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When studying the ancient world, it becomes very clear very quickly that Athens is the archetypical
shining city on the hill and the singular foundation of the greatest civilization in
history, according to Athens. If you ask anyone else, of course, the story is very different.
The fact is, for the majority of Ancient Greek history, Athens was one of the smaller
potatoes rattling around. It gets the barest of mentions in Homer’s epics around the 800s BCE,
where Athens is brought up once in the infamous Boat List Chapter of the Iliad - and its sole
representative hero, Theseus, isn’t even mentioned and didn’t really start getting
any major press till the romans rolled up around the turn of the millennium. Athens only scraped
together the barest possible claim to fame in 490 BCE when they won the battle of marathon,
and spent the next few decades gradually building up momentum before taking their place center stage
starting in the mid-400s. After that, the first priority appeared to be making up for lost time,
and Athens was pretty quick to start constructing narratives where they were actually always the
coolest kids on the block and everybody knew it all along. We’ve touched on this in some earlier
videos - like how in the mid-300s BCE Plato spent the bulk of his dialogues Timaeus and
Critias talking about how the ancient empire of Atlantis was single-handedly defeated thousands
of years prior by the totally real Ancient Athenians by virtue of how totally rad and
Athenian and real they were. But Plato was far from the only one, and the most illustrative
example of this retroactive spotlight-hogging is probably Athens’s official founding myth.
Now before we talk about the Government-Issued Founding Myth written after Athens became
actually important, let’s briefly touch on what the athenian founding myth looked like
before Athens hit it big. Don’t worry, it’s short. In the Iliad’s Boat Chapter,
Athens is referred to as a “well-built citadel” and “the land of great-hearted Erechtheus”. Now,
that’s all we get about Athens at this point, but Erechtheus, sometimes also called Erechthonius,
the culture hero slash first king of Athens, is a fairly interesting figure who has a little more
detail. For one thing, he’s autochthonous, meaning born from the earth - essentially he’s one of
Gaia’s direct offspring. Gaia’s mostly known for giving birth to monsters, and Erechtheus isn’t
entirely an exception - he’s frequently described as having serpentine or draconic features, in some
versions having warped or snakelike legs that make it difficult for him to walk. But he’s also not
just Gaia’s kid. The actual story of his birth is - well, frankly, pretty gross. Basically,
according to Pseudo-Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca, Athena decides she wants some new weapons,
so she goes to commission Hephaestus for some, but instead of just taking the commission, Hephaestus
is struck by her beauty and tries to assault her. This obviously doesn’t work out so hot for him,
given that she’s a war goddess and his legs don’t even work, but as a result of… certain
icky parts of the process, Erechtheus is conceived by Hephaestus and born from the earth itself, and
Gaia hands the baby off to Athena. Sources vary on how Erechtheus’s childhood went, but TLDR he ends
up as king of Athens, erects a statue of Athena in the acropolis, founds the Panhellenic games,
and - most interestingly, I think - invents the chariot to help compensate for his own
limited mobility. It’s not really surprising that Erechtheus is the offspring of Hephaestus - being
a disabled inventor is pretty on-brand. This myth is also interesting because sometimes Athena was
credited as the first charioteer when she was referred to with the epithet Hippia,
meaning “Of Horses”. A lot of modern pop culture greek mythology says she and Poseidon invented
the chariot together, but unfortunately that apparently isn’t sourced anywhere - Athena
as first charioteer is corroborated with the epithet, but if there was ever a more detailed
myth about this, it unfortunately didn’t survive beyond a single anecdotal epithet.
So that’s pretty neat, but it’s not really about Athens, is it? It’s just about this
cool king of Athens. And that’s about the coolest story Athens had to offer until bam!
It’s the turn of the fifth century BCE and Athens just invented democracy and kicked
some persian ass! Now they’re a big deal and it’s time everyone started acting like it!
