The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes

By Nicole Loraux, Caroline Levine and Froma I. Zeitlin

According to one myth, the first Athenian citizen was born from the earth after the sperm of a rejected lover, the god Hephaistos, dripped off the virgin goddess Athena's leg and onto fertile soil. Henceforth Athenian citizens could claim to be truly indigenous to their city and to have divine origins that bypassed maternity. In these essays, the renowned French Hellenist Nicole Loraux examines the implication of this and other Greek origin myths as she explores how Athenians in the fifth century forged and maintained a collective identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691236834

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The Children of Athena

Nicole Loraux

The Children of Athena

ATHENIAN IDEAS ABOUT CITIZENSHIP

AND THE DIVISION BETWEEN THE SEXES

Translated by Caroline Levine

Foreword by Froma I. Zeitlin

Princeton University Press

Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press

Translated from Nicole Loraux, Les enfants d'Athéna: Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la division des sexes.

Copyright © 1984

Editions La Découverte, Paris

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Loraux, Nicole.

[Enfants d'Athéna. English]

The children of Athena : Athenian ideas about citizenship and the division between the sexes / Nicole Loraux; translated by Caroline Levine ; foreword by Froma I. Zeitlin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-03272-6

ISBN 0-691-03762-0 (pb.)

1. Sex role—Greece. 2. Women—Greece. 3. Greece—Civilization— To 146 B.C. 4. Athens (Greece)—Social conditions. I. Title.

HQ1075.5. G8L6713 1993

305.3'0938'5—dc20 92-39325

eISBN: 978-0-691-23683-4

R0

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii

Foreword by Froma I. Zeitlin xi

INTRODUCTION

Autochthony and the Athenian Imaginary 3

Fragments of a Lexicon for the Acropolis 23

I. ATHENIANS AND WOMEN

1. Autochthony: An Athenian Topic 37

2. On the Race of Women and Some of Its Tribes: Hesiod and Semonides 72

3. The Athenian Name: Imaginary Structures of Lineage in Athens 111

II. REALITY, FICTION: WOMEN OF ATHENS

4. The Comic Acropolis: Aristophanes, Lysistrata 147

5. Autochthonous Kreousa: Euripides, Ion 184

EPILOGUE: ONCE AGAIN, THE WOMAN, THE VIRGIN, FEMALE ATHENIANS 237

BIBLIOGRAPHY 251

INDEX 267

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

From the Acropolis to the Kerameikos

Athens (western part), based on Travlos (1971) 71.

Lysistrata and the Topography of the Acropolis

The places mentioned in the Lysistrata shown on a map of the Acropolis, borrowed from Travlos (1971) 71.

Ion and the Topography of the Acropolis

The tragic places of the Acropolis (from J. Travlos [1971] 71). A comparison of the maps reveals the similarity between these two visions of the Acropolis (all the sites in the Ion are mentioned or suggested in the Lysistrata), and the much more exhaustive nature of the comic topography.

PLATES (following p. 26)

PLATE 1: Red-figure lekythos: Paris, Louvre (CA 681); circa 450 (drawing by F. Lissarrague). Bibliography: ARV² 263, B 12, and Kron (1976) 74 and 254.

Athena and Erichthonios: the goddess raises up a child, and we have no trouble recognizing it as the autochthonous hero, despite the absence of Ge (and also of Hephaistos and Kekrops). In fact, this depiction is an original representation of the scene, in which the isolation of the two protagonists emphasizes what matters most in the birth of Erichthonios: Athena's recognition of the child—and the child's recognition of Athena—the central event in all representations of the autochthon's birth. Cf. Kron (1976) 74, who sees here an abridged version of the birth scene, and cf. below, Autochthony: An Athenian Topic, 61-62. The reduction to just this moment of the story is what interests us here, despite its somewhat crude technique. Behind Athena is an object covered with a veil. Is it an altar? A basket used in the mysteries?

PLATE 2: Red-figure volute krater: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (525); circa 450. Side A (Ashmolean Museum photograph). Bibliography: ARV² 1562, 4, and Paralipomena 506.

The birth of Pandora: on the right, Pandora appears in the anodos position, before Epimetheus, who approaches the woman with a mallet in hand, as an Eros figure flies over her head. On the left, Hermes is leaving Zeus, from whom he has received his orders. All the figures are identified by inscriptions that give their names. Commentary: see Bérard (1974) 161-64, and below, On the Race of Women, 89 and n. 74, as well as The Athenian Name, 115 and n. 17. It may be important to point out that side B represents the (amorous) pursuit of a young woman by an ephebe who is armed with a two-headed spear: could this be yet another scene of passage?

