αἱ φροντίδες τῆς Ἀθηνᾶς

The Thoughts Of Athena

Sing, O Muses, you who witness both song and silence.
You who thread gold through grief and bind the memories the victors would erase.
Calliope, lend voice to justice not yet fulfilled.
Clio, bring forth memory that will not decay.
Erato, soothe the rage that sings beneath every word unsaid.
Mnemosyne, let the past rise—not to haunt, but to heal.

Let us tell now the story not of Olympus triumphant,
but of a goddess besieged by guilt, a monster misunderstood, a weaver cursed, and a hero undone.
Let us tell the story of those who built the world not with glory,
but with the weight of what was never forgiven.

Long ago, when Olympus still ruled with an unquestioned hand, there was the goddess named Pallas Athena—daughter of Zeus — known to the Latins as Optimus Maximus, born not from womb but from mind, clothed already in armor, already bearing a spear.

Athena, Minerva in another tongue, what can I tell you? She was order incarnate. She upheld cities. She founded civilizations. To some, she offered strategy; to others, virtue; to rulers, counsel; and to warriors, cause. And yet, for all her wisdom, Athena had no real mother, no soft hand to temper her grip. She feared chaos, abhorred vulnerability, and prized structure above all else. Her temples gleamed. Her laws were sharp. Her face, serene and severe, was carved into marble across polis from the one which bears her name to eternity and all its little metropolitani.

You shall see however if you descend down with me reader, how one day, far below the gleaming towers of Athena the law-giver and order-bringer, a girl named Arachne emerged—not with sword, nor crown, but with loom and thread. A commoner. A nobody in the eyes of the aristocracy. But her tapestries told stories no poet dared recite…

Arachne….she wove the transgressions of the gods with a precision that burned. The lust of Zeus, the fury of Hera, the deceptions of Apollo. She wove not in rebellion, but in truth. Her art was unflinching. She made the “deathless Gods” appear very mortal, long before the coming of Socrates. Even those who could not write, if they could at least see, saw all.

Word of her reached Athena, Athena the vengeance-bringer who faced down any who dared disturb her family, Athena who descended in glory, yet for now veiled not in the thunderclaps of her father but in restraint. She challenged the girl.

“Match my weaving” spoke the goddess, and see if you are truly divine.

Arachne did.

And won.

The tapestry she revealed was flawless—and fatal. It revealed once more what Athena could simply not allow to be seen: that the Olympians, for all their vaulted fame, were often cruel. That their justice was sometimes just protection for their own vanity. Athena did not strike her down immediately in the wroth of wrath, as other gods might have. Instead, she did something worse.

She tore the tapestry. She cursed the girl. She transformed her into a spider, condemned to weave unseen in corners, her gifts reduced to pestilence, her name a byword for something to be crushed. The people Arachne sought to help as Prometheus had before he was punished was likewise condemned and repulsed — now seen as a pest, a problem best swept under the rug.

But spiders remember.

Years passed, and another shadow fell within Athena’s sanctum.

Medusa, once a priestess in her temple, was taken by Poseidon—violently, without consent, in the very hall where she had knelt in prayer. Athena found the desecration not in the act, but in the pollution of the temple’s sanctity. Rather than punish the god, Athena punished the victim — for her uncle, she was told, was untouchable. “You would bring to justice the one who helped your father slay the Titans, who restored order? You who stand for order would contradict? Silly girl…” Hera had said.

And so Athena, disgusted and weeping, transformed Medusa into a Gorgon, her beauty twisted into terror, her hair into serpents, her gaze into a death sentence. No one could look upon her again without turning to stone. Athena, that evening, wept openly to her owls, who wiped her tears with their feathers. Yet try as she might, she knew she had not done right.

This was not mercy, as her half-sister Dice and stepmother Themis later reproached her, “It was containment.” For her, the temple was “clean” once more. But the world now held one more monster. A woman who, when looked upon, forced those who dared to see her pain to stop moving forever.

