Please tell me beautiful and wonderful things about Athena?

winebrightruby:

(I can go on about Athena ad nauseam; you may have made a huge mistake.)

She is born in a thunder of arms and violence, and she emerges cool-eyed and self-possessed, everyone around her disheveled, covered in sweat and blood. Amid the furor, she gleams, her beauty like the edge of a sword.

She is proud, oh she is proud – when Hephaistos pursues her, exciting himself so much in the pursuit that he spills his seed on her leg, she wipes it off in disgust and flings it away. She creates the flute, then throws it away forever because puffing her cheeks out to play it makes her look foolish. Her pride is an immaculate blade – as she stoops to pat the earth over the first olive pit, nurturing the pale green shoot out of the dirt. She walks men through hitching and guiding the first plow, through mapping a course across the sea, through pressing olives for their precious oil, through bridling a horse. When she is challenged, nothing can bend her. But when she is honored and heard, there is no better friend to man.

Nor to woman, as she works the loom alongside mothers and young brides, talking as women will while their hands work by rote. Goddess of spinning and weaving, of careful accounting and prudent savings for the future, plenty of people will call her sexless or cold-hearted or even a woman-hater, but they overlook her incredible self-possession, her utmost confidence in herself that permits her to move from battlefield to gynaeceum. No one can tell her she doesn’t belong; she is Nike, ever-victorious, and what she sets her hand to turns inevitably to excellence. 

She is the Owl-Eyed Liar, the one who lays plans upon plans, the goddess who brushed the merest edge of her capacity for guile across Odysseus’ life. And yet when it comes to those she favors, there is no fiercer champion: she is Perseus’ winged boots and mirror-bright shield; she is Bellerophon’s golden bridle on Pegasus; she is the Gorgon’s blood scorching Asklepios’ throat; she is Telemachus’ guide and Odysseus’ homesick spirit and Penelope’s steadfast wily heart. She is Koroneis and Nyktimene’s new wings, a refuge from assault, and Eurynome’s happy marriage bed. 

When Ajax violated her temple to rape Kassandra, she hounded him and the entire Greek army across the sea and made common cause with Poseidon to see him drowned beneath the waves, and then it took a thousand years of human sacrifice to assuage his guilt and her rage.

When I have worked myself to the bone and cannot sleep for the pounding incessant stress inside my mind endlessly reciting all the tasks yet to be done, she says “It is enough” and “You can accomplish nothing by destroying yourself” and “Stop being an idiot”. When I dedicate a week and four soft spools of embroidery thread to her and sit in quiet meditation to braid a seven foot long cord, her hum of pride raises my own chin.