PLATE 3: Red-figure hydria by the Oinanthe Painter: London, British Museum (E 182); from the second quarter of the fifth century (British Museum photograph). Bibliography: ARV² 580, 2, and Paralipomena 392.

The birth of Erichthonios: in the center, Erichthonios and his swaddling clothes. Ge holds out the infant, while Athena extends the piece of cloth in which she will wrap him; behind the armed goddess, a Nike figure is bringing a swaddling band. On the left is Zeus, with a young woman who watches the scene over his shoulder. Her identity is much disputed (but she is certainly not the fair Oinanthe—Oinanthe kale—honored by an erotic inscription that is above the head of this inquisitive observer). Commentary: see Simon (1959) 51 (on the cloth), Kron (1976) 56-58 (on the quasi-Olympian nature of the event), and below, The Athenian Name, 135-36 and n. 115-19 (on Erichthonios and Athena, her father's daughter).

PLATE 4: Red-figure stamnos: Munich, Antikensammlungen (2413); from the second quarter of the fifth century. Side A (Studio Koppermann photograph). Side B represents Zeus and a Nike. Bibliography: ARV² 495, 1, and Paralipomena 380.

Flanked by two Eros figures, the birth of Erichthonios is enacted between Ge in the center, holding the child out to the goddess Athena, on the right, who is dressed in apparel hardly suited to a warrior, and Hephaistos, on the left, leaning on his staff. Commentary: see Kron (1976) 57-58, 65, and below, The Athenian Name, 125 and n. 62 (on the couple Athena and Hephaistos).

PLATE 5: Red-figure cup by the Kodros Painter: Berlin, Antikenmuseum (2537); circa 440 (photograph by Jutta Tietz Glagow). Sides A and B: the birth of Erichthonios. Bibliography: ARV² 1268, 2.

Side A, from left to right: Kekrops, Ge, Erichthonios, Athena, Hephaistos, Herse (one of the Kekropides); side B, from left to right: Aglauros, Erechtheus, Pandrosos, Aegeus, Pallas. All the figures are identifiable by inscriptions bearing their names. There is a great deal of commentary: see especially Brommer (1957), and see below, Autochthony: An Athenian Topic, 41, n. 20 (the atemporal time of the first Athenian's birth), and 61-63 (as a paradigmatic representation of the scene).

PLATE 6: Black-figure neck amphora: Boulogne-sur-Mer, Musée municipal (572); from the second half of the sixth century. Side A (Studio Devos photograph). Bibliography: Vasenlisten 330, A 2.

Peleus giving the child Achilles to the centaur Chiron. Commentary: see below, Autochthony: An Athenian Topic, 63 and n. 139 (the gesture of the child, reaching his arms out to his father).

PLATE 7: Red-figure lekythos by the Hyllos Painter: Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (322); circa 450 (Ashmolean Museum photograph). Bibliography: ARV² 627, 1.

Scene of the parting (or reunion?) of Deianeira and Herakles. The child Hyllos, held by his mother, twists himself away from her to stretch his arms toward Herakles. The identity of the mother and child is substantiated by a comparison with pelike G 229 in the Louvre, which gives names for all the figures. In fact, this image should be placed in the context of a whole series of representations of Herakles, Deianeira, and Hyllos: aside from the Louvre pelike, there is a krater with columns from Padua, published in van Buren (1960) 360, plate 104, no. 5, as well as a bell-krater in Munich (2398). All of these, despite their stylistic differences, assign the same gesture to Hyllos.

PLATE 8: Black-figure amphora by the Antimenes Painter. London, British Museum (B 244); from the last quarter of the sixth century. Side A (British Museum photograph). Bibliography: ABV 271, 74.

The birth of Athena: Zeus is in the center, with scepter in hand, while Athena, fully armed, springs from his head; on either side of Zeus is an Eileithyia. On the right, Hephaistos, with his axe, looks back at Zeus. On the left is Hermes, god of passages. On the birth of Athena as a confinement, see below, The Athenian Name, 132 and n. 96-97.

PLATE 9: Black-figure cup by the potter Phrynos (signed). London, British Museum (B 424); circa 540. Side B (British Museum photograph). Bibliography: ABV 168 M.

