The Inside of Strategies: Athene

Excerpt-James Hillman-Mythic Figures

I hardly need to recall to you with your rich classical heritage that Ulysses—that most wily and civilized of heroes—was Athene’s favorite. She even explains to him why! Ulysses is epetes, anchinoos, and echephron. The first two terms appear extremely rarely; in fact, all three are beyond my scholarly capacity. Nonetheless, they are said to refer to a gently civilized restraint, a skillful accuracy in perceptual judgment, and self-mastery over impulsive action. These qualities characterize the inner stuff of the strategic mind.

Let us say, Athene’s mode of control proceeded strategically, not merely by discipline or coercion. For instance, for a city to progress, its youth must be harnessed. Athene presided over the phratria—the clubs, fraternities, or guilds—that wove together young men with civic feeling. Young women, too, were integrated into the public order through the institution of marriage. Parents took their daughters to the Athenian acropolis before marriage to bring them under the tutelage of Athene. Athene’s Roman form, Minerva, was patroness of teachers whose charge it was to care for the development of the civilizing mind and its ideals.

Whether by forming young men into fellowships, young women through household and marriage, or by schooling, each was a strategy for protecting civic life. Athene did not rule alone—there were twelve Olympians and others beside. She had particular troubles with Dionysus, Poseidon, Ares, and the lovely Aphrodite.

Conflict with Poseidon lies at the source of Athens itself, for the tales say that both a sprig of an olive tree and a spring of seawater appeared miraculously out of the ground. The people voted to decide which gift founded Athens, what was its deepest “nature.” By one vote only, the people decided for the olive so necessary to civilization, the oil for cooking, for lighting and healing; yet barely preferable over the wild sea surges, unpredictable floodings and luring deeps of Poseidon. Poseidon and Athene were also in conflict over the gift of the horse: the animal “belonged” to Poseidon, but the controlling bridle was given by Athene. The entire Odyssey of Homer can be read as a struggle between Poseidon and Athene over the fate of Ulysses.

The difference with Ares, like that with Poseidon, turns on the distinction between eruptive immediacy and distanced reflection. Though Athene too wants victory, she conquers through thoughtful judgment rather than with strength and fury alone. Dionysus with his dancing crowd of followers, the inconstant ebb and flow of his vitality, his wine, and the underworld cult in relation to the mysteries of the soul and death, as well as the tragic sense of life, was indeed an alien world view to that of Athene. Where she was a victor, he was often a victim; he soft and half naked; she armored from head to toe. His associated animal, the goat, was forbidden on Athene’s grounds.

As for differences with Aphrodite, where would one begin! Already enmity was set up by Paris’s unfortunate choice—not the choice he made for the goddess of love, beauty, and sexual delight but the folly of choosing at all among the gods! Just one look at the images of these two powers exaggerates the differences: the one with a horrible Gorgon on her breastplate staring you in the face, paralyzing; the other poised half-naked at her bath, a suggestive come-on; one with the dreaded owl, the other with doves and roses; one called the virgin, the other, promiscuity.