In such a matter a poet might well have been instinctively, though unconsciously, true to fact. To tell the story of the making of Athene is to trace the history of the city of Athens, to trace perhaps, in so far as they can be severed, its political rather than its religious developement. At first the maiden of the elder stratum, she has to contend for supremacy with a god of that stratum, Poseidon. Poseidon, the late Mr R. A. Neil[785] has shown, was the god of the ancient aristocracy of Athens, an aristocracy based, as they claimed descent from Poseidon, on patriarchal conditions. The rising democracy not unnaturally revived the ancient figure of the Kore, but in reviving her they strangely altered her being and reft from her much of her beauty and reality. They made her a sexless thing, neither man nor woman; she is laden with attributes like the Parthenos of Pheidias, charged with intended significance, but to the end she remains manufactured, unreal, and never convinces us. She is, in fact, the Tyche, the Fortune of the city, and the real object of the worship of the citizens was not the goddess but the city herself, ‘immortal mistress of a band of lovers[786]’: ‘The grace of the town that hath on it for crown But a head-band to wear Of violets one-hued with her hair, For the vales and the green high places of earth hold nothing so fair And the depths of the sea know no such birth of the manifold births they bear,’ a city, ‘Based on a crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.’ Nowhere is this artificiality, this unreality of Athene as distinct from Athens so keenly felt as in the famous myth of her birth from the brain of Zeus. A poet may see its splendour: ‘Her life as the lightning was flashed from the light of her Father’s head,’ but it remains a desperate theological expedient to rid an earth-born Kore of her matriarchal conditions. The Homeric Hymn[787] writer surrounds the Birth with all the apparatus of impressiveness, yet it never impresses; the goddess is manifestly to him Reason, Light and Liberty; she is born at the rising of the Sun: ‘Hyperion’s bright son stayed His galloping steeds for a space.’ The event is of cosmic import: ‘High Olympus reeled At the wrath in the sea-grey eyes and Earth on every side Rang with a terrible cry, and the Deep was disquieted With a tumult of purple waves and outpouring of the tide Suddenly.’ Fear takes hold of all the Immortals, and ‘the Councillor Zeus is glad,’ but the mortal reader remains cold. It is all an unreal, theatrical show, and through it all we feel and resent the theological intent. We cannot love a goddess who on principle forgets the Earth from which she sprang; always from the lips of the Lost Leader we hear the shameful denial[788]: