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In this definitive assessment of the various representations and approaches to Athena, Susan Deacy does what no other has done before and brings all the aspects of this legendary figure into one, outstanding study.
A survey of one of the most enduringly popular of ancient deities, the book introduces Athena’s myth, cult and reception, while directing the reader to detailed discussion as and when it is appropriate.
Students will find it a great help in their studies, and for the general reader with an interest in the ancient world and for those from related disciplines such as literature, art history and religion, it provides a mine of information and insight into this fascinating classical figure.
A survey of one of the most enduringly popular of ancient deities, the book introduces Athena’s myth, cult and reception, while directing the reader to detailed discussion as and when it is appropriate.
Students will find it a great help in their studies, and for the general reader with an interest in the ancient world and for those from related disciplines such as literature, art history and religion, it provides a mine of information and insight into this fascinating classical figure.
175 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
About the author
Susan Deacy
7 books5 followersDr Susan Deacy is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, England.
She was previously an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, England.
She was previously an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, England.
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May 30, 2018Well, I spotted this on the library shelf, and thought 'why not'. Given the title I can't say I had any particular expectations, but I am none the less vaguely disappointed.
Deacy's book is a pretty brief discussion of the Goddess Athena, broken down into nine short chapters. Perhaps that is a clue to the problem - how do you talk about a divine being sensibly? Is it meaningful to have a biography? Or to establish the theology? How about the worshippers, can we establish what was important to them, what role and meaning did worship have to them? Or is the author's role tracking the changing interpretations of a symbol through cultures and times?
Anyway I was interested particularly by a very late point that Deacy makes, the Goddess Minerva was so early associated with, or assimilated into, Athena that there is no independent iconography of her, however functionally the two were separate, Minerva was the junior member of the Roman Capitoline Trinity of Minerva, Juno and Jupiter and had a special role in overseeing the transition was childhood to adulthood while in the Greek world that function was undertaken by Artemis and Apollo (for girls and boys respectively) while the Olympian gods were equallish with Zeus at best, first among equals. This is indicative of two contradictory trends that run throughout the book - on the one hand consolidation and unity across the Mediterranean world, on the other distinctive and particular if not peculiar local features. Athena and Athenas maybe. Some early Christian writers argued that she was (at least) five different goddess, each one more vile and despicable than the last, while they would say that, perhaps it does suggest a real difficulty on the part of your everyday pagan, less educated than Deacy, to whom Athena in Acardia was a different being than Athena in Athens.
This tension is implicit in the discussion of Athena's origins, on the one hand one idea is that cult figurines in Crete of a woman with snakes and from the Greek mainland of a woman with a shield merged to form Athena, while another is to see Athena as very like a range of Goddesses - Egyptian Neith who was a warrior and a weaver and the patron of a city just like Athena, (they were assumed by Plato and Herodotus to be one and the same divinity, an idea picked up and repackaged in Black Athena), but also Hittite KA.ZAL who like Athena emerged from a senior god's skull, Mesopotamian Inanna who was a war goddess associated with owls (like Athena) but unlike her was also love goddess, while Phoenician Anat daughter of the still worshipped El, a Virgin and protector of cities, armed with an axe rather than the Athenian spear, but unlike Athena she had horns and wings. So one can imagine Athena as a Greek cult strongly coloured by similar nearby cults or as one of a number of very similar Goddesses arising from a closely connected group of cultures.
Within Greece we might say that the same situation applies, in Sparta Athena was uniquely honoured by casting bronze bells, in Acardia the virgin goddess was honoured by those who wished to conceive, in Boetia her sacred bird was the crow, in Athens the Owl, in Athens Athena was predominant, unusually her cult was a city centre one and while other gods and goddesses were worshipped, typically it was in aspects that were related to or in relation to Athena and her cult. The principal cult object was a chunk of olive wood which was ceremonially taken to the sea each year and washed, the piece of wood was believed to have survived from the Olive tree planted by Athena herself in Attica as sign of her dominion over the territory. In a foul temper her uncle Poseidon then flooded the region as he had wanted it for himself.
In any case my sense was of Ancient Greece as a mass of local cults each strongly tied to specific landscapes and local stories which may not have had ,meaning for the people in the neighbouring town a few miles down the road.
I feel almost as lost as the book gets, there is so much going on, equally I was annoyed (a little) by her use of evidence ,so for example she says that the above mentioned holy piece of olive wood might have been removed from the Acropolis of Athens before the Persians burnt the city instead of saying who says that and why we might believe them or not. Equally she cites evidence from Greek pots to 'prove' that Athena had an important role in assisting Heracles in his twelve tasks without ever saying if these are unique pots or common motives.
