Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Athena came to Hephaestus’s forge for weapons. The smith, overcome with desire—some say because Poseidon had told him Athena would yield, or simply from lust—pursued her. She fled; he caught her and tried to force her, but she resisted, and his seed fell on the earth (or on her thigh, whence she wiped it off with wool and threw it down). Gaia conceived; the child Erichthonius was born from the ground—earth-born, half-linked in some images with serpentine form. Athena, wishing to rear him in secret, placed the infant in a chest (or basket) with a guardian serpent (or serpents) and entrusted the chest to Pandrosos, daughter of Cecrops, forbidding her to open it. The sisters Aglauros (Agraulos) and Herse persuaded Pandrosos—or themselves opened it against orders. Seeing the child and the snake, they were driven mad by Athena’s anger and leapt from the Acropolis to their deaths (Pausanias and Apollodorus; Euripides’ *Ion* preserves the chest, snakes, and Creusa as Erichthonius’s descendant). Erichthonius grew under Athena’s protection, became king of Athens after Cranaus (or Amphictyon), set up the wooden image of Athena on the Acropolis, instituted the Panathenaea in some accounts, and was buried in the temenos of Athena Polias. The myth binds Hephaestus and Athena’s frustrated union to Athens’s autochthonous kingship and the taboo of the Cecropid sisters.