In a late rendering by Gaius Julius Hyginus ( Poetical Astronomy ii. John Tzetzes says that aegis was the skin of the monstrous giant Pallas whom Athena overcame and whose name she attached to her own. The Douris cup shows that the aegis was represented exactly as the skin of the great serpent, with its scales clearly delineated. In a similar interpretation, Aex, a daughter of Helios, represented as a great fire-breathing chthonic serpent similar to the Chimera, was slain and flayed by Athena, who afterwards wore its skin, the aegis, as a cuirass ( Diodorus Siculus iii. It was supposed by Euripides ( Ion, 995) that the aegis borne by Athena was the skin of the slain Gorgon, yet the usual understanding is that the Gorgoneion was added to the aegis, a votive offering from a grateful Perseus. In classical poetry and art First century BC depiction of Alexander wearing the aegis on the Alexander Mosaic, Pompeii ( Naples National Archaeological Museum)Ĭlassical Greece interpreted the Homeric aegis usually as a cover of some kind borne by Athena. However, Zeus is normally portrayed in classical sculpture holding a thunderbolt or lightning, bearing neither a shield nor a breastplate. According to Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, the Aegis is the breastplate of Zeus, and was "awful to behold". In the Iliad when Zeus sends Apollo to revive the wounded Hector, Apollo, holding the aegis, charges the Achaeans, pushing them back to their ships drawn up on the shore. "Aegis-bearing Zeus", as he is in the Iliad, sometimes lends the fearsome aegis to Athena. When the Olympian shakes the aegis, Mount Ida is wrapped in clouds, the thunder rolls and men are struck down with fear. When the Olympian deities overtook the older deities of Greece and she was born of Metis (inside Zeus who had swallowed the goddess) and "re-born" through the head of Zeus fully clothed, Athena already wore her typical garments. Some of the Attic vase-painters retained an archaic tradition that the tassels had originally been serpents in their representations of the aegis. Virgil imagines the Cyclopes in Hephaestus' forge, who "busily burnished the aegis Athena wears in her angry moods-a fearsome thing with a surface of gold like scaly snake-skin, and the linked serpents and the Gorgon herself upon the goddess's breast-a severed head rolling its eyes", furnished with golden tassels and bearing the Gorgoneion ( Medusa's head) in the central boss. and among them went bright-eyed Athene, holding the precious aegis which is ageless and immortal: a hundred tassels of pure gold hang fluttering from it, tight-woven each of them, and each the worth of a hundred oxen." "It produced a sound as from myriad roaring dragons ( Iliad, 4.17) and was borne by Athena in battle. The aegis of Athena is referred to in several places in the Iliad. In Greek mythology Athena's aegis, with Gorgon, here resembles the skin of the serpent who guards the golden fleece (regurgitating Jason) cup by Douris, early fifth century BC ( Vatican Museums) The transition to the meaning "shield" or "goatskin" may have come by folk etymology among a people familiar with draping an animal skin over the left arm as a shield. The original meaning may have been the first, and Ζεὺς Αἰγίοχος Zeus Aigiokhos = "Zeus who holds the aegis" may have originally meant "Sky/Heaven, who holds the thunderstorm".
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