Two things I particularly liked from the mythology were Athena's role in the Trojan war and in the succession of gods. The Succession of gods begins with Gaia giving birth to Uranos and ends with Zeus giving 'birth' to Athena, each male leading god was warned that their offspring would overthrow them and imaginatively each reacted to the threat of dethronement by trying to eat the offspring or in the case of Zeus the pregnant mother. Athena closes the cycle by siding with her father and taking his side, supporting rather than overthrowing.
The Odyssey we might read as contest between Poseidon and Athena, Poseidon representing passion and strength, Athena craft and skill. She, we are shown is more effective in upholding and supporting her champion. Her role as patron either of cities or heroes is one of her prime attributes.
The Trojan war as we recall resulted from The Judgement of Paris, but in awarding the golden apple to Aphrodite, Paris snubbed Athena who had been patron and protector of Holy Troy. Which just goes to show that when three goddesses bear down upon you while are out innocently herding sheep the best thing to do is to recuse yourself. Athena has a vindictive streak so once Paris has disrespected her, she doesn't heed the Trojan prayers and for Deacy her tricking Hector to his death foreshadows her role in inspiring the trojan horse and the burning of the topless towers of Illium.
The critical feminist views of Athena turn out to have a fair pedigree too, it was the nineteenth century Swiss scholar J.J. Bachofen (who sadly was a jurist rather than a baker) who in 1861 published Das Mutterrecht in which he argued that human societies were originally matriarchal but which became patriarchal - the Orestia was for him the key moment in this shift and Athena the prime actor in this process, at the dawn of the 20th century Jane Harrison continued this view seeing Athena as de-sexed victim in the transition to patriarchy and victimiser who colludes in the suppression of women (like Archne or Murmix). This blends into possibly the most fertile area of considering a virgin goddess - what does she mean to people now? Plainly for Bachofen, Harrison, Freud and Jung Athena had powerful symbolic and archetypal meaning which can be analysed and explored equally when Rubens painted Marie de Medici as Minerva, one can read the message well enough, but when the London Metropolitian police call their racial and violent crimes taskforce 'Operation Athena' does that mean anything more than that the Met employs too many classics graduates (or not enough, by Jove! Depending on your point of view)?
There was a brief mention of how Athena spilled over into the Virgin Mary, at one of the sieges of Byzantium, city dwellers reported seeing visions of the Virgin standing on the city walls with helmet and spear, shouting at the enemy - one of Athena's roles was patron of cities, Deacy doesn't explore it but the old religion presumably flowed into the new in others ways too, both Mary and Athena were virgins and mothers with curious conceptions and distinct from other females.
I think after 157 pages I am convinced that it is potentially a fascinating subject, but this book was a far less rich read than the uses of Greek Mythology.
Deacy's book is a pretty brief discussion of the Goddess Athena, broken down into nine short chapters. Perhaps that is a clue to the problem - how do you talk about a divine being sensibly? Is it meaningful to have a biography? Or to establish the theology? How about the worshippers, can we establish what was important to them, what role and meaning did worship have to them? Or is the author's role tracking the changing interpretations of a symbol through cultures and times?
Anyway I was interested particularly by a very late point that Deacy makes, the Goddess Minerva was so early associated with, or assimilated into, Athena that there is no independent iconography of her, however functionally the two were separate, Minerva was the junior member of the Roman Capitoline Trinity of Minerva, Juno and Jupiter and had a special role in overseeing the transition was childhood to adulthood while in the Greek world that function was undertaken by Artemis and Apollo (for girls and boys respectively) while the Olympian gods were equallish with Zeus at best, first among equals. This is indicative of two contradictory trends that run throughout the book - on the one hand consolidation and unity across the Mediterranean world, on the other distinctive and particular if not peculiar local features. Athena and Athenas maybe. Some early Christian writers argued that she was (at least) five different goddess, each one more vile and despicable than the last, while they would say that, perhaps it does suggest a real difficulty on the part of your everyday pagan, less educated than Deacy, to whom Athena in Acardia was a different being than Athena in Athens.
This tension is implicit in the discussion of Athena's origins, on the one hand one idea is that cult figurines in Crete of a woman with snakes and from the Greek mainland of a woman with a shield merged to form Athena, while another is to see Athena as very like a range of Goddesses - Egyptian Neith who was a warrior and a weaver and the patron of a city just like Athena, (they were assumed by Plato and Herodotus to be one and the same divinity, an idea picked up and repackaged in Black Athena), but also Hittite KA.ZAL who like Athena emerged from a senior god's skull, Mesopotamian Inanna who was a war goddess associated with owls (like Athena) but unlike her was also love goddess, while Phoenician Anat daughter of the still worshipped El, a Virgin and protector of cities, armed with an axe rather than the Athenian spear, but unlike Athena she had horns and wings. So one can imagine Athena as a Greek cult strongly coloured by similar nearby cults or as one of a number of very similar Goddesses arising from a closely connected group of cultures.
