. war-chariots,or with an older religion in which the horsewas a sacred animal to her as it was to Poseidon(Paus. i. 30, 4, ii. 4 ; Pind. 01. xiii. 79 ; C. 1071). She was the inventress also, bysome accounts, of the Pyrrhic dance (Plat. b), and, as giver of victory in war, wasworshipped in A07)t) Nikt; (Paus. i. 42, 4). Shewas in fact Ni/C7j onrrepos, the wingless Victory,to distinguish her from the conventional symbolof winged Victory. As protectress of cities shewas called iro\toiixos not only at Athens but inother
. war-chariots,or with an older religion in which the horsewas a sacred animal to her as it was to Poseidon(Paus. i. 30, 4, ii. 4 ; Pind. 01. xiii. 79 ; C. 1071). She was the inventress also, bysome accounts, of the Pyrrhic dance (Plat. b), and, as giver of victory in war, wasworshipped in A07)t) Nikt; (Paus. i. 42, 4). Shewas in fact Ni/C7j onrrepos, the wingless Victory,to distinguish her from the conventional symbolof winged Victory. As protectress of cities shewas called iro\toiixos not only at Athens but inother states (Paus. i. 42, iii. 17): at Athens inthis character she presided over the phratries orclans, and sacrifice was offered to her at theApaturia. In many local legends of the Pelo-ponnesus, connected apparently with the Dorianconquest, she appears as the friend and ally ofHeracles (Paus. v. 17, 11, vi. 19, 12). Theanimals sacred to her were the owl, the serpent,and the cock: for the last Pausanias (vi. 26, 2)gives the rather doubtful reason that the cock. Athene. (Aeglna Marbles.) was a pugnacious bird ; the serpent was prob-ably consecrated to her as representative of anold local religion connected with regards the owl, the most reasonable expla-nation is that at one time she was worshippedas the owl itself in the primitive days of animalworship, and that when Greek art and civili-sation rejected monstrous forms of deities andchose the idealised human form, then the owlbecame merely her sacred bird or her symbolon coins. (Even Homer seems to preserve atrace of this primitive religion when he makesAthene assume the form of a bird: II. vii. 59;Oil. iii. 372, v. 353.) It is impossible to acceptthe idea that Homer when he called AtheneyAavKwiTis pictured her to himself as an owl-faced deity, but there is much probability thatat one period she had that form : it is even ]possible that though Homer (cf. Paus. i. 14, 6)attached the sense of keen-eyed to the word, i
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidclassicaldic, bookyear1894
