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 
equally 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 
aegis. 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 
31 
