entirely free from magic and mystery, for Athena is emphatically a civic goddess, having hardly any connection with the powers of Nature. She is pure intellect. True, she has a pugnacious aspect, she is armed with spear and shield, and with a breastplate, or ægis, bearing the Gorgon’s head and snaky coils of hair.[29] It has been ingeniously suggested that the ægis had been evolved by art from the skin of a beast worn over the shoulders, with the fierce head hanging over the breast of the wearer, and the legend of Medusa the Gorgon invented to explain it. Anyhow, Athena is a hoplite goddess. Whatever connection she may have with water elsewhere, at Athens she is armed for land warfare. All these signs convince us that the Athena worshipped on the Acropolis of Athens is not a primitive goddess. Her character, her weapons, and her cult all point to a Northern origin, like that of Zeus and Apollo. Moreover, we have, in the legend of her successful strife with Poseidon for the patronage of the city, a clear account of her importation, and she shared a temple with the old earth-born hero of Athens, Erechtheus. How then did she come to give her name to the city? Is it true that Athens had been called Cecropia in times past? It is hard to believe that the goddess was called after the city, for there were strong local cults of Athena elsewhere, so markedly individual in character that the name cannot have been due to a mere identification of local heroines with the famous goddess of a famous city. It is not in the least likely that the Spartans, of all people, would call the goddess who played a very important part in the life of their State by the name of an essentially Athenian deity. Nor, again, can we believe that a goddess could completely change her character and become civilised without leaving distinct traces of her past. The only conclusion is that Pallas Athene was an Achæan goddess who came rather late upon the Acropolis of Athens. It is true that the Athenians boasted themselves to be an aboriginal people of the old stock, and it is very probable that the main bodies of Northern invaders did, as Thucydides alleges, pass by that stony promontory of Attica as beneath notice. But they can hardly have left a strong citadel unconquered, and though Athens and her king Menestheus play a rather humble part in the Iliad, yet there was an Athenian contingent in the Achæan host. It is probable that Athens received an Achæan king and that the Acropolis itself passed into Achæan hands. But the population of Attica received little Northern intermixture. Herodotus tells us that the Athenian maidens going down from the citadel to draw water were liable to constant attacks from the Pelasgians who lived on Mount Hymettus.