Owls to Athens

The Latin equivalent of ‘coals to Newcastle’ (ligna in silvam) was the subject of an earlier post. The Greek equivalent is γλαυκ' Ἀθηναζε [ἀγειν], meaning ‘to bring an owl to Athens’. The owl was the bird of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and it is said that owls used to roost in the rafters of the old Parthenon, Athena’s sanctuary on the Acropolis (destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 B.C.). The Parthenon also served as the treasury of the Athenian state, and the tetradrachmai, coins worth four drachmas stamped with the image of Athena’s owl, were known as γλαυκες (‘owls’). Not only, then, was the Acropolis a haunt of owls, but Athens minted its own owl money, using silver from its mines at Laurion. Thus, to take an owl to Athens was seen as redundant in every way; a complete waste of effort.

In Aristophanes’s play The Birds (414 B.C.), when the Hoopoe sings its beautiful summons to all the other birds to gather to discuss the idea of building a bird-metropolis in the ether, Euelpides and Pisthetaerus give us a catalogue of the winged folk as they fly in. Catching sight of the owl, they have this brief dialogue:

Ε: χαὐτηι γε γλαυξ.  (‘And here comes the owl’)

Π: τι φῃς; τις γλαυκ' Ἀθηναζ' ἠγαγεν;  (‘What are you saying? Who is it brings an owl to Athens?’)

Athena was originally a pre-Hellenic Nature goddess before the Athenians made her the tutelary spirit of all that was sophisticated in their culture and polis, and the fact that the owl was her familiar may mean that she was originally a crone-figure or even a goddess of death.