As usual, the oldest literary references to Athene are found in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. It were superfluous to collect and compare texts so numerous and so familiar. Athene appears in the _Iliad_ as a martial maiden, daughter of Zeus, and, apparently, of Zeus alone without female mate.* * Iliad, v. 875, 880. This is stated explicitly in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where Athene is said to have been born from the head of Zeus (Pindar, Olympic Odes, vii.). She is the patron of valour and the inspirer of counsel; she arrests the hand of Achilles when his sword is half drawn from the sheath in his quarrel with Agamemnon; she is the constant companion and protector of Odysseus; and though she is worshipped in the citadel of Troy, she is constant to the cause of the Achæans. Occasionally it is recorded of her that she assumed the shape of various birds; a sea-bird and a swallow are among her metamorphoses; and she could put on the form of any man she pleased; for example, of Deiphobus.* It has often been observed that among the lower races the gods habitually appear in the form of animals. "Entre ces facultes qui possedent les immortels, l'une des plus frappantes est celle de se metamorphoser, de prendre des apparences non seulement animales, mais encore de se transformer en objets inanimes."** Of this faculty, inherited from the savage stage of thought, Athene has her due share even in Homer. But in almost every other respect she is free from the heritage of barbarism, and might very well be regarded as the ideal representative of wisdom, valour and manfulness in man, of purity, courage and nobility in woman, as in the Phæacian maid Nausicæ. * _Iliad_, xxii. 227, xvii. 351, Od. iii. 372. v. 353; _Iliad_, vii. 59. ** Maury, _Religion de la Grece_, i. 256.