by Rick Riordan
Before Typhoeus could recover, he stumbled into the sea. Zeus ripped a mountain from the earth and held it over his head.
“EAT ETNA!” Zeus bellowed. (Because that was the name of the mountain.)
He smashed Typhoeus under the weight of Mount Etna, and the storm giant has been trapped there ever since, rumbling beneath megatons of rock and occasionally causing volcanic explosions.
So that’s how Zeus saved the universe, with a little assist from Hermes and Aegipan. I’m not sure if Hermes got a reward, but Aegipan was given a constellation to honor his bravery. It’s in the shape of a goat with a fish’s tail, to commemorate the form he took when he escaped Typhoeus. Later on, that constellation became a zodiac symbol. We call it Capricorn.
And finally, hooray, I can stop talking about Zeus.
The bad news: it’s time to talk about a goddess who dislikes my dad and isn’t very fond of me, either. But I’ll try to be fair, because after all, she’s my girlfriend Annabeth’s mom—good old crafty, scary-smart Athena.
ATHENA ADOPTS A
HANDKERCHIEF
SO ABOUT A MILLION PAGES AGO, I mentioned Zeus’s first wife, the Titan Metis. Remember her? Neither did I. I had to go back and look. All these names: Metis and Thetis and Themis and Feta Cheese—I get a headache trying to keep them straight.
Anyway, here’s a recap:
Last week on The Real Gods of Olympus: Metis was pregnant with Zeus’s child. She had a prophecy that the child would be a girl, but if Metis and Zeus had another child after that, it would be a boy who would grow up to take Zeus’s place. Hearing this, Zeus did the natural thing. He panicked and swallowed his pregnant wife whole.
Dun-dun!
What happened next?
Well, immortals can’t die, even when they’re ingested by other immortals, so Metis gave birth to her daughter right there in Zeus’s gut.
(Feel free to get sick now. Or you can wait. It gets worse….)
Metis eventually faded into pure thought, since she was the Titan of deep thoughts anyway. She became nothing more than a nagging voice in the back of Zeus’s mind.
As for her daughter, she grew up in Zeus’s body, the same way the earlier Olympians had grown up in Kronos’s belly. Once the child was an adult (a small, super-compressed, very uncomfortable adult) she started looking for a way to escape into the world. None of the options seemed good. If she erupted from Zeus’s mouth, everyone would laugh at her and say she had been vomited. That was undignified. If she followed Zeus’s digestive track the other way—Nope! That was even grosser. She was a strong young goddess, so she might have been able to break out of Zeus’s chest, but then everybody would think she was one of the monsters from the Alien movies, and again, that was not the kind of entrance she was looking for.
Finally she had an idea. She dissolved into pure thought—a little trick her mother, Metis, had taught her—and traveled up Zeus’s spinal cord straight into his brain, where she re-formed. She started kicking and hammering and screaming inside Zeus’s skull, making as much racket as she could. (Maybe she had a lot of room to move around in there because Zeus’s brain was so small. Don’t tell him I said that.)
As you can imagine, this gave Zeus a splitting headache.
He couldn’t sleep all night with the pounding in his skull. The next morning he stumbled into breakfast and tried to eat, but he kept wincing, screaming, and pounding his fork on the table, screaming, “STOP IT! STOP IT!”
Hera and Demeter exchanged worried looks.
“Uh, my husband?” Hera asked. “Everything…okay?”
“Headache!” Zeus bellowed. “Bad, bad headache!”
As if to prove his point, the lord of the universe slammed his face into his pancakes, which demolished the pancakes and the plate and put a crack in the table, but did nothing for his headache.
“Aspirin?” Apollo suggested. (He was the god of healing.)
“Nice cup of tea?” Hestia suggested.
“I could split your skull open,” offered Hephaestus, the blacksmith god.
“Hephaestus!” Hera cried. “Don’t talk to your father that way!”
“What?” Hephaestus demanded. “Clearly he’s got a problem in there. I could open up the hood and take a look. Might relieve the pressure. Besides, he’s immortal. It won’t kill him.”
