
a. The sacred olive-tree.
The holy bloom of the olive, whose hoar leaf
High in the shadowy shrine of Pandrosos
Hath honour of us all.
Apollodorus[118] says, ‘After him (Poseidon) came Athena, and having made Kekrops witness of her seizure, she planted the olive which is now shown in the Pandroseion.’ A ‘seizure’ indeed, and not from Poseidon but from the elder goddess Pandrosos. Athena is manifestly an interloper; why should Pandrosos have other people’s olive trees planted in her precinct? The olive is but one of the many ‘tokens’ or attributes that Athena wrested to herself. It was there before her, Kekrops quite rightly holds it in his hand.
The olive-tree grew in the Pandroseion, it also grew in the older Erechtheion. Herodotus[119] says, ‘There is on this Acropolis a temple of Erechtheus, who is called earth-born, and in it are an olive-tree and a sea which, according to the current tradition among the Athenians, Poseidon and Athenaia planted as tokens when they contended for the country.’ There is no discrepancy, the Pandroseion must have been included in the older Erechtheion.