Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

by Rick Riordan

  “Athena herself must have taught you weaving!” the nymph said.

  Now, this was a huge compliment. Arachne should’ve just nodded, said thank you, and let it go.

  But Arachne was too proud of her own work. She had no use for the gods. What had they ever done for her? Arachne had built herself up from nothing. Her parents had died and left her penniless. She’d never had a bit of good luck.

  “Athena?” Arachne snorted. “I taught myself how to weave.”

  The crowd shuffled nervously.

  “But, surely,” one man said, “you should thank Athena for your talent, since the goddess invented weaving. Without her—”

  “No tapestry for you!” Arachne hit the man in the face with a ball of yarn. “Weaving is my thing. If Athena is so great, she can come down here and test her skills against mine. We’ll see who gets schooled.”

  You can guess what happened. Athena heard about this challenge. When you’re a goddess, you really can’t let somebody get away with calling you out like that.

  The next day, Athena descended to the earth, but rather than come in with spears blazing, she decided to visit Arachne in stealth mode and check things out. Athena was careful that way. She liked to get her facts straight, and she believed in giving people a second chance. After all, she’d accidentally killed her own best friend Pallas. She knew that mistakes happened.

  She took the shape of a feeble old woman and hobbled over to Arachne’s hut, joining the crowd that had gathered to watch the weaver do her thing.

  The mortal was good. No doubt about it. Arachne wove scenes of mountains and waterfalls, cities shimmering in the afternoon heat, animals prowling in the forests, and sea monsters so terrifying they looked ready to leap out of the fabric and attack. Arachne churned out the tapestries with inhuman speed, flinging them into the crowd as prizes, firing them from her T-shirt cannon, making all the spectators happy with valuable parting gifts.

  The girl didn’t seem greedy. She just wanted to share her work with the world.

  Athena respected that. This mortal Arachne hadn’t come from a rich family or gone to a fancy school. She had no advantages, and she’d made something of herself from skill alone. Athena decided to give Arachne the benefit of a doubt.

  The goddess pushed her way through the crowd and began to speak to Arachne as the young girl worked.

  “You know, dearie,” said Old Lady Athena, “I may be old, but I’ve gained some wisdom with my age. Would you accept some advice?”

  Arachne just grunted. She was busy with her weaving and didn’t want any words of wisdom, but she said nothing.

  “You’re very talented,” Athena continued. “There’s absolutely no harm in gaining the praise of other humans. You’ve earned it! But I hope you’ve given the goddess Athena proper credit for your talent. She invented weaving, after all, and she grants talent to mortals like you.”

  Arachne stopped weaving and glared at the old lady. “Nobody granted me anything, Grandma. Maybe your eyes have gone bad, but look at this tapestry. I made this. I don’t need to thank anyone else for my hard work!”

  Athena tried to keep her cool. “You are proud. I see that. And rightly so. But you are dishonoring the goddess. If I were you, I would ask her forgiveness right now. I’m sure she would grant it to you. She is merciful to all who—”

  “Get lost, Grandma!” Arachne snapped. “Save your advice for your daughters and stepdaughters. I don’t need it. If you love Athena so much, go tell her to come find me and we’ll see who owns the art of weaving!”

  That was it.

  Athena’s disguise burned away in burst of light. The goddess stood before the crowd, her shield and spear gleaming. “Athena has come,” she said. “And she accepts your challenge.”

  Pro tip: If you’re a mortal and a goddess appears right next to you, and if you want to survive the next few minutes, the proper thing to do is to fall on your face and grovel.

  The crowd did exactly that, but Arachne had guts. Of course she was terrified inside. Her face went pale, then flushed red, then turned pale again. But she managed to stand and glare at the goddess. “Fine. Let’s see what you’ve got, old lady!”

  “Ooooo,” said the crowd.

  “What I’ve got?” Athena shot back. “The little girl from Lydia’s going to show me how to weave? When I get through, this crowd’s going to be using your tapestries for toilet paper!”