“No, thanks…” Zeus grimaced. “I…” Suddenly red spots danced before Zeus’s eyes. Pain racked his body, and a voice in his head screamed: LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!
Zeus fell from his chair, writhing in agony. “Cut my skull!” he wailed. “Get it out of me!”
The other gods turned pale with fear. Even Apollo froze, and he had like, a dozen Boy Scout badges in first aid.
Hephaestus rose from his seat. “Right. I’ll get my awl.” (Which was basically an industrial-strength ice pick for making holes in thick surfaces, like metal, or gods’ heads.) “The rest of you, get Zeus on his throne and hold him down.”
The Olympians prepped for emergency brain surgery. They dragged Zeus to his throne and held him steady while Hephaestus retrieved his tools. The blacksmith god wasted no time. He marched up to Zeus, set the point of the awl in the middle of the sky god’s forehead, raised his hammer, and BANG!
After that, they called him One-Hit Hephaestus.
He used enough force to penetrate the skull without turning Zeus into a god-kebab. From the awl point to the bridge of Zeus’s nose, a fissure spread—just wide enough for Athena to squeeze her way out.
She sprang from Zeus’s forehead and, right in front of their eyes, grew until she was a fully formed adult goddess, dressed in gray robes and battle armor, wearing a bronze helmet and holding a spear and shield.
I’m not sure where she got the outfit. Maybe Athena magically created it, or maybe Zeus ate clothing and weaponry for snacks. At any rate, the goddess made quite an entrance.
“Hello, everyone,” she said calmly. “I am Athena, goddess of warfare and wisdom.”
Demeter passed out. Hera looked scandalized, since her husband had just given birth to a child from his own forehead, and Hera was fairly certain Athena wasn’t her daughter.
Ares the war god said, “You can’t be in charge of war! That’s my job!”
“I said warfare and wisdom,” Athena explained. “I’ll oversee the sort of combat that requires planning, craftiness, and high intelligence. You can still be in charge of the stupid, bloody, ‘manly man’ aspects of war.”
“Oh, all right,” said Ares. Then he frowned. “Wait…what?”
Hephaestus sewed up the crack in Zeus’s head. Despite the misgivings of the other gods, Zeus insisted that they welcome his daughter Athena into their ranks. That’s how she became one of the Olympians.
Like you heard, she was the goddess of wisdom, which included good advice and useful skills. She gave the Greeks the olive tree, but she also taught them about calculating numbers, weaving cloth, using oxen to pull their plows, flossing after every meal, and a bunch of other helpful tips.
As the goddess of warfare, she was more about playing defense than offense. She didn’t enjoy combat, but she knew that sometimes it was necessary. She always tried to win through good strategy and sneaky tricks. She tried to minimize casualties, whereas Ares loved violence and liked nothing better than a battlefield littered with mangled corpses. (Yeah, he is a sweetheart, that guy.)
Athena’s sacred plant was the olive tree, since that was her big gift to the Athenians. Her sacred animals were the owl and the snake. Supposedly, the owl was a symbol of wisdom from the heavens. The snake symbolized wisdom from the earth. Me, I never understood that. If owls were so wise, why would they go around asking Who? all the time, like they couldn’t remember their own names? Snakes have never struck me as very smart, either; but apparently the Greeks thought that when snakes hissed, they were whispering important secrets. Yea
h, that’s right, Mr. Greek Dude. Hold that rattlesnake a little closer to your ear. He’s got something to tell you.
Athena is easy to spot in the old Greek statues and paintings. She pretty much always wears the same thing. Her helmet is decorated with rams, horses, griffons, and sphinxes, and it has a big fancy Mohawk-type plume on the top. She usually carries her shield and spear, and wears a sleeveless Spartan-style dress with a magic cloak called the Aegis draped over her shoulders. According to the legends, the cloak is lined in snakeskin and is pinned with the bronzed head of Medusa, kind of like a corsage. Sometimes you’ll hear the Aegis described as the goddess’s shield rather than her cloak. I guess nobody has ever looked closely enough to tell for sure which is right, because with the head of the Medusa there…well, the whole point of that thing is to make you run away screaming.
