Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Apollodorus records that after Athena’s birth she was raised, in one tradition, beside the Libyan lake or river Triton, companion to Pallas, daughter of the sea-god Triton. The two girls practiced the arts of war together. They quarreled in sport; as Pallas was about to strike, Zeus interposed the aegis (or startled her), and Athena, lunging, mortally wounded her friend. In grief she fashioned a likeness of Pallas and took the name Pallas Athena; from Pallas’s skin she made the aegis, the divine goatskin (or shield-cover) that thereafter bore terror into battle—later commonly described with the Gorgoneion fixed upon it after Perseus’s gift. Pausanias and Attic cult keep the aegis as Athena’s emblem of protected sovereignty. The childhood tale supplies a personal aetiology: the goddess’s second name and her war-cloak both remember a slain companion, so that every appearance of “Pallas” and every flash of the aegis carries mourning as well as power. A separate Apollodorean notice has Athena flay the Giant Pallas in the Gigantomachy for the same aegis—catalogue tradition thus offers two Pallas-victims for one object; this file follows the Tritonid friend.