lights, so many colors flash from her 

 arms. And Hephaestus seems in doubt 

 by what gift he should win the favor of 

 the goddess for his bait is spent since 

 her arms have grown with her. 



Zeus gasps with pleasure, as those 

 enduring great pain for great gain, and 

 inquires for his child, proud that he 

 bore her, and Hera is not angry, but 

 rejoices as if she had borne the maiden 

 herself. Now two peoples sacrifice to 

 Athena on two citadels, the Athenians 

 and the Rhodians, land and sea; of the 

 one indeed the sacrifices are without 

 fire and incomplete. Among the 

 Athenians fire is painted and the savor 

 of sacrifices and smoke, as if fragrant 

 and ascending with the savor; there- 

 fore, as to the wiser and those sacrific- 

 ing well, the goddess comes to them. 

 It is said that gold was poured down 

 from heaven for the Rhodians and 

 filled their houses and streets since 

 Zeus poured out a cloud upon them 

 because they, too, revered Athena; and 

 the god Wealth stood upon their acro- 

 polis, winged, as if from the clouds 

 and golden from the material in which 

 he appears, and he is painted as having 

 eyes, for from foresight he came to 

 them." 



Now that practically all the evidence 

 has been brought it is time to investi- 

 gate the theories propounded by these 

 modern scholars and the various inter- 

 pretations which they put upon this 

 strange birth of a deity. 



Preller looks upon Athena as the 

 goddess of the clear sky. In the 

 cloudy sky, in the midst of the storm 

 and lightning the clear bright heaven 

 appeared, and this was the birth of 

 Athena. The sky is of the greatest 

 beauty in Greece, especially in Attica, 

 so Athena was most honored in this 

 land. 



To another German scholar, Welcker, 

 she is the aether and also the spirit, 

 presenting both sides of the nature of 

 her father, being aether, the daughter 

 of Zeus dwelling in the aether and 

 spirit, the daughter of Zeus the most 

 high spirit. He lays a great deal of 

 stress upon etymologies in his method 

 of proof, deriving the name Athena 

 from aether, but as every author has a 

 different derivation for this name 



ec[ually plausible, it is impossible to 

 have full confidence in this gentle- 

 man's theory. 



Ploix regards Athena as the twi- 

 light, and Max Miiller brings for- 

 ward his inevitable "Dawn" as the 

 true solution of the question, but the 

 view which is presented in Roscher's 

 Lexicon is perhaps the most sensible 

 of all on this side. Originally Athena 

 was the storm-cloud.and her birth from 

 the head of Zeus shows this, Roscher 

 maintains. This interpretation is evi- 

 dent all through the myth. The 

 clouds appear in different forms, some- 

 times as the head of Zeus the god of 

 the weather, at other times as the 

 itgis. The lightning is the bright 

 hatchet or glittering lance with which 

 the blow is dealt. The thunder is the 

 terrible war cry. That she was born 

 in the west adds to this evidence, as 

 storms came to the Greeks from that 

 direction. 



Farnell contends valiantly in sup- 

 port of his theory that Athena repre- 

 sents no physical force in nature, but 

 wisdom. In antiquity he acknowledges 

 that some philosophers did regard 

 Athena in the other light. Aristotle 

 looked upon her as the moon. The 

 stoic Diogenes Babylonius gave a 

 physical explanation of her birth. He 

 recalls also a comment of a scholiast 

 to Pindar, which tells that Aristocles 

 said that the goddess was concealed 

 in a cloud, and that Zeus, striking the 

 cloud, made the goddess appear. He 

 remarks that philosophers then, in their 

 vagaries, were no better than modern 

 scholars, but that the conceptions 

 which the Greek people and poets had 

 are important for us in reaching a true 

 conclusion; so he endeavors to prove 

 that neither in the accounts of the 

 poets nor in the minds of the Greeks 

 was there any physical conception of 

 the goddess. 



In the hymn quoted above he re- 

 minds us that there is no thunder 

 which could not be left out if this were 

 the description of a storm. He says 

 also that there is nothing physical in 

 the picture which Pindar gives us, un- 

 less the terrible cry of a deity must be 

 taken to mean thunder. Lucian tells 

 of no storm, and Philostratus, who is 