Within Greece we might say that the same situation applies, in Sparta Athena was uniquely honoured by casting bronze bells, in Acardia the virgin goddess was honoured by those who wished to conceive, in Boetia her sacred bird was the crow, in Athens the Owl, in Athens Athena was predominant, unusually her cult was a city centre one and while other gods and goddesses were worshipped, typically it was in aspects that were related to or in relation to Athena and her cult. The principal cult object was a chunk of olive wood which was ceremonially taken to the sea each year and washed, the piece of wood was believed to have survived from the Olive tree planted by Athena herself in Attica as sign of her dominion over the territory. In a foul temper her uncle Poseidon then flooded the region as he had wanted it for himself.
In any case my sense was of Ancient Greece as a mass of local cults each strongly tied to specific landscapes and local stories which may not have had ,meaning for the people in the neighbouring town a few miles down the road.
I feel almost as lost as the book gets, there is so much going on, equally I was annoyed (a little) by her use of evidence ,so for example she says that the above mentioned holy piece of olive wood might have been removed from the Acropolis of Athens before the Persians burnt the city instead of saying who says that and why we might believe them or not. Equally she cites evidence from Greek pots to 'prove' that Athena had an important role in assisting Heracles in his twelve tasks without ever saying if these are unique pots or common motives.
Two things I particularly liked from the mythology were Athena's role in the Trojan war and in the succession of gods. The Succession of gods begins with Gaia giving birth to Uranos and ends with Zeus giving 'birth' to Athena, each male leading god was warned that their offspring would overthrow them and imaginatively each reacted to the threat of dethronement by trying to eat the offspring or in the case of Zeus the pregnant mother. Athena closes the cycle by siding with her father and taking his side, supporting rather than overthrowing.
The Odyssey we might read as contest between Poseidon and Athena, Poseidon representing passion and strength, Athena craft and skill. She, we are shown is more effective in upholding and supporting her champion. Her role as patron either of cities or heroes is one of her prime attributes.
The Trojan war as we recall resulted from The Judgement of Paris, but in awarding the golden apple to Aphrodite, Paris snubbed Athena who had been patron and protector of Holy Troy. Which just goes to show that when three goddesses bear down upon you while are out innocently herding sheep the best thing to do is to recuse yourself. Athena has a vindictive streak so once Paris has disrespected her, she doesn't heed the Trojan prayers and for Deacy her tricking Hector to his death foreshadows her role in inspiring the trojan horse and the burning of the topless towers of Illium.
The critical feminist views of Athena turn out to have a fair pedigree too, it was the nineteenth century Swiss scholar J.J. Bachofen (who sadly was a jurist rather than a baker) who in 1861 published Das Mutterrecht in which he argued that human societies were originally matriarchal but which became patriarchal - the Orestia was for him the key moment in this shift and Athena the prime actor in this process, at the dawn of the 20th century Jane Harrison continued this view seeing Athena as de-sexed victim in the transition to patriarchy and victimiser who colludes in the suppression of women (like Archne or Murmix). This blends into possibly the most fertile area of considering a virgin goddess - what does she mean to people now? Plainly for Bachofen, Harrison, Freud and Jung Athena had powerful symbolic and archetypal meaning which can be analysed and explored equally when Rubens painted Marie de Medici as Minerva, one can read the message well enough, but when the London Metropolitian police call their racial and violent crimes taskforce 'Operation Athena' does that mean anything more than that the Met employs too many classics graduates (or not enough, by Jove! Depending on your point of view)?
There was a brief mention of how Athena spilled over into the Virgin Mary, at one of the sieges of Byzantium, city dwellers reported seeing visions of the Virgin standing on the city walls with helmet and spear, shouting at the enemy - one of Athena's roles was patron of cities, Deacy doesn't explore it but the old religion presumably flowed into the new in others ways too, both Mary and Athena were virgins and mothers with curious conceptions and distinct from other females.
I think after 157 pages I am convinced that it is potentially a fascinating subject, but this book was a far less rich read than the uses of Greek Mythology.
April 17, 2017
I was looking for an up-to-date summary of what was known about the Athena figure from historical sources and how it developed over time. This book provided me with precisely that. Citing vase paintings, statues and the Homeric Hymns (with the essential gloss on how certain Greek words likely differed from their English equivalents), and excavating some of the layers of scholarship, it is both clear and dense, suggestive and non-judgmental.