The birth of Athena: Zeus is there, with thunderbolt in hand, Athena springing from his head. Hephaistos, with his axe, turns back toward them as he moves away. This scene is reduced to its necessary protagonists: it is a motherless, metallurgical birth (see below, The Athenian Name, 131 and n. 93).

PLATE 10: Black-figure hydria by the Antimenes Painter: Würzburg, Martin von Wagner-Museum (309); circa 500 (Martin von Wagner-Museum des Universitäts photograph). Bibliography: ABV 268, 28.

Principal image: the birth of Athena (or, at least, after the birth of Athena); this reading is considered dubious by Brommer (1961). Athena stands before Zeus; on the right are an Eileithyia and Hermes, on the left, a goddess and Poseidon. The assembly of gods is focused on the central scene of Athena dressed in the aegis, brandishing her spear and helmet above Zeus, who is seated, holding a kind of Janus bifrons (according to Langlotz—but it is tempting to speculate about this strange figure: if the right profile, which mirrors Zeus's profile, is obviously masculine, the left profile, with a hairstyle much like those of the three goddesses and a more delicate arm, might belong to a woman; could this be an allusion to the double status of Zeus as both father and mother? See below, The Athenian Name, 132 and n. 95).

FOREWORD

THE FIELD of gender studies has had a relatively brief life in the history of scholarship. Evolving rapidly over the last fifteen years or so with an astonishing proliferation of research and production, this area of inquiry has gained not only a solid respectability but also a sense of its own history in reflecting on those pioneering studies that mapped out the territory and stand now as landmarks for those who follow on their own journeys of discovery. One such work is Nicole Loraux's stimulating analysis of the intertwining of myth and politics in fifth-century classical Athens, which was originally published in France more than a decade ago and has recently appeared there again in a second edition. Its insistence on bringing to the foreground the significance of the division between the sexes in Athenian ideas about citizenship provided a model for integrating the study of the feminine directly into the heart of a given society, while its resistance to facile generalizations and static oppositions between male and female pointed the way to a far more supple and subtle understanding of cultural dynamics. The translation of this work into English after all these years is not, however, just a sign of the status it has achieved as a classic in its own right, but was the result of circumstances that delayed a project I had hoped to see achieved long ago.

By now, the work of Nicole Loraux should need no introduction. Following on the heels of her first book, The Invention of Athens (L' invention d'Athènes), which treated the political discourse of Athens in a close study of the epitaphios, or funeral oration, pronounced in the yearly ceremonies honoring the Athenian war dead, The Children of Athena (Les enfants d'Athéna) won instant recognition for its remarkable originality in concept and design and for its genuine contribution to the lively debates about the substance and texture of Athenian political life and thought in its most creative period. These two volumes were only the beginning of what has proved to be a most felicitous match between the historian and her chosen field of study. In addition to a number of essays, several books have followed that continue to explore the theme of women in Athenian literature, religion, politics, and history, one of which (Les expériences de Tirésias) will soon be published in English, also by Princeton University Press.

While her thought has evolved over the years and her interests have diversified, all her work is marked by a certain inimitable voice that was evident from the beginning. Like the goddess Athena, who is the focal point of the present volume, Loraux seems to have arrived on the intellectual scene already fully mature in her style and method, and like that stalwart figure on the Acropolis who balances helmet and shield with an exemplary agility of mind, Loraux has shown herself a formidable critic who now securely occupies a premier position in the world of classical scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. The publication of The Children of Athena, then, is no act of feminist piety, nor is it merely an acknowledgment of past achievement. The work remains an adventure in reading that proves as fresh and as rich in insights as when it was written.

I speak of an adventure because the essays in this volume are designed as a journey of exploration that takes many winding routes as it makes the rounds of Athens, stopping longest at the Acropolis, the vital religious core of the city, but also including the public Agora, the stage of the theater of Dionysos, the potter's workshop, and the official cemetery, the Kerameikos. Its purpose is to enter into what Loraux calls the land of autochthony, a symbolic space of the civic imagination where the Athenian quest for self-identity takes numerous forms and where the myths of the city's origins are played and replayed in different combinations and kinds of discourse.

