At Zeus service

Hermes in the representations of the birth of Athena

Bibliographic Data

ID19476277
AuthorsCarmine Pisano (16, Viale J.F. Kennedy Aversa Italy, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume24
Issue1
Pages263-280
Publication date2023-06-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArchiv für Religionsgeschichte (BOOK_SERIES)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1436-3038 • E-ISSN: 1868-8888
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/arege-2022-0012
OpenAlexW4379471849
LanguageEN
References cited13

At Zeus service: Hermes in the representations of the birth of Athena 1 From narrative to imagesIn the Theogony Hesiod narrates that Zeus, having become king of the cosmos, consolidates his power through a series of marriages.First, the son of Cronus marries Metis ("the cunning intelligence") and, when she is pregnant with Athena, he swallows her on the advice of Gaia and Uranus, in order to acquire the qualities necessary for a stable and eternal government and to avoid the goddess later generating a son stronger than his father.Metis' pregnancy is brought to term by Zeus himself, who delivers Athena from his head.On this unusual birth, Apollodorus states that Zeus bore his daughter after Hephaestus hit him on the head with an axe.This detail, absent in Hesiod, is certainly ancient since it is found in most of the iconographic representations of the birth of Athena.The corpus is well known and has been analyzed from different perspectives.The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the role of Hermes in these scenes starting from a rather exceptional circumstance: the long inscription that runs vertically, from top to bottom, along the body of the god on the Kyllenios Painter amphora found in Cerveteri, in Etruria, and today preserved in Berlin (fig.1).This black-figure amphora, made in Athens between 570 and 560 BC, presents an articulated representation of the birth of Athena in the presence of various deities, all named through inscriptions.The case of Hermes is particular.He has an inscription that is not limited to the theonym alone, but which consists of a sort of sentence, a real self-presentation, which the son of Maia pronounces before Hephaestus: h ("I am Hermes Kyllenios").The length of the inscription and its particular discursive nature have caused some amazement among art historians, who defined the artist as the Kyllenios Painter by virtue of the epithet that Hermes attributes to Hes., Th. 886 -900. Hes., Th. [924][925][926]. The version of Athena's birth which includes the intervention of Hephaestus assumes that the god was born before the goddess.In Hesiod, however, the order of birth is reversed: Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head and Hera, angry, generates Hephaestus "without joining in love with anyone" (Hes., Th. 924-929).Also in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (305 -355), the birth of Athena by Zeus arouses the anger of Hera, who, in this case, takes her revenge by generating Typhon

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