  “Burn!” said the crowd.

  “Oh, yeah?” Arachne sneered. “Must’ve been dark inside your daddy’s head if you think you can weave better than me. Zeus probably swallowed your mama just to keep you from getting born and embarrassing yourself.”

  “Snap!” the crowd yelled.

  “Oh, yeah?” Athena growled. “Well, your mama…” The goddess took a deep breath. “You know what? That’s enough trash talk. It’s time to weave. One tapestry each. Winner gets bragging rights.”

  “Uh-huh.” Arachne put her fists on his hips. “And who decides the winner. You?”

  “Yes,” Athena said simply. “On the River Styx, I promise a fair judgment. Unless you’d like these mortals to decide between us.”

  Arachne looked at the terrified mortals and realized she was in a hopeless situation. Obviously the mortals would decide for Athena no matter how good Arachne’s weaving was. They wouldn’t want to get zapped into ashes or turned into warthogs for angering the goddess. Arachne didn’t believe for a minute that Athena would be fair, but maybe gods really did have to keep their promises if they swore on the River Styx.

  Arachne decided she had no choice, so she might as well go out in style. “Bring it on, Athena. You want to borrow my loom, or do you need a special one with training wheels?”

  Athena clenched her teeth. “I’ve got my own loom. Thanks.”

  The goddess snapped her fingers. A glowing loom appeared right next to Arachne’s. The goddess and the mortal both sat down and furiously began to work. The crowd chanted, “WEAVE! WEAVE!” and pumped their fists in the air.

  The Lydians totally should have sold advertising and gotten corporate sponsors, because it would’ve been the highest-rated weaving smack-down in Ancient Greek television history.

  As it turned out, Athena and Arachne’s trash talk continued—but in the language of tapestries. Athena wove a scene of the gods in all their glory, seated in the council hall of Mount Olympus, as if to say: We are the best. Don’t bother with the rest. She depicted the temples on the acropolis of Athens to show how wise mortals should honor the gods.

  Then, for good measure, Athena wove little warnings into the cloth. If you looked closely, you could see all the different famous mortals who had dared to compare themselves to the gods and had been turned into animals or flattened into roadkill.

  Meanwhile, Arachne wove a different story. She depicted every ridiculous and horrible thing that the gods had ever done. She showed Zeus turning into a bull to kidnap the princess Europa. She showed Poseidon as a stallion chasing Demeter as a white mare, and then poor Medusa, an innocent girl wooed by Poseidon and turned into a hideous monster by Athena. She made the gods look stupid, and evil, childish, and no good for mortals…and I’m sorry to say, she had a lot of material to choose from.

  When the tapestries were done, the crowd was absolutely silent, because both were amazing. Athena’s was majestic and breathtaking and made you feel the power of the Olympian gods. Arachne’s was the most scathing critique of the gods ever created, and it made you want to laugh and cry and get angry all at the same time—but it was still beautiful.

  Athena looked back and forth between the tapestries, trying to judge which one was better.

  Some stories will tell you that Athena won the contest, but that’s not true. In fact, Athena was forced to admit that the two tapestries were exactly equal in quality.

  “It’s a tie,” she said grudgingly. “
Your skill, your technique, your use of color….As much as I want to, I can’t find any fault.”

  Arachne tried to stand up tall, but the work had taken something out of her. Her hands hurt. Her back was sore and she stooped from the effort. “What now, then? A rematch? Unless you’re scared….”

  Athena finally lost her temper. She took the shuttle out of her loom—a length of wood like a square baseball bat. “Now, I beat the crud out of you for insulting the gods!”

  WHACK! WHACK! WHACK!

  The goddess hit Arachne over the head as the mortal weaver scuttled around, trying to hide. At first, the crowd was horrified. Then they did what humans often do when they’re frightened and nervous and somebody else is getting a beating…They began to laugh and make fun of Arachne.

  “Get her, Athena!” one cried.

  “Yeah, who’s the boss, now, little girl?” said another.