Myths of origins occupy a privileged place in the storehouse of collective lore. They are invested with a power that, as Mircea Eliade has shown, endows them with the inalienable prestige of beginnings, a point of departure that returns to the first moments of creation to inaugurate and to authorize a version of cultural history that justifies retrospectively the identity of a given society, and, more importantly, expresses what its members want or imagine themselves to be. That power is also profoundly psychological, since the question Where did I come from? inevitably draws on every child's fascination with issues of sex, parentage, and the process of generation. Thus every formal inquiry into origins necessarily confronts the question of woman. More accurately, the inquiry confronts males (and masculine society) with what they know but would often like to circumvent or even deny—namely, that man is from woman born. Hence the role of myth in exploring imaginary solutions that can recompose the biological facts of human sex and birth into other fantastic patterns and can redefine the roles of mother and father while constructing the rules of kinship as well as of citizen status.

This is the case, above all, in Greek thought, which, in the interests of masculine self-definition, grapples with these questions again and again through a wide array of ingenious reproductive strategies, starting with the creation of the gods and the establishment of a permanent world order, as in Hesiod's Theogony. Its gods, first of all, are endowed with gender and generative capacity. As sexed beings, they conform to the laws of human procreation but are also free to experiment with a range of other possibilities not available in the human sphere: parthenogenesis, or creation by a female entity alone; a male's imitation of pregnancy through swallowing his young; or, in a direct reversal, a male giving birth to a female—as in the case of Zeus and Athena, not from his loins but from his head.

Additionally, there is no single standard myth of man's creation. Yet in that same Hesiodic text we find the invention of woman, who is added as a supplement to an already existing world of men, and who, as an artisanal masterpiece molded by the gods out of clay, is far removed from the feminine as a natural category. Pandora, as Loraux's analysis demonstrates, is not represented as the mother of humankind (as is Eve in the book of Genesis), but rather is the first of the race of women from whom all other members of her species are descended. Yet why should her entry into the world forever compromise man's estate, if not because of her sexual allure and his need to produce a son to inherit his goods when he is gone? Loraux is correct in maintaining that this first woman has little to do with the canonical image of the good wife who bears children for her husband. Thus the text has to suppress as far as possible any direct mention of men's involvement either in sexual contact with women or as fathers. In separating woman from man and in insisting on her alien presence in his house, the story in the Theogony already presents a dilemma. It can only gloss over the mixture that is sexual union and cannot directly state that human beings of both sexes inevitably are born from two and not from one. Paradoxically, it is the gods, in their endless series of begettings in the standard way, who provide the norm that men would prefer to overlook.

The canonical image of the good wife in her reproductive role is founded on an analogy between the fertility of woman and the fecundity of the earth. Gaia is opposed to Pandora as goddess to woman, as first principle to secondary formation. But in positing the primordial role of Gaia in the initial processes of creation, the Theogony already founds the idea of autochthony by which men might be born not of mothers but from the earth itself. A popular myth of origins in a number of other Greek cities, autochthony lies at the heart of Athenian identity, but in an unusually complex form. Unlike the famous myth of the Spartoi (or Sown Men) at Thebes, home of Kadmos, Oedipus, and even Dionysos (with a remarkable birth story of his own), the Athenian version does not tell the story of a single event that engendered fully armed warriors to fight one another, leaving a few survivors to found what some have claimed was a military class. Instead, the Athenian myth recounts a gradual evolution from autochthonous beginnings to the founding of the city, with many stages and several false starts. The result, difficult to unravel at times, is a story unparalleled in its subtle experiments with forms of engendering, parentage, and nurture. Substitutes, surrogates, and fictive arrangements abound. In following Loraux's equally subtle analyses, the reader will explore the vagaries of these myths in religious and secular terms, in texts and in images. The reader also, it is hoped, will come to understand the reasons for the central position of these myths in this city of men that would like to exclude women from its origins (and its citizenship) but is forever enmeshed in questions of the feminine by its own name and origins.

Athens, after all, is the city that belongs to the goddess Athena. Dedicated to eternal virginity, she mates neither with gods nor with mortals. Her myth of origins sets her apart: she and she alone has no mother, having been born from the head of Zeus, whose appropriation of the female part in childbearing put an end to the replacement of father by son in the world of the gods and consolidated the permanence of Zeus's Olympian rule over mortals and immortals alike. In Athens, the myth of autochthony intersects with the founding role of the goddess. Yet, exempted from the physiological acts of sex and procreation, she cannot directly enhance the city's prestige through another popular strategy in Greek myth by which the offspring of a god and a mortal confers divine sanction on a city's beginnings. Autochthony on the one hand, divine origins on the other: Athenian myth is as clever as the goddess herself in overcoming these logical barriers through a series of obstetrical adventures. Athens can come to have it all—the child Erichthonios is born both from the earth and, through an ingenious fiction, from some approximation of sexual relations that links its children, the Athenians, to a divine ancestry. In either case, the human mother is bypassed in favor of a transcendent maternity, represented both by Earth (Gaia) and by Athena. Once shored up by these assurances, men can take wives. Reality returns.