And so it was that Athena the sorrow-carrying, now twice the enforcer of order, would one day come to a young man named Perseus, compelled by her code as though hypnotized — to finish the job with Medusa. She armed him not with wisdom, but with weapons: the Harpe, a curved sword of adamantine; the Aegis, a mirror-shield polished to silver purity; and sandals to carry him far from his conscience. She sent him not to battle—but to silence.

Perseus was arrogantly certain, and felt at the time no compunction. He was to slay a beast, and was that not appropriate? Poor Perseus, ahime! He did not know what he was doing. He thought he was slaying evil.

Medusa was sleeping when he entered her cave. She was not hunting. She was not raging. She was alone. Perseus used the mirror to avoid her gaze—not to honor her, but to deny her presence. He cut off her head without looking her in the eyes. And when he returned with the Gorgon’s head, the gods praised him. They crowned him hero. His name was etched in stone. Athena could not stand to look at Perseus, and the irony was not lost on that Goddess of wisdom — wisdom learned, as we have seen, as much from pain as scholarly pursuit.

But over time, for Perseus, the mirror began to lose its polish. And that same hero—now older, haunted—saw his reflection not as the victor, but as the tool. He had not saved the world. He had preserved its lie.

From Elysium he had descended — in his mind and as a shade, slipping from the fields of peace into the folds of Tartarus, and from that sainted slice of the afterlife he arrived, the Harpe rusted in his hand, the shield no longer shining but dull and cloudy. He returned not to a city of Hades, but to a shrine of Athena just outside where Charon awaits, it was in ruin—and yet it was to be the place where the three stories converge as though stitched in symmetry.

Arachne was already there, surrounded by her daughters—small, brown spiders weaving quietly in the dust, their webs laid over old laws like veins over bones. Her body was no longer human, not quite beast—a creature of harsh beauty and many eyes. She spun with clarity, not rage. Her voice, when she spoke, was edged with precision.

Medusa came next, veiled—her eyes exposed only through a slit, out of mercy. Her tunic was torn at the shoulder, blood dried in the fabric. Her serpents slept, but stirred with her breath. She walked with the bearing of one who had carried grief until it became weapon and shield in equal measure.

And then Athena, the goddess herself, arrived — Athena who was called the Indefatigable was seen to be fragile, weighed down and almost broken by her sense of shame. Yea, she was not nearly as strong as she once was. Her crown was missing. Her armor dulled. Her hands empty — spear cast to the ground in guilt. She did not come to judge, but to listen. For the first time, she had no command to give nor any stomach for whatever was not relief from anguish.

Perseus fell to his knees before them. The Harpe clattered to the floor. He looked to Athena, his voice breaking—not with anger, but with the bitter sob of understanding. She was his patroness and his muse, and he had killed for her.

"O Lady, why was I made your executioner? What justice was there in that? I thought I was saving the world… but I see now I was only preserving its cruelty."

Arachne, skittering to Perseus, did not answer with forgiveness. She placed her threads in his hand. “Now you see. That is enough.” Medusa lifted her veil just enough to let him weep. Her gaze did not turn him to stone. It softened him—because he met her eyes and did not look away. Athena said nothing. But her tears fell too, silent and long, soaking the dust beneath them. The daughters of Arachne wove the tears into their tapestries—not to erase the past, but to include it.

When the weeping had softened, and the threads of truth began once more to whisper among the living, the shrine—once a place of judgment—fell into a pregnant hush. Something older than Olympus stirred. Something deeper than even the Titans recalled. The air grew still, as though the very fabric of fate were holding its breath.

And then she came.

Nyx, Primordial Night.

She did not arrive with dazzling light. She came in the absence of need—as velvet silence, as infinite night, as the mother of what the world does not speak of in daylight.

Her raiment was woven from void and starlight, a flowing mantle of purple midnight stitched with galaxies in slow rotation. No pattern could be discerned, and yet the mind bent to trace it. She walked not on the floor, but through it, as if night had taken form just long enough to touch the hearts of the broken.

Even the spiders stopped spinning.

Even the serpents of Medusa ceased their restless flickering.