  The same mortals who had gazed in wonder at Arachne’s work and had stood around her hut for days hoping for free tapestries now turned against her, calling her names and jeering as Athena hit her.

  Cruel? You bet. But if you ask me, that mob painted a picture of humans that’s just as true and just as scathing as Arachne’s tapestry about the gods.

  Finally Athena’s anger subsided. She turned and saw all the mortals laughing and pointing at Arachne, and Athena realized maybe she’d gone too far with the punishment.

  “Enough!” the goddess yelled at the crowd. “Would you turn on one of your own people so quickly? At least Arachne had some talent! What makes you people so special?”

  While Athena was occupied chewing out the crowd, Arachne struggled to her feet. Every part of her body hurt, but most of the damage was to her pride. Weaving was her only joy, and Athena had taken that away. Arachne would never be able to take pleasure in her work again. The townspeople she’d tried so hard to please had turned against her too. Her eyes stung with shame and hatred and self-pity.

  She rushed to the loom and gathered up a thick row of threads—enough to form a makeshift rope. She tied a noose and put it around her neck, then looped the other end of the rope over the rafter beam above her.

  By the time Athena and the crowd noticed, Arachne was hanging from the ceiling, trying to kill herself.

  “Foolish girl,” Athena said. She was overcome with pity, but she also hated suicide. It was a cowardly act. “I will not let you die. You will live on, and weave forever.”

  She changed Arachne into a spider, and from then on, Arachne and her children have continued to weave webs. Spiders hate Athena, and Athena hates them right back. But spiders also hate humans, because Arachne never forgot her shame and her anger at being ridiculed.

  So what’s the moral of the story? The old preachy storytellers will claim: Don’t compare yourself to the gods, because you can’t be that good. But that’s not true.

  Arachne was that good.

  Maybe the lesson is: Know when to brag and when to keep your mouth shut. Or: Sometimes life isn’t fair, even if you are as gifted as Athena. Or maybe: Don’t give away free tapestries.

  I’ll let you decide.

  Athena tore up the tapestries from that contest, as beautiful as they were. Because honestly, I don’t think anybody came away from that encounter looking very good.

  You may be getting the idea that Athena…well, how to put this delicately? She might’ve been the wisdom goddess, but she didn’t always make the smartest choices.

  For one thing, she was self-conscious. For instance, the way she invented the flute. She was walking in the woods near Athens one day when she heard a nest of snakes hissing, and she thought, Huh, a bunch of long tubular things that make noise. And just like that she got the idea for a new musical instrument. She hollowed out a reed, made some holes in it, blew on one end, and beautiful music came out.

  At first she was really proud of her flute. She wasn’t even the goddess of music, and here she’d invented a cool new sound. She took her flute up to Olympus, eager to show the other gods, but as soon as she started playing, the other goddesses started giggling and whispering to each other.

  Athena stopped mid-song. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” said Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

  “The music is lovely, my dear,” Hera said, trying not to laugh.

  Now, honestly, the other goddesses were intimidated by Athena, because she was so smart and strong. Naturally, they made fun of her behind her back and tried to shut her out of the clique. Athena disliked the other goddesses. She thought most of them were silly and shallow. But she also wanted to fit in, and it made her mad when they teased her.

  “Why are you laughing?” Athena demanded.

  “Well…” Demeter suppressed a smile. “It’s just that when you play the flute, your eyes cross and your cheeks puff out, and you make this funny shape with your mouth.”

  “Like this…” Aphrodite demonstrated, doing her best imitation of Athena’s flute face, which looked sort of like a constipated duck’s.

  The gods and goddesses busted out laughing. Athena fled in humiliation. You would think, being the goddess of wisdom, she’d be able to laugh it off and not let it get under her skin; but she felt so burned she threw the flute away, letting it fall to the earth.

  She even issued a curse. “Whoever dares play that thing again,” she muttered to herself, “let the worst fortune befall him!”

  Eventually the flute would get picked up, but that’s a story for later….

