child. The role elsewhere played by Ge alone is shared between two maternal figures,
Ge and Athena.
This distribution of parental roles is demonstrated in Figure 14.1, an Attic stamnos
from the second quarter of the fifth century BC. While Hephaestus looks on, Ge is
emerging out of the ground handing the baby over to Athena. The child is reaching
out to Athena, who is preparing to wrap him in her aegis. We are presented with a
more feminine, nurturing Athena than the goddess as she normally appears in Attic
(or any other) art. This is not the goddess in her guise of armed protectress, but a
motherly figure, the nurturer of the ancestral hero.
According to the next stage in the myth, Athena wanted to make the child immortal
so she shut him up in a chest and put a serpent or pair of serpents inside. These are ideal
creatures in the circumstances because, like Erichthonius, they have associations that
Figure 14.1 The birth of Erichthonius. Attic stamnos, second quarter of the fifth century
BC. Munich, Antikensammlungen 2413; redrawn by S.J. Deacy
226 Susan Deacy