Athena
- Pindar, Pythian
12 (excerpt)
- [...] I ask you, queen, graciously to accept, with the
kindliness of immortals and of men, this wreath from
Pytho for glorious Midas: and accept him too, who has
beaten Greece in the art which Pallas Athena discovered,
when she wove together the deathly dirge of the fierce
Gorgons, the dirge that she heard poured out in woeful
grief from under the maidens' dreadful snaky heads, when
Perseus killed one sister out of the three, bringing doom
to sea-encircled Seriphos and to its people. He blinded
the weird race of Phorcus: he made dreadful for
Polydektes his wedding feast, his long enslavement of
Perseus' mother, and the marriage-bed to which she was
compelled, by pulling forth the head of fair-cheeked
Medusa, he, Danae's son, begotten, we say, of a shower of
gold that fell of its own will.
- But when the maiden goddess had saved her dear friend
from these toils, she made an every-voiced melody of auloi,
to imitate with instruments the clamorous wailing that
burst from the ravening jaws of Euryale. The goddess
discovered it: but when she had discovered it for mortal
men to possess, she named it the nomos of many
heads, that glorious suitor for contests to stir the
people, coming through thin bronze and through the reeds
that grow by the city of the Graces with its lovely
dancing-places, in the holy place of the nymph of
Cephisus, faithful witnesses to the dancers. [...]
(Barker 1984: 57-58)
- Athenaeus XIV.7, 616EF
- On the subject of auloi, then, someone said that
Melanippides had ridiculed aulos-playing
splendidly in his Marsyas, when he said of Athena:
'Athena threw the instruments from her holy hand and said
"Away, shameful things, defilers of my body! [616f]
I do not give myself to ugliness." ' Someone else
responded by saying 'But Telestes of Selinus hit back at
Melanippides in his Argo: speaking of Athena he
said: "When the clever goddess had picked up the
clever instrument in the mountain thickets, I cannot
believe in my mind that she, divine Athena, frightened by
the ugliness unpleasant to the eye, threw it away again
from her hands to be a glory for Marsyas, that
handclapping creature born of a nymph.
(Barker 1984: 273)
- Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
I.4.2
- Apollo also slew Marsyas, the son of Olympus. For
Marsyas, having found the pipes (aulous) which
Athena had thrown away because they disfigured her face,
engaged in a musical contest with Apollo. They agreed
that the victor should work his will on the vanquished,
and when the trial took place Apollo turned his lyre (kithara)
upside down in the competition and bade Marsyas do the
same. But Marsyas could not. So Apollo was judged the
victor and despatched Marsyas by hanging him on a tall
pine tree and stripping off his skin.
(James G. Frazer, Apollodorus: The
Library, Cambridge, Mass.-London: Harvard University Press and
Heinemann, 1921: 29-31)
- Other literary sources:
-
- Corinna, PMG fr. 15 ;
- Propertius III.22 (29). 16ff.;
- Ovid, Fasti VI. 697ff.; Ars amatoria III.
505f.;
- Hyginus, Fabulae 165;
- Plutarch, De cohibenda ira 6;
- Pausanias I.24.1;
- Fulgentius, Mythologiae III.9;
- Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. G. H.
Bode, vol. I, pp. 40, 114 (First Vatican Mythographer
125, Second Vatican Mythographer 115).
Main page