According to the Pelasgians, the goddess Athene was born beside Lake Tritonis in Libya, where she was found and nurtured by the three nymphs of Libya, who dress in goat-skins.
1
As a girl she killed her playmate, Pallas, by accident, while they were engaged in friendly combat with spear and shield and, in token of grief, set Pallas’s name before her own. Coming to Greece by way of Crete, she lived first in the city of Athenae by the Boeotian River Triton.
2
1
. Plato identified Athene, patroness of Athens, with the Libyan goddess Neith, who belonged to an epoch when fatherhood was not recognized (see
1.
1
). Neith had a temple at Saïs, where Solon was treated well merely because he was an Athenian (Plato:
Timaeus
5). Virgin-priestesses of Neith engaged annually in armed combat (Herodotus: iv. 180), apparently for the position of High-priestess. Apollodorus’s account (iii. 12.
3
) of the fight between Athene and Pallas is a late patriarchal version: he says that Athene, born of Zeus and brought up by the River-god Triton, accidentally killed her foster-sister Pallas, the River Triton’s daughter, because Zeus interposed his aegis when Pallas was about to strike Athene, and so distracted her attention. The aegis, however, a magical goat-skin bag containing a serpent and protected by a Gorgon mask, was Athene’s long before Zeus claimed to be her father (see
9.
d
). Goat-skin aprons were the habitual costume of Libyan girls, and
Pallas
merely means ‘maiden’, or ‘youth’. Herodotus writes (iv. 189): ‘Athene’s garments and aegis were borrowed by the Greeks
from the Libyan women, who are dressed in exactly the same way, except that their leather garments are fringed with thongs, not serpents.’ Ethiopian girls still wear this costume, which is sometimes ornamented with cowries, a yonic symbol. Herodotus adds here that the loud cries of triumph,
olulu, ololu
, uttered in honour of Athene above (
Iliad
vi. 297–301) were of Libyan origin.
Tritone
means ‘the third queen’: that is, the eldest member of the triad—mother of the maiden who fought Pallas, and of the nymph into which she grew—just as Core-Persephone was Demeter’s daughter (see
24.
3
).
3
. Among other mythological personages named Pallas was the Titan who married the River Styx and fathered on her Zelus (‘zeal’), Cratus (‘strength’), Bia (‘force’), and Nicë (‘victory’) (Hesiod:
Theogony
376 and 383; Pausanias: vii. 26. 5; Apollodorus; 2. 2–4); he was perhaps an allegory of the Pelopian dolphin sacred to the Moon-goddess (see
108.
5
). Homer calls another Pallas ‘the father of the moon’ (
Homeric Hymn to Hermes
100). A third begot the fifty Pallantids, Theseus’s enemies (see
97.
g
and
99.
a
), who seem to have been originally fighting priestesses of Athene. A fourth was described as Athene’s father (see
9.
a
).