In a lot of stories, Athena gives the Aegis to Zeus as a present, so it’s technically his; but she borrows it from time to time like, Hey, Dad, can I borrow the severed head of Medusa tonight? I’m going out with my friends.
Okay, honey, just bring it back by midnight, and don’t petrify anyone.
One of the biggest mysteries about Athena is why she’s called Pallas Athena. For the longest time, I thought people were saying Palace Athena, like it was a hotel in Vegas, or maybe Athena’s secret lair.
Even the Greeks couldn’t agree on why their favorite goddess had the nickname Pallas, but here’s the way I heard it.
When Athena was a young goddess, fresh out of Zeus’s forehead, her dad sent her to live with the nymphs of Lake Tritones in Libya on the North African coast.
“You’ll like them,” Zeus promised. “They’re warlike women, just like you. They might even teach you a few combat tricks!”
“I doubt that,” Athena said. “Why are you sending me away?”
Zeus tried for a smile, which wasn’t easy, since his forehead still hurt. “Look, my little war-muffin—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“You’ve been stuck inside my guts your whole life,” Zeus said. “This’ll give you a chance to learn about the wide world. And it’ll give the other Olympians time to get used to the idea of you being on the gods’ council. Honestly, you’re a little intimidating to them. You’re smart and powerful.”
Athena was flattered, so she agreed to spend some time in Africa.
She loved it there, just as Zeus had predicted. The nymphs of Lake Tritones were excellent fighters and athletes, maybe because they lived in such a harsh environment. Athena learned all sorts of super-secret ninja-nymph combat techniques. The nymphs thought Athena was the best thing since sliced ambrosia.
Her dearest friend was Pallas, the only nymph who could occasionally beat Athena in hand-to-hand combat. They shared the same taste in armor and weapons. They had the same sense of humor. They thought so much alike they could finish each other’s sentences. In no time, they became BFFs.
Then one day, Athena and Pallas were sparring by the lakeside when Zeus happened to look down from the sky to see how Athena was doing.
Zeus was shocked. Athena and Pallas fought with such speed and intensity, Zeus couldn’t believe it was a mock combat. Athena looked like she was about to be killed! (And, yeah, I know she was immortal so she couldn’t actually be killed, but Zeus was an overprotective dad. In the heat of the moment, he forgot.)
Pallas thrust her javelin at Athena’s chest and Zeus overreacted. He appeared in the sky right behind Athena and held up the Aegis (which he was keeping at the time) so Pallas couldn’t help but see it.
The bronzed face of Medusa startled the nymph. Athena knocked aside her friend’s javelin and counterattacked, stabbing her spear right at Pallas’s gut.
Normally, Pallas would’ve had no trouble dodging. Athena expected Pallas to move.
But this time, Pallas was too slow. Athena’s spear went straight through the nymph’s stomach and out the other side. Pallas crumpled to the ground.
Nymphs are magical creatures. They can live a long time and withstand a lot, maybe even the sight of Medusa, but they aren’t immortal. If you impale a nymph with a spear, she will die.
Pallas died.
Athena fell to her knees, sobbing in shock and horror. She cradled her poor friend’s lifeless body and glared at Zeus, still hovering in the air with the Aegis.
“DAD!” Athena screamed. “WHY?”
Looking in his daughter’s stormy gray eyes, Zeus felt almost as scared as he had when he’d faced the giant Typhoeus. “I thought…I didn’t mean to…Oops.”
He disappeared and fled back to Olympus.
Athena was miserable in her grief. Her friend’s body dissolved back into the waters of Lake Tritones, the way water nymphs often do, but Athena decided to honor Pallas with a sacred monument. The goddess built a wooden replica of Pallas and painted it with such skill that it looked almost lifelike. Then Athena cut off a small section of the Aegis cloak (which, being god-size, was pretty huge) and draped it over the shoulders of the replica Pallas.
