Shelley.
Some of the statues of Minerva represented her helmet with a sphinx in the middle, supported on either side by griffins. In some medals, a chariot drawn by four horses, appears at the top of her helmet.
But it was at the Panathenæa, instituted in her behalf, that she received the greatest honour. On the evening of the first day, there was a race with torches, in which men on foot, and afterwards on horseback, contended.
To celebrate these festivals, also, the maidens divided into troops, and armed with sticks and stones, attacked each other with fury. Those who were overcome in this combat, were devoted to infamy, while they who conquered, and had received no wounds, were honoured with triumphant rejoicings.
These fêtes, established in Lybia, were transferred to Athens, the city to which Minerva had granted the olive tree, and which she had taken under her protection.
She was adored at Troy by the title of Pallas, and her statue guarded the city under the name of Palladium. Some authors maintain that this was made with the bones of Pelops—while Apollodorus asserts, it was no more than a piece of clock-work which moved of itself. To its possession, was attached the safety of the city; and during the Trojan war, Ulysses and Diomedes were commissioned to steal it away.
DESCRIPTION OF MINERVA IN THE FLORENCE GALLERY.
"The head is of the highest beauty. It has a close helmet from which the hair, delicately parted on the forehead, half escapes. The attitude gives entire effect to the perfect form of the neck, and to that full and beautiful moulding of the lower part of the face and mouth, which is in living beings the seat of the expression of a simplicity and integrity of nature. Her face, upraised to heaven, is animated with a profound, sweet, and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, and fervid and disinterested pleading against some vast and inevitable wrong. It is the joy and poetry of sorrow making grief beautiful, and giving it that nameless feeling, which, from the imperfection of language, we call pain, but which is not all pain, though a feeling which makes not only its possessor, but the spectator of it, prefer it to what is called pleasure, in which all is not pleasure. It is difficult to think that this head, though of the highest ideal beauty is the head of Minerva, although the attributes and attitude of the lower part of the statue certainly suggest that idea.
"The Greeks rarely in their representations of the characters of their Gods—unless we call the poetic enthusiasm of Apollo a mortal passion—expressed the disturbance of human feeling; and here is deep and impassioned grief animating a divine countenance. It is indeed divine. The drapery of the statue, the gentle beauty of the feet, and the grace of the attitude, are what may be seen in many other statues belonging to that astonishing era which produced it: such a countenance is seen in few."
Shelley.
We have already seen that Minerva, not satisfied with being goddess of Wisdom, claimed also pre-eminence in beauty, although Paris by his judgment, gave the palm of loveliness to Venus.