aughter of Zeus, by the name Athena
or Athenaia. The Athenian goddess must have come in from Athenian
influence, and it is strange to find how deep into the heart of the
poems that influence must have reached. If we try to conjecture whose
place it is that Athena has taken, it is worth remarking that her
regular epithet, 'daughter of Zeus', belongs in Sanskrit to the
Dawn-goddess, Eos.[52:2] The transition might be helped by some touches
of the Dawn-goddess that seem to linger about Athena in myth. The rising
Sun stayed his horses while Athena was born from the head of Zeus. Also
she was born amid a snowstorm of gold. And Eos, on the other hand, is,
like Athena, sometimes the daughter of the Giant Pallas.[53:1]

Our three chief Olympians, then, explain themselves very easily. A body
of poetry and tradition, in its origin dating from the Achaioi of the
Migrations, growing for centuries in the hands of Ionian bards, and
reaching its culminating form at Athens, has prominent in it the Achaian
Zeus, the Ionian Apollo, the Athenian Kore--the same Kore who descended
in person to restore the exiled Pisistratus to his throne.[53:2]

We need only throw a glance in passing at a few of the other Olympians.
Why, for instance, should Poseidon be so prominent? In origin he is a
puzzling figure. Besides the Achaean Earth-shaking brother of Zeus in
Thessaly there seems to be some Pelasgian or Aegean god present in him.
He is closely connected with Libya; he brings the horse from
there.[54:1] At times he exists in order to be defeated; defeated in
Athens by Athena, in Naxos by Dionysus, in Aegina by Zeus, in Argos by
Hera, in Acrocorinth by Helios though he continues to hold the Isthmus.
In Trozen he shares a temple on more or less equal terms with
Athena.[54:2] Even in Troy he is defeated and cast out from the walls
his own hands had built.[54:3] These problems we need not for the
present face. By the time that concerns us most the Earth-Shaker is a
sea-god, specially important to the sea-peoples of Athens and Ionia. He
is the father of Neleus, the ancestor of the Ionian kings. His temple at
Cape Mykale is the scene of the Panionia, and second only to Delos as a
religious centre of the Ionian tribes. He has intimate relations with
Attica too. Besides the ancient contest with Athena for the possession
of the land, he appears as the father of Theseus, the chief Athenian
hero. He is merged in other Attic heroes, like Aigeus and Erechtheus