The Birth of Athena

Metis, a Titaness whose name means cunning wisdom, was Zeus's first wife. Hesiod records that Gaia and Ouranos warned Zeus that Metis was destined to bear two children: first a daughter equal to her father in strength and wisdom, then a son who would grow up to be king of gods and men in his place. To stop the second birth from ever happening, Zeus tricked Metis with flattering words and swallowed her whole while she was already pregnant with the daughter. Hesiod presents this as calculated self-preservation rather than appetite or rage: Zeus wanted Metis inside him permanently, so she could counsel him from within on good and evil, and so that no rival to his throne could ever be born. When the child came to term, Zeus was seized by a splitting pain in his head. Pindar's account has Hephaestus swing a bronze axe and cleave the skull open; other tellings, including the one Apollodorus preserves, give the blow to Prometheus instead. Athena leapt out fully grown, in full armor, and gave a war cry so loud that Ouranos and the sea trembled at it. Pindar says Helios, the sun, halted his chariot in the sky until the goddess had set down the arms she carried in front of Zeus. Because she came from her father alone, with no mother to raise her, later Athenians called her Parthenos, the virgin, and traced her fierce loyalty to Zeus and to reasoned strength over blind force to the manner of her birth. The Parthenon on the Athenian acropolis takes its name from that epithet.