Nyx, goddess unbound by Olympian structure, bore no crown, no spear, no herald. Her presence was enough. Every shadow in the shrine leaned toward her like children toward a mother they never dared hope to meet.

She moved first to Arachne, who, for a moment, ceased her weaving. The two said nothing at first. It was Arachne who lowered her many eyes, not in shame, but in reverence.

Nyx reached out, her long obsidian fingers brushing the edge of the tapestry Arachne had begun to spin with Perseus’s tears.

“Child of the Loom,” she said, her voice low as deep water, “you have not been forgotten.”

Arachne dared to glance upward. Her lips parted, and memory flooded the shrine like ink in water.

For it was to Nyx and her sons—Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), and Morpheus (Dream)—that Arachne had fled after her curse. In the cold hours of her exile, before she accepted her spider’s form, she had wandered the edges of the world, looking not for vengeance but for someone who would not flinch at what she had become.

Nyx had taken her in without question.

It was Arachne who wove for them the first cloaks of dream-thread.
It was she who dressed the dark.

And though she had gone her way again—driven to spin in corners where truth had no stage—Nyx had never turned her face from her.

“You clothed my sons,” Nyx said softly. “And I have worn your sorrow with pride. I have come now to mend what others could not.”

She did not stay. Her work here was not with the weaver — and yet the Night, as we are told by our mothers when we as children join them by the fire, sees…hears….remembers.

She turned instead to Medusa, still seated in stillness, her veil drawn across her face like a wall between worlds.

Nyx knelt.

The cosmos bowed.

She placed her hand on the veil, and for a breath, everyone in the shrine felt the weight of time before time. There was no command in her gesture—only permission.

Medusa trembled.

Slowly, she lifted the veil.

The serpents hissed—not in threat, but in longing. Her eyes shimmered with ancient suffering. No one turned to stone. The power had faded. She was weary of being feared. Weary of being feared by those who had never once asked who she had been before the head was taken, before her body was weaponized.

Nyx cupped her face, and kissed her once on the brow, then once on each eye.

The room did not erupt in luminosity.

Instead, the curse dissolved like mist before dawn.

Not abruptly erased—remembered, honored and then released.

The snakes unwound and slipped down her shoulders, no longer serpents, but strands of black hair once again. Medusa’s gaze remained intense, but now—at last—it was her own. No longer distorted through divine punishment.

“Let no one make a weapon of your body again,” Nyx said gently.

Medusa wept, openly now, unshielded. Her tears were not destructive. They were engaged in catharsis.

Nyx rose slowly, her mantle flowing around her like the wings of sleep. She looked upon Athena—not in scorn, but in grieving pity.

“You were made into a blade before you understood what you could be. You inherited your father’s spear, but none of your mother’s silence. And so you made silence into punishment.”

Athena lowered her head. Her eyes stung. She did not deny it.

Nyx passed her by, not to judge, but to leave her with her thoughts.

To Perseus, the Night Mother offered no forgiveness—only recognition. For forgiveness, as our fathers taught us by their forges, is earned — as Heracles laboured even in his madness and due to the capriciousness of another, still he obtained liberation and learned many lessons.

“You did not invent the motive. But you failed to question it. And that failure cost more than your tear-soaked contrition can repay.”

He nodded, and said nothing more.

Nyx stood at the center of the shrine now, beneath the loom.

The spiders descended from the corners and began to spin again—but now not alone. The threads glistened with Perseus’s remorse, with Medusa’s tears, with Athena’s grief, with the silent memory of girls who had no stories written in marble.

The loom became something new—not a tool of fate, but of collective self-efficacy.

Arachne resumed her place, but this time she was not alone.

Medusa sat beside her, threading black and gold.
Perseus watched from a distance, no longer to lead, but to serve as best he could.
And Pallas Athena, humbled, offered her spear—not as a weapon, but as a beam to support the frame.

All this as Nyx—eternal, endless, unseen—remained in the shadows, where she feels most suited, not because she is unworthy, but because some truths, in the form of our thoughts which are destined for the bright light of clarity must first be felt in darkness before they can be spoken in light.