It is not so with Pallas. Pitilessly opposed to the Trojans in the war, she is nowhere so identified with the Greeks as to exhibit her in the light of one of those deities, whose influence or sympathies were confined to any one place or nation. Her enmity to Troy is mythologically founded on the Judgment of Paris[212]: but it has a more substantive ethical ground in the nature of the quarrel between the two countries.
Unlike Juno and Neptune, she was regularly worshipped at Troy, where she had a priestess of high rank, and a temple placed, like that of Apollo, on the height of Pergamus.
Distinct proof, however, that Minerva was neither originally at war with the Trojans, nor unknown to them by her beneficial influences, is afforded by the case of Phereclus son of Harmonides, the carpenter; this Phereclus was the builder of the ships of Paris, and was a highly skilled workman[213] by her favour,
ἐξόχα γάρ μιν ἐφίλατο Πάλλας Ἀθήνη.
The name of Harmonides may be fictitious; but the relation to Pallas deserves remark, if we assume Troy to have been fundamentally Pelasgian; and it affords a strong presumption, that there was nothing in the character of Minerva to prevent her being propitious to a Pelasgian country. Her attributes as the goddess of industry, or more strictly, in our phrase, of manufacture, were indeed in no special harmony with the character of the Pelasgians, as she had nothing to do with works of agriculture: but neither was there any antagonism between them.
There is also something that deserves notice in the speech in which Minerva expresses to Juno her resentment at the restraint put upon her by Jupiter. She accuses him of forgetting the services she had so often rendered to Hercules when he was oppressed by the labours that Eurystheus had laid upon him, and declares that it was she who effected his escape from Hades[214]. Now this has all the appearance of being the fabulous dress of the old tradition, which reports that the children of Hercules had taken refuge in Attica, and had been harboured there; that Eurystheus invaded the country in consequence of the protection thus given, and that he was slain while upon the expedition. It seems therefore possible, that this reception of the Heraclids may have had something to do with the special relation, at the epoch of the Troica, between Athens and Minerva as its tutelary goddess? In connection with Hercules personally, the Iliad affords us another mark that friendly relations might subsist between Troy and Pallas. She, in conjunction with them,
Τρῶες καὶ Πάλλας Ἀθήνη[215],
erected the rampart in which Hercules took refuge from the pursuing monster.
But the full answer to the objection is of a wider scope, and is to be found in the general character of this deity, which did not, like inferior conceptions, admit of being circumscribed by the limits of a particular district or people.