So Athens has its glow-up and becomes important - and, fun fact, one of the first things they did
around this time was make the official statement that all Athenians were autochthonous just like
Erechtheus. Not to say that they all individually sprouted out of the ground just like that,
but that their ancestors did. The Athenians didn’t settle Athens, they were born from it.
MOLDED by it. They didn’t see anything that wasn’t Athens until they were already a man, and by then
it was nothing to them but nowhere near as cool as athens. So yea, autochthonous pride was not
what I was expecting to find researching this, but it’s still pretty dang nifty.
Anyway, now that Athens is a big deal IRL, it’s time to give them a big deal founding myth that
reflects how much of a big deal they are. One with gods and heroes and really important stuff. No
other city did this, by the way. Sure, you’d get mythical founder-kings bouncing around setting up
cities and naming them after stuff, but it didn’t usually get much fancier than that.
Not so for Athens. In the first-ish century CE, Pseudo-Apollodorus writes his Bibliotheca,
a compendium of greek myths and legends derived from earlier works, mostly from around the 300s
BCE. And in this Bibliotheca he tells us the new and improved founding myth of Athens.
For one thing, Erechtheus is no longer the first king of athens. That honor goes to Kekrops,
another autochthonous founder-king who is also part snake, what a coincidence. He rules the
Attic peninsula, which he names Kekropia after himself, and is by all accounts doing a good job
when the gods decide it’s time to start divvying up the planet and the problems begin. See,
Kekropia is just such a prime piece of Grade A real estate that both Poseidon and Athena want
a piece of it. Poseidon gets there first, and to mark his territory he strikes the ground
with his trident, producing a saltwater spring - and, according to some later roman writers,
also a horse. Then Athena shows up, calls Kekrops over to make sure he’s watching, and plants a nice
little olive tree. Athena and Poseidon start butting heads over who gets the city, so Zeus
intervenes to break it up. Sources vary on who exactly makes the final judgment, but the popular
attestation is that Kekrops judges the olive tree a more practical gift than a saltwater spring,
so the city goes to Athena and is renamed Athens. Poseidon is unsurprisingly butthurt about this
and floods the nearby plains in revenge, most likely to explain why Athens was, at the time,
located right next to three separate rivers. A few kings later, our old buddy Erechtheus
pops back up in his old role as Super Cool King, though by this point they’re pretty
consistently calling him Erichthonius instead. What’s neat about this is that Erechtheus’s
original name still gets independent press in this telling, since the saltwater spring
Poseidon creates is called Erechtheis - and in the Acropolis of Athens, alongside
the statue of Athena Polias, patron goddess of the city, there was a statue of Poseidon
Erechtheus, a figure of worship very specifically conflating the figures of Poseidon and this
autochthonous snakey founder-king to worship them in a single capacity. Erechtheus also features
in a more subtle role - in the Parthenon’s massive now-lost statue of Athena Parthenos,
there’s a snake behind Athena’s shield, and that snake represents Erechtheus. Pretty dope!
Now the really cool thing about this specifically is Athens is not the only
snake-centric myth about a god claiming a city. Kekrops and Erechtheus are both offspring of
Gaia with hefty amounts of snake symbolism and iconography, and they both play a mythological
role in giving Athena control over their city. This story structure also happens… in Delphi.
See, before Apollo took over as its patron, Delphi and its oracle were ruled by Python,
an autochthonous child of Gaia who was, unsurprisingly at this point, a giant snake.
Python is supposedly minoan in origin, and was potentially originally framed as a benevolent
guardian spirit - though by ancient greek times Python was a little more antagonistic,
in one story being sent by Hera to kill Apollo and Artemis’s mother Leto. Regardless of why,
Apollo killed Python and claimed Delphi and its oracle for his own. This story is referenced in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in 522 BCE, meaning it’s most likely a lot older than that.
I don’t know exactly how far this “olympians superseding ancient snake gods” thing goes,
but even if it’s just a coincidence it’s a hell of a throughline to stumble on.
Can’t believe all my mythological conspiracy theorying finally led me to friggin’ snake
people. All these thumbtacks and string might be getting to me…