As well-organized as this book is, it would not make for an easy entry point. I was using it to interrogate my existing knowledge and assumptions, and this worked wonderfully. The questions it throws up are manifold, and will I suspect differ for each reader. For me, it was the potential difference between Athena and her mother, Metis, and the further difference between the kind of intelligence Athena represented in Classical Greece and her use in a Christian context. Should I wish to pursue this, "Further Reading" and "Works Cited" offer a plethora of possibilities.
Neatly presented and containing the essential illustrations (in b&w), this book testifies to the enduring power of myth in general, and the glorious , bright eyed goddess.
As well-organized as this book is, it would not make for an easy entry point. I was using it to interrogate my existing knowledge and assumptions, and this worked wonderfully. The questions it throws up are manifold, and will I suspect differ for each reader. For me, it was the potential difference between Athena and her mother, Metis, and the further difference between the kind of intelligence Athena represented in Classical Greece and her use in a Christian context. Should I wish to pursue this, "Further Reading" and "Works Cited" offer a plethora of possibilities.
Neatly presented and containing the essential illustrations (in b&w), this book testifies to the enduring power of myth in general, and the glorious , bright eyed goddess.
January 29, 2026
From the perspective of someone who has no real background in this subject beyond reading the translated myths, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and an occasional book/article on the subject in my spare time, this was a useful but an increasingly muddy book. The early chapters are great in showing how broad Athena's remit as a deity is, contrasting her with other deities and highlighting how often she embodies opposing values, such as a warrior figure who is also dedicated to craft and not just upholding but establishing civilization or a defiantly virginal being who can also be maternal. The confusion (or my confusion, at the very least) comes from a few different sources. Some parts of the text, particularly towards the end of the book, could use another pass from the editor to improve clarify. Another source of confusion comes from broad conclusions drawn from very slight or even non-existent evidence. In the chapter about Hephaistos, for example, a claim is made that while both he and Athena are connected to craft, Athena is highly respected and distinguished while Hephaistos is a servant of the gods and a figure of fun as a reflection of the metalworkers being essential to the Greek society but also feared and marginalized. No citations accompany this claim and so it is questionable how much it can really be trusted.
Overall, this is not a bad book but I would not say it is a particularly good entry point for someone who wants to learn either about the Greek religion as a whole or about Athena in particular. The book does have a pretty good section with recommended further reading that is split into topics. I just wish the book also had a section dedicated to the publications the author recommends reading prior to reading this book. Non-fiction, particularly titles that skew somewhat academic, often tends to assume and expect a certain baseline knowledge of the subject from the readers but does not communicate this expectation. I think many unfulfilling experiences (and poor ratings) could be avoided if writers were specific about what they expect their readers to know and perhaps even provided a list of recommended books to obtain this knowledge from.
Overall, this is not a bad book but I would not say it is a particularly good entry point for someone who wants to learn either about the Greek religion as a whole or about Athena in particular. The book does have a pretty good section with recommended further reading that is split into topics. I just wish the book also had a section dedicated to the publications the author recommends reading prior to reading this book. Non-fiction, particularly titles that skew somewhat academic, often tends to assume and expect a certain baseline knowledge of the subject from the readers but does not communicate this expectation. I think many unfulfilling experiences (and poor ratings) could be avoided if writers were specific about what they expect their readers to know and perhaps even provided a list of recommended books to obtain this knowledge from.
February 17, 2026
This was an excellent book for my purposes of learning more about Athena in her various aspects. I wish there wasn’t so much lean into talk of her uplifting patriarchy, but I get that from the author’s POV, and the POV of many scholars who write about her, that’s a central detail of the goddess. It rings of 2008. I think I’ve found better ways to frame her in my brain. Aside from that though, fabulous read for anyone interested in Athena for any reason. Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World for the win!
November 24, 2025
This is a really helpful guide to Athena. It's nice and short, but covers a lot of ground (including Athena's reception in the modern world). There is also a generous 'guide to further reading' at the back, which would make this a valuable starting point for anyone taking their first look at Athena.
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September 2, 2024
This book was gifted to me after my husband found it in a used bookstore. As an amateur who does a lot of research in mythology and folklore, he thought it would interest me, and it certainly did. I will say that this book is not for those new to Greek mythology or the classics in a general sense; it takes a very academic approach and assumes that you have some basic level of knowledge relating to the goddess and the structures of Greek mythology. If you have this knowledge, you will likely find this book very rewarding. It's well-organized and dense while remaining a brief 200-level introduction to Athena.
This book is part of an ongoing series released by Routledge. After this deep dive, I am interested in reading some of the other volumes that focus on figures that are more essential to research that I am engaged in.
This book is part of an ongoing series released by Routledge. After this deep dive, I am interested in reading some of the other volumes that focus on figures that are more essential to research that I am engaged in.
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