Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Arachne was a Lydian girl of ordinary birth whose skill at the loom surpassed all human rivals. She boasted that her weaving equaled Athena’s and refused to yield primacy to the goddess. Athena, disguised as an old woman, warned her to seek only mortal praise; Arachne scorned the advice and challenged the goddess openly. Both set up looms. Athena wove the gods in majesty and, at the borders, examples of mortals punished for challenging divinity. Arachne wove the loves and deceptions of the gods—Zeus’s and Poseidon’s assaults among them—faultless in craft but insolent in theme. Enraged that she could find no flaw in the work, Athena tore the web, struck Arachne, and the girl hanged herself. The goddess sprinkled her with a potion (or simply transformed her) and changed her into a spider, condemned forever to spin thread and hang from webs—etiology of the spider (*arachnē* in Greek). Because the contest, the competing tapestries, and the metamorphosis form a continuous story only in Ovid, this entry treats the myth as **Roman transmission** of a Greek craft-and-hubris theme centered on Athena the weaver.