Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 207
Hephaistos’s hammer during a quarrel. She emerged fully adult
and dressed as a warrior. She was the goddess both of women’s
crafts and of defensive war. She became the patron deity of Athens
by causing an olive tree to spring up on the Acropolis, symbolic of
the fact that Athens’s economic prosperity was based on the olive.
The most sublime of all Greek temples, the Parthenon, which dominates
the Acropolis, was dedicated to Athene in her capacity as a
virgin or parthenos. It contained a statue sculpted by Pheidias that
was over thirty-six feet high and covered in gold and ivory.
Hades
Hades, the brother of Zeus, was the god of the underworld.
Together with his wife Persephone, he ruled over the dead. The
only myth associated with him is the abduction of Persephone.
Demeter
Demeter was the goddess of vegetation and the harvest. Her grief
for her lost daughter Persephone after her abduction was believed to
cause the “death” of the vegetative cycle in winter. Conversely, her
yearly reunion with Persephone was thought to usher in the spring.
In the outpouring of her grief for her daughter, we see her touched
by emotion to a greater degree than any other Olympian deity.
Almost uniquely, Demeter does not seem to have had a shadow side,
although she played a prominent part in rituals pertaining to death
Reconstruction of the Parthenon. Courtesy akg-images, London.