  After that, Athena became even more self-conscious about her looks. As a warrior goddess, she’d already decided that she would never get married. She didn’t want any man claiming to be her master, and she didn’t have time for that silly love nonsense Aphrodite was always gossiping about.

  Because of this, Athena was very sensitive about her privacy. One night she decided to go to a swimming hole in central Greece, just to relax. She bathed naked, and while she was washing off in the waterfall, enjoying the peace and quiet, she heard this choking, whimpering sound.

  She looked over at the riverbank and saw this old mortal dude just staring at her with his jaw hanging open and his eyes as big as drachmas.

  Athena screamed.

  The dude screamed.

  Athena splashed water in his eyes and yelled, “Blindness!” Instantly, the man lost his sight forever. His eyes turned pure white. He stumbled backward, bumped into a tree, and fell on his butt.

  “M-m-mistress!” he wailed. “I—I’m so sorry! I didn’t—”

  “Who are you?” Athena demanded.

  The poor guy explained that his name was Teiresias. He had just been out for a walk from the nearest city, Thebes. He had no idea Athena was there, and he was really, really sorry.

  Athena’s anger cooled, because obviously the man was telling the truth.

  “You must remain blind,” she said, “because no man may see me nude without being punished.”

  Teiresias gulped. “Um…okay…”

  “However,” Athena continued, “since this was an accident, I will compensate you for your blindness by giving you other gifts.”

  “Like…another set of eyes?” Teiresias asked.

  Athena managed a smile. “Sort of. From now on, you will be able to understand the language of birds. I will give you a staff, and with the help of the birds, you will be able to walk almost as if you had your own sight.”

  I’m not sure how that worked, exactly. I would’ve been worried that the birds would play jokes on me, like, A little farther. Turn left. Now, run! And I’d pitch over a cliff, or ram headfirst into a brick wall. But apparently the arrangement worked out okay for Teiresias, and the birds took care of him. It also shows how Athena could calm down and moderate her punishments.

  The one thing she couldn’t stand, however, were guys flirting with her. Which brings us to the story of her and He
phaestus. Okay, deep breath, because things are about to get weird.

  So, Hephaestus was the crippled blacksmith god. More on him later.

  Right now, all you need to know is that ever since he helped Athena get out of Zeus’ forehead, Hephaestus had had a crush on her. This made sense, because they were both into crafts and tools. They were both deep thinkers and enjoyed solving mechanical problems.

  The problem was that Athena hated romance and never even wanted to hold hands with a guy, much less marry one. Even if Hephaestus had been handsome, Athena would have turned him down. But Hephaestus was most definitely ugly: Grade-A Industrial-Strength Ugly with Extra Gross.

  He tried in his own way to flirt with her, like, Hey, baby, want to see my hammer collection? And stuff like that.

  Athena power walked away from him, but Hephaestus limped after her. Athena didn’t want to scream and run, because she wasn’t a helpless mortal girl, or one of those silly “pink princess” goddesses who fainted and fluttered their eyelashes or whatever. She was the goddess of war!

  She just kept moving away from Hephaestus, snapping at him to leave her alone. Finally the poor guy was sweating and panting like crazy, because it wasn’t easy for him to move on his crippled legs. He flung himself at Athena, wrapping his arms around her waist.

  “Please,” he begged. “You’re the perfect woman for me!”

  He buried his face in her skirt and sobbed and sniveled, and some of his godly sweat and snot rubbed off on her bare leg where the skirt was parted, and Athena was like, “Gross!”

  She kicked Hephaestus away and snatched up the nearest piece of cloth she could find—maybe a handkerchief or a napkin or something. She wiped the godly moisture off her leg and tossed the gross piece of cloth off Olympus, where it fluttered slowly down to the earth.

  Then she ran away.

  That should’ve been the end of the story, but something weird happened to that piece of cloth. It contained the essence of both Athena and Hephaestus, and somehow, when it hit the earth, it grew into a mortal baby boy.