The myths are only half the story Loraux narrates on the way. The aim of her project is to read these myths in their civic context, in the overlappings of past and present and in the intersections between myth and history, myth and political thought, myth and law, as these relations are articulated through choruses of different voices. The birth of Erichthonios as depicted on the Acropolis is countered by the birth, not of the first Athenian woman, but of the first woman, Pandora; this leads Loraux to explore the implications of a race of women in Hesiod's Theogony and Semonides' tribes of women in his invective against the female sex. Here, in these two influential renderings of the division between the sexes that belong to all of Greece in its archaic period, the unequivocally negative note is sounded, with only a nod, in Semonides' text, to the impossible ideal of the virtuous wife.

But if the figure of Pandora is chiseled in stone at the base of Pheidias's chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos on the Acropolis, the place to escape such institutional orthodoxy is an imaginary version of Athens's hallowed space that assumes a virtual reality only on the stage of the theater of Dionysos—at the foot of the Acropolis, with its back turned toward the sacred hill. The world of the stage revels in contradictions and reversals, in its freedom to play, at a safe distance, with social categories and cherished ideals. This is true for the tragic genre, whose playwrights challenge the official discourses of the moment, placing them in question at the very moment that they are reworking the myths, and also, in another vein, for the privileged sphere of comedy, which has the license to turn everything upside down in the name of a festive spirit that indulges in ribald fantasies. Two plays in particular (one comic, one tragic) show that the Athenian imaginary in the theater can close the gap that elsewhere, in official ideology, separates the goddess of the city from the women of Athens.

Accordingly, in the first instance, Loraux takes up that most famous of Aristophanes' farces, the Lysistrata, in which the married women of Athens (and indeed, of other Greek cities) storm the Acropolis and capture the religious and political center of Athenian life, winning success in their battle against the men (for their own and the men's eventual benefit). They can do so, as Loraux shrewdly observes, by returning to their previous status as virgins in the service of the goddess Athena. At the same time, through their sex strike, the women must bring Aphrodite over to their side in what turns out to be a happy conjunction of opposites. As for tragedy, Loraux returns at the end to the myths of autochthony and the birth of Erichthonios in Euripides' brilliant play, the Ion, which, although set at Delphi, is haunted everywhere by the Acropolis in Athens. Rejecting the typical readings of this play, which, with its foundlings and birth tokens, had been deemed a precursor of New Comedy, Loraux restores a depth of political discourse about citizenship that clarifies a remarkable psychological drama of grieving mothers and lost children. This virtuoso exhibition of close and nuanced reading is a fitting conclusion to the journey Loraux undertook at the beginning of the volume, wending her way through the maze of extensive evidence on her chosen themes and keeping the thread of the argument always firmly in hand.

These brief preliminary remarks from one who has many times followed the track of Loraux's thought with profit and pleasure cannot, of course, substitute for the reader's own experience in coming to know in intimate detail about those children of Athena and the stories they tell or represent about themselves. While several choruses of women in Euripidean plays are made to lament their own muted, unsung history and to issue a call to redress the inequity by celebrating the deeds of women, there is no gainsaying that we hear their voices only as filtered through the minds of men. Yet perhaps this is precisely the point in a study such as The Children of Athena, which, with rigorous method and unsparing honesty, delves deeply into the sources of men's imaginings. This preface can only hold out the promise of the rewards to be found in this volume: insights not only into the serious significance of founding myths of origin for the conduct of a political program, but also into the indispensability of Greek myth in founding (and sustaining) a variety of Western ideas about gender in which woman is so often the observed and man the observer—he the dreamer and she the dream.

