Each God or Goddess in Ancient Greek life had a role. Some provided people with a sense of hope, some provided people with fame, and the Goddess Athena provided a sense of authority for humanity. In The Oresteia, a trilogy written by Aeschylus her power is shown in many ways, stemming from the fact that she is the Greek Goddess of War, a job that requires a person to have a sense of strong authority. In a war zone, authority is necessary to gain and maintain control and to provide structure and order. Without these characteristics a person would not be successful in a war and being that Athena is the Goddess of War, it is necessary for her to show this type of control. Athena shows that she deserves the title of Goddess of War because
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This shows that Athena will almost always favor men over women, making her even more so the most androgynous Goddess. This makes her androgynous because most people and Gods tend to favor their own gender but Athena does otherwise. Athena thinks this way because she never had a mother of her own as she was born out of Zeus’s head as a grown woman. This meant that she never had a motherly role model in her life, causing her to lack many of the womanly qualities and showing more masculine characteristics. This upbringing has made Athena have a dislike towards women, despite being a woman herself. This is shown in her automatic vote against the Furies, a group of women, and more importantly her automatic vote for Orestes. The vote in favor of Orestes shows how little she cares about mothers because Orestes admittedly murdered his own mother and Athena still is voting in favor of him. This shows her authority in the trial because regardless of what Orestes did, and what the Furies could potentially do to Athena and her city, Athena is still confident enough in her beliefs to cast her vote in favor of Orestes because of her hatred towards women, specifically mothers is so strong which directly resulted from her lack of
This shows that Athena will almost always favor men over women, making her even more so the most androgynous Goddess. This makes her androgynous because most people and Gods tend to favor their own gender but Athena does otherwise. Athena thinks this way because she never had a mother of her own as she was born out of Zeus’s head as a grown woman. This meant that she never had a motherly role model in her life, causing her to lack many of the womanly qualities and showing more masculine characteristics. This upbringing has made Athena have a dislike towards women, despite being a woman herself. This is shown in her automatic vote against the Furies, a group of women, and more importantly her automatic vote for Orestes. The vote in favor of Orestes shows how little she cares about mothers because Orestes admittedly murdered his own mother and Athena still is voting in favor of him. This shows her authority in the trial because regardless of what Orestes did, and what the Furies could potentially do to Athena and her city, Athena is still confident enough in her beliefs to cast her vote in favor of Orestes because of her hatred towards women, specifically mothers is so strong which directly resulted from her lack of