Athena

Pindar, Pythian 12 (excerpt)

[...] I ask you, queen, graciously to accept, with the kindliness of immortals and of men, this wreath from Pytho for glorious Midas: and accept him too, who has beaten Greece in the art which Pallas Athena discovered, when she wove together the deathly dirge of the fierce Gorgons, the dirge that she heard poured out in woeful grief from under the maidens' dreadful snaky heads, when Perseus killed one sister out of the three, bringing doom to sea-encircled Seriphos and to its people. He blinded the weird race of Phorcus: he made dreadful for Polydektes his wedding feast, his long enslavement of Perseus' mother, and the marriage-bed to which she was compelled, by pulling forth the head of fair-cheeked Medusa, he, Danae's son, begotten, we say, of a shower of gold that fell of its own will.

But when the maiden goddess had saved her dear friend from these toils, she made an every-voiced melody of auloi, to imitate with instruments the clamorous wailing that burst from the ravening jaws of Euryale. The goddess discovered it: but when she had discovered it for mortal men to possess, she named it the nomos of many heads, that glorious suitor for contests to stir the people, coming through thin bronze and through the reeds that grow by the city of the Graces with its lovely dancing-places, in the holy place of the nymph of Cephisus, faithful witnesses to the dancers. [...]

(Barker 1984: 57-58)

Athenaeus XIV.7, 616EF

On the subject of auloi, then, someone said that Melanippides had ridiculed aulos-playing splendidly in his Marsyas, when he said of Athena: 'Athena threw the instruments from her holy hand and said "Away, shameful things, defilers of my body! [616f] I do not give myself to ugliness." ' Someone else responded by saying 'But Telestes of Selinus hit back at Melanippides in his Argo: speaking of Athena he said: "When the clever goddess had picked up the clever instrument in the mountain thickets, I cannot believe in my mind that she, divine Athena, frightened by the ugliness unpleasant to the eye, threw it away again from her hands to be a glory for Marsyas, that handclapping creature born of a nymph.

(Barker 1984: 273)

Apollodorus, Bibliotheca I.4.2

Apollo also slew Marsyas, the son of Olympus. For Marsyas, having found the pipes (aulous) which Athena had thrown away because they disfigured her face, engaged in a musical contest with Apollo. They agreed that the victor should work his will on the vanquished, and when the trial took place Apollo turned his lyre (kithara) upside down in the competition and bade Marsyas do the same. But Marsyas could not. So Apollo was judged the victor and despatched Marsyas by hanging him on a tall pine tree and stripping off his skin.

(James G. Frazer, Apollodorus: The Library, Cambridge, Mass.-London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1921: 29-31)

Other literary sources:

 

Corinna, PMG fr. 15 ;

Propertius III.22 (29). 16ff.;

Ovid, Fasti VI. 697ff.; Ars amatoria III. 505f.;

Hyginus, Fabulae 165;

Plutarch, De cohibenda ira 6;

Pausanias I.24.1;

Fulgentius, Mythologiae III.9;

Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini, ed. G. H. Bode, vol. I, pp. 40, 114 (First Vatican Mythographer 125, Second Vatican Mythographer 115).

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