There remains only the last and gratifying task of thanking the translator of this complex and often recalcitrant text. Il faut toujours nuancer might be Loraux's motto, and the elaborate quality of her French style more than matches the fine detailing of her thought. To turn this literary structure into readable English required an arduous journey of its own, with numerous experiments in crossing the linguistic boundaries between two vastly different idioms. Caroline Levine undertook this demanding project with remarkable skill, industry, and a patience that lasted through our later collaboration in bringing the text into its final form. The credit belongs to her for the integrity of her procedures and the attunement of her ear and eye to graceful and lively expression, aiming, above all, to maintain a clarity of diction throughout. I salute her accomplishment—and her forbearance.

Froma I. Zeitlin

August 1992

INTRODUCTION

Autochthony and the Athenian Imaginary

IF WE WERE TO DESCRIBE the construction of this book as a simple journey, we would be inventing a fictional narrative and imposing it on the past, disguising the wanderings of a presumptuous traveler who has, in fact, lost her way more than once in the heart of a space that she imagined she had marked very distinctly. There is no point in describing this constant process of trial and error. Instead, for those who would like this introduction to present an orderly voyage into the land of autochthony, I propose a shortcut—virtually a straight line to cut through the winding paths that we will linger on later.

The origins of this book are found in one project and in two places: the project was a reading of myths in their civic framework, and the first of the places was institutional, a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes devoted to an examination of Athenian myths of autochthony. More important is the second place, the space that holds the Acropolis in Athens—both the object and the rooted foundation of this study, where we can still wander, finding on the whole that Pausanias is more useful to us than a standard guidebook. This Athenian space will be discussed throughout the book: three of the chapters furnish a map of the Acropolis and two others stop there briefly to incorporate Athena, Erichthonios, and Pandora. As for the seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, let me say simply that without such a place for criticism and the exchange of ideas, this work would never have been brought to completion. Finally, we encounter the project of reading myths in their civic context, an enterprise I would like to explain at greater length. Reading myths in such a way involves, of course, drawing on our capital of historical knowledge, and, more importantly, it involves giving myth the place it deserves in the field of the historian of ancient Greece.

The analysis of myths, as Lévi-Strauss recently noted, presupposes readings, rereadings, and incubations;¹ between this process and the deliberately instructive—and therefore serious—practice of the historians, there is something like a dialogue of the deaf, if not a misunderstanding carefully nurtured by both sides. How can readers of myths resist getting caught up in their subject? And how can historians give up their need for objectivity when faced with the truth of fact?

In French universities, it is true, the subject of ancient Greece suffers from an imperious set of restrictions whereby myth scarcely has a place, at least not among historians, infatuated as they are with reality. Following the example of their first and most illustrious predecessor, their skepticism about myth is equal only to Thucydides' great mistrust of the legendary, the mythōdes.² They will claim it is perfectly suitable (for others) to study myth, as long as this pastime serves a purpose. And they recommend the educational method of comparison (as between Eve and Pandora, or between the myth of Erichthonios and the myth of Prajapati),³ with the result that it is impossible to acknowledge the originality of the Greeks except after having cited the sacrosanct list of elements borrowed from the East and recurrent patterns in Indo-European ideology.

Instead, without leaving Greek terrain, we could use myth to illuminate an ancient past: a doubly helpful operation, we might suppose, that both disengages myth from its position as fable and recognizes it as a witness to reality—perhaps a hidden, disfigured reality, but one that functions nonetheless as a basis of truth for the fable. With this approach, the Athenian myth of autochthony is seen as nothing more than proof that the Athenians did not experience the catastrophic migrations attributed to the Greek Middle Ages;⁴ Athena, Hephaistos, and Ge are not worth discussing—they are only irritating additions to the fable, mere mythological adornments. Of course, a few historians of Greece have noticed from time to time that myth played an integral part in the life of Greek cities. These scholars ask less conventional questions about mythic discourse; as a result, when they study the development of a national tradition and are responsive to questions about myth, they find themselves convinced that history—that is, the history of each city—owed much more to the category of mythōdes than to Thucydides' rational scheme.⁵ Yet this kind of discourse is not, alas, the major scholarly trend. As a general rule, historians of ancient Greece prefer to exclude myth from the city (or to leave it to those who enjoy a good story, which is essentially the same in the end), so they can devote themselves undisturbed to the more prudent historiographical method that cherishes the study of institutions.