The statue became an important artifact. Eventually it ended up in the city of Troy, where it stood in a special shrine called the Palladium, meaning the place of Pallas. Women could go there and claim sanctuary from Athena. No one would be allowed to harm them. Men, on the other hand, weren’t even allowed to look at the statue. The punishment for doing so was death.
The statue of Pallas looked so much like Athena that people began to call it the Pallas/Athena. Then people got confused and started calling the goddess Pallas Athena.
Athena was fine with that. In a way, by taking her friend’s name, the goddess was keeping Pallas’s memory alive.
So feel free to call her Pallas Athena, but don’t ask her if you can book a room at the Palace Athena. I can tell you from personal experience, she doesn’t think that’s funny.
Come to think of it…Athena doesn’t have a great sense of humor in general.
The way she dealt with Arachne, for instance? Harsh.
Arachne started life with no advantages at all. She lived in a kingdom called Lydia, which was in the country we now call Turkey. It was nothing special, sort of the South Dakota of Ancient Greece. (Sorry, South Dakota.) Arachne’s parents were lower-class wool dyers, which meant they spent all day stirring bolts of cloth in buckets of stinky, steaming purple soup—kind of the equivalent of flipping burgers at McDonald’s.
They died when Arachne was young, leaving her with no friends, family, or money. Yet Arachne became the most famous girl in the kingdom because of pure skill. She could weave like nobody’s business.
I know, you’re thinking, Wow. Weaving. South Dakota is starting to sound exciting.
But, dude, you try weaving. It’s hard! I mean have you ever looked at the fabric of your shirt up close? Next time you’re in a boring chemistry lecture, check it out. The cloth is made of threads—millions of them going up and down, back and forth. Somebody had to take the material, like wool or cotton or whatever, brush it out so all the fibers go in the same direction, then spin it and twist it into those tiny little threads. Then they had to line up a zillion sideways threads, all parallel to each other like guitar strings, and weave the up-and-down threads into them.
Sure, now we’ve got machines to do that. But imagine, back in the day, doing it all by hand. Every square inch of cloth took hours and hours to make. Most people could only afford one shirt and one pair of pants, because they were so freaking hard to make. Curtains or sheets? Forget about it!
And that’s if you just made it one color, like white. What if you wanted a pattern? Then you had to plan out which threads to dye what color and you had to get them all in exactly the right place, like a massive puzzle. With my ADHD, I could never do that.
Weaving was the only way to get things made out of cloth, so unless you wanted to run around naked all the time, you’d better find yourself a good weaver.
That made her popular and very famous.
Pretty soon the local folks were gathering at Arachne’s hut every day to watch her work. Even the nymphs left their woods and their streams to gawk at her weaving, because her tapestries were more beautiful than nature.
Arachne’s hands seemed to fly. She picked up a tuft of wool, spun it into thread, dyed it whatever color she wanted, and looped it on the frame of her loom in less than a second. When she had a whole row of strands going up and down, she attached the sideways thread to a long piece of wood called a shuttle, which was kind of like a giant sewing needle. She slid the shuttle back and forth as fast as a ball in a tennis game, weaving the threads together into a solid piece of cloth, and because she’d planned out her colors so perfectly, a picture appeared in the cloth as if by magic.
Shuttle, shuttle, shuttle, shuttle: WHAM!
Suddenly you were looking at an ocean scene woven from cloth, but so realistic that the waves seemed to break on the beach. The water glittered in blue and green metallic thread. The woven people on the shore were so carefully crafted you could make out the expressions on their faces. If you held a magnifying glass up to the sand dunes, you could pick out each individual grain of sand. Arachne had basically invented high-definition weaving.
One of the nymphs gasped. “Arachne, you are amazing!”
“Thanks.” Arachne allowed herself a smug smile as she prepared to weave her next masterpiece.