On the earliest Panathenaic vase known--the "Burgon" vase in the British
museum--Athena has a dolphin on her shield. The dolphin has two
principal meanings in Greek symbolism. It means, first, the sea;
secondarily, the ascending and descending course of any of the heavenly
bodies from one sea horizon to another--the dolphins' arching rise and
replunge (in a summer evening, out of calm sea, their black backs roll
round with exactly the slow motion of a water-wheel; but I do not know
how far Aristotle's exaggerated account of their leaping or their
swiftness has any foundation) being taken as a type of the emergence
of the sun or stars from the sea in the east, and plunging beneath in the
west. Hence, Apollo, when in his personal power he crosses the sea,
leading his Cretan colonists to Pytho, takes the form of a dolphin,
becomes Apollo Delphinius, and names the founded colony "Delphi." The
lovely drawing of the Delphic Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le
Normand and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6) gives the entire conception of this
myth. Again, the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent Taras coming to
found the city, riding on a dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have partly
the rage of the sea in them, and partly the spring of the horse, because
the splendid riding of the Tarentines had made their name proverbial in
Magna Græca. The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the same
thought; and, again, the plunge, before their transformation, of the
ships of Æneas. Then, this idea of career upon, or conquest of, or by
dolphin-like ships (compare the Merlin prophecy,
"They shall ride
Over ocean wide
With hempen bridle, ad horse of tree,")
connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in
the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either
of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does
often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the
repetition of her own ægis-snakes as the further expression of her power
over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with
her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocoön from the
sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on
the ocean also, and the madness of the ægis-snake is give to the
wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of
Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her
beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation
possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being
carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.
In Plate cxv. of vol. ii, Le Normand, are given two sides of a vase,
which, in rude and childish ways, assembles most of the principal
thoughts regarding Athena in this relation. In the first, the sunrise is
represented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, foreshortened; the light
is supposed to blind the eyes, and no face of the god is seen (Turner, in
the Ulysses and Polyphemus sunrise, loses the form of the god in light,
giving the chariot-horses only; rendering in his own manner, after 2,200
years of various fall and revival of the arts, precisely the same thought
as the old Greek potter). He ascends out of the sea; but the sea itself
has not yet caught the light. In the second design, Athena as the
morning breeze, and Hermes as the morning cloud, fly over the sea before
the sun. Hermes turns back his head; his face is unseen in the cloud, as
Apollo's in the light; the grotesque appearance of an animal's face is
only the cloud-phantasm modifying a frequent form of the hair of Hermes
beneath the back of his cap. Under the morning breeze, the dolphins leap
from the rippled sea, and their sides catch the light.
The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give a fair representation of the
helmed Athena, as imagined in later Greek art, with the embossed Scylla.
40. Fourthly, Athena is the air nourishing artificial light--unconsuming
fire. Therefore, a lamp was always kept burning in the Erechtheum; and
the torch-race belongs chiefly to her festival, of which the meaning is
to show the danger of the perishing of the light even by excess of the
air that nourishes it; and so that the race is not to the swift, but to
the wise. The household use of her constant light is symbolized in the
lovely passage in the Odyssey, where Ulysses and his son move the armor
while the servants are shut in their chambers, and there is no one to
hold the torches for them; but Athena herself, "having a golden lamp,"
fills all the rooms with light. Her presence in war-strength with her
favorite heroes is always shown by the "unwearied" fire hovering on their
helmets and shields; and the image gradually becomes constant and
accepted, both for the maintenance of household watchfulness, as in the
parable of the ten virgins, or as the symbol of direct inspiration, in
the rushing wind and divided flames of Pentecost; but together with this
thought of unconsuming and constant fire, there is always mingled in the
Greek mind the sense of the consuming by excess, as of the flame by the
air, so also of the inspired creature by its own fire (thus, again, "the
zeal of thine house hath eaten me up"--"my zeal hath consumed me, because
of thine enemies," and the like); and especially Athena has this aspect
towards the truly sensual and bodily strength; so that to Ares, who is
himself insane and consuming, the opposite wisdom seems to be insane and
consuming: "All we the other gods have thee against us, O Jove! when we
would give grace to men; for thou hast begotten the maid without a mind--
the mischievous creature, the doer of unseemly evil. All we obey thee,
and are ruled by thee. Her only thou wilt not resist in anything she
says or does, because thou didst bear her--consuming child as she is."