Similarly, readers of myths have some reason to be suspicious of history, since they believe that the historical method is limited to a treatment of myth that cannot be anything other than a reductive one. Yet it comes as no surprise that when faced with the champions of realia, these readers are primarily preoccupied with reversing the arguments of the other side. They respond first by asking whether the city in fact excluded myth. If so, myth stands aloof from the obtrusive surrounding context of politics, and the reality of the city yields to a coherent model of the polis, but a model that is static like an abstract idealization. Proponents of myth also ask whether historians have in fact looked behind myth to find concealed events and hidden realities. These readers of myths then reject the quest for reality and declare the sovereign independence of mythic discourse.⁶

Partisans of realia, friends of discourse: this version of the everrecurrent gigantomachia that pits history against formal structure is not necessarily a fatal opposition. The historians of ancient Greece will have to accommodate new objects someday, as other historians before them have done, and claim this new subject matter as their own.⁷ History simply cannot remain indifferent to the question of the autonomy of discourse. And there is no myth that can claim complete independence from reality, whether it is equipped with realistic content or defined more broadly as taking its place within the whole collection of shared representations in the city. In fact, the boundary between mythic discourse and these representations is not an easy one to trace, unless we find a place for representations within every discourse—which the readers of myths do not intend to do—and unless we isolate pure mythoi, keeping them separate from the temporal frame of the city as well as from all the literary forms that borrow their language from myth.

In short, the task of the historian who has undertaken the project of reading myths in their civic framework is to ask whether myth is not always already there within the city, woven into the multitude of its manifestations and into its web of discourses—enveloped to such an extent that neither the historian nor the reader of myths should be able to face this complexity and still come down on the side of either selection or exclusion. This task entails gambling in favor of myth precisely at the point where it seems to fade away, appearing to retreat into the texture of literary forms or into civic institutions of language such as comedy, tragedy, and the funeral oration. And it means gambling on the reverse, too: to imagine that the city itself is speaking when myth is telling those implausible stories, which are hardly political—such as the pursuit of Athena by Hephaistos and the consequences it brings. In adopting an Athenian myth, the task also entails the deliberate choice of a presumably orthodox subject, too orthodox, perhaps, for us to be able to expect from the outset any promise of its displacement.

The choice is autochthony, the founding myth of Athenian citizenship, and behind this myth, the strict relationship between Athens and Athena, between the ideal city and its civic goddess. In fact, although historians are always reticent when it comes to granting myth even a modest importance in a discussion of the polis, there are no historians of ancient Greece who would not appease their consciences by including an account of the cults of the Acropolis.⁸ But those historians would then be taking into account only the rites of religious life, and not the discourse used by the city about and around the Acropolis. There is thus a choice between ritual acts and mythic discourse that echoes our earlier choice between reality and the imaginary. Here, however, the question is the imaginary, one that is neither autonomous, since it is entangled in reality, nor subordinate to the practical aims of a politics of contingency. Nor is it ultimately orthodox, unless we concede that orthodoxy is speaking in a very peculiar way, and at times in even more than one peculiar way. But we should not get ahead of ourselves. It is time to force this ambitious project to confront the accumulated body of research and the questions that presently substitute for results.

At the root of this investigation, then, is a desire to set myth in the context of the city. Our choice falls on Athens, which, in Greek studies, is the city that represents the true homeland of the national concept of identity. But we should not be misled: Athens is the obvious choice in any attempt to draw up a precise list of variations on a myth, and to take into account the varying positions and sites where myth is exposed. Such a choice is essential, also, to the task of identifying the effects of myth on representations produced by the city. Despite the numerous gaps, information about Athens is less disjointed than the material available for any other city, and this set of resources certainly expedites the investigation, reducing the degree of personal fantasy that readers of myth inevitably project onto their subject. Finally and most importantly, if Athens indeed declared the prominence of civic politics more often than any other city,⁹ it is important to look more closely at the story that the Athenians claim, in mythic terms, describes the origin of their polis.

In approaching the question of origins, I had for my use from the beginning two kinds of statements that are neatly juxtaposed in Euripides' Ion, as if to oblige the student of autochthony: The autochthonous people of celebrated Athens / Erichthonios, son of the earth.¹⁰ I found the first expression while following the trail of epitaphioi logoi (funeral orations), in which the official orators collectively ascribe to all Athenians an autochthonous emergence from the soil of the city, and this is regarded as a source of nobility itself. The second version borrows the language of representation used in Attic pottery—where Erichthonios is depicted as being born on the Acropolis, and passes from the arms of Ge into those of Athena, under the pensive or dispassionate eyes of Hephaistos and