Athena

The Greeks (and Romans after them) had what I think is a pretty amusing set of deities. In fact, I’m pretty sure at least some of the stories were intended to be sarcastic and/or sacreligious. The objects of Greek worship were hardly heros of moral strength and piety. No, the opposite of that.

It seems like just about every god and goddess had an affair or two with the spouse of another diety, if not a human. For example, Ares seduced Aphrodites (Mrs. Hephaistos), producing at least two children. Ares went on to kill the son of Poseidon, who had raped Ares’ daughter. There was so much mischief and trickery that these folks could have run for Congress.

And as though the salacious stories and bizarre antics are not entertaining enough, it’s like a puzzle put together by a maniac. There are four wind gods, because you aparently can’t get one god to blow in more than one direction (sometimes there’s a fifth god who controls the other four). And there is Hypnos, the god of sleep, owning half our lives, and who worked with Morpheus, the god of dreams (more familiar as the red pill/blue pill guy from The Matrix), who might have eventually become the Sandman…

But it really gets going when you get to the major gods, who have so many unrelated responsibilities, they were probably assigned using a dart board and a blindfold. Apollo is the god of the bow, who directed the arrow that fatally struck Achilles heal. And he is the god of music, or at least the lyre, and won musical competitions against both Marsyas with his flute and Pan with his pipes. His father is Zeus, and his mother is Leto, who was not Mrs. Zeus…

While the aforementioned Ares is the god of plain old war, Athena is the goddess of just or strategic war. But she is also the goddess of arts and crafts, and of wisdom and mathematics. Her mother was Metis, whose name means wisdom or craft, of all things. Metis was actually the wife of Zeus, Athena’s father. That may seem almost boring for a Greek diety, but stay with me.

Due to a threatening prophecy, Zeus feared the children of Metis, so he tricked her into turning into a fly, which he then ate. But she was already pregnant with Athena, and while inside Zeus, Metis noisily hammered out a helmet and made a robe for Athena, who was born from Zeus’s head, fully grown, armed, and armored. Athena went on to invent the flute which was played by Marsyas, and assisted Hercules, Achilles (oops), and Jason (of Argonaut fame). And that Trojan horse was actually her idea.