Arachne's transformations

Greek Mythology invented and reinvented

This week it’s back to school for many young people, and I’ve been in mind of children’s books and stories.

In fact, a substantial portion of THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY is devoted to the process of re-inventing Greek Mythology for young readers.

The process began in the early 1800’s, when children’s literature was a burgeoning industry. But it gained even more momentum with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, the first really successful book of Greek myths for kids, and it has expanded into what seems to be an unstoppable cultural phenomenon (hello, Rick Riordan!).

One of the best-known stories from Greek Mythology for kids concerns Arachne. She was a skilled weaver who foolishly challenged Athena to a weaving contest. Athena is, among other things, the patron goddess of weaving, and we assume that Arachne is destined to lose, like a lot of other humans who challenge divinities.

But stay tuned.

According to the invaluable reference book Early Greek Myth by the late Timothy Gantz, this story appears exactly nowhere in Greek writers who have been preserved to us in the present day. Arachne drops in first to the agricultural poem of Vergil, the Georgics, several hundred years after Greek myths first began to be written down, and even here she’s a bit obscure, in a list of household pests, including hornets and moths:

…or the hated spider of Minerva (who) hangs her loosely-woven web in the doorway.

The most famous version of the story appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 6, and this version forms the one most often adapted in the modern day.

To me this is absolutely extraordinary: not that a supposedly Greek story has only been preserved in Latin writers (Ovid features a number of these), but that the story blew up virally to the point where it now has this immense prominence, where once it was incredibly obscure.

And much of this is due to a choice by authors to make Arachne into a kid’s tale.

Anyway, the story from Ovid is utterly fascinating, and a tale to be interpreted in another newsletter, but what concerns me here is its metamorphosis into a story for children.

It’s clear from Ovid’s poetry that he’s not a believer in the Olympian divinities, and he uses them, among other things, as a way to show how absurd it is that anyone ever believed in them.

Ovid tells us that Arachne was a young woman of humble origin who nevertheless did not acknowledge Minerva (the Roman name for Athena) as her mistress, teacher, or inspiration.

(Arachne is from Lydia, a region of Anatolia [modern Turkey], and a place the stories of which have much influence on the invention of Greek myths. I wonder whether the tale was originally told in this area and made its way west at some point in the misty past.)

Minerva devises a kind of sting operation, where she comes to Arachne as an old woman and attempts to get her to ask Minerva’s forgiveness for her too-high opinion of herself. Minerva’s intent is clear: catch Arachne disrespecting the goddess to her face, thus enabling her to be punished.

The disconnect here, however, is that Ovid never mentions Minerva as any kind of teacher, inspiration, or mistress of Arachne. She contributes nothing to Arachne’s skill, except for being “the goddess of weaving” in general. Why should Arachne acknowledge her? It is a logical argument.

Arachne accordingly declines the advice and boldly asks why the goddess is not there in person for a weaving duel. Minerva shrugs off her disguise, declares, “I am here!” and the contest is on.

Both weave a gorgeous tapestry (and the lines of poetry, not coincidentally, are also gorgeous): Minerva’s is a consciously didactic scene of humans who attempted to challenge the gods but failed. Arachne’s is not inferior to Minerva’s, however. The problem is that Arachne makes hers into scenes of the shameful and shameless deeds of the gods.

Minerva, always the Olympian, is furious and begins to strike Arachne. This part of the story now becomes a bit strange. After being struck “3 or 4 times,” Arachne takes a rope with which to hang herself. One wonders how she has the time in between the beatings.

No matter. Minerva isn’t about to let Arachne get away so easily. She takes the rope, turns it into a spider silk, and transforms Arachne into a spider.

Not something you’d consider a natural candidate for a story for impressionable audiences, right? Well, read on.

Compare a version taken from a webpage intended for children to read (the text is lifted from the book Old Greek Stories by a certain James Baldwin [not this one], published in 1895). In this version, significantly, Athena makes Arachne promise never to spin again if she loses the contest. Arachne, of course, agrees.

First Arachne weaves, and it is a beautiful piece of work. But then

…Athena began to weave.  And she took of the sunbeams that gilded the mountain top, and of the snowy fleece of the summer clouds, and of the blue ether of the summer sky, and of the bright green of the summer fields, and of the royal purple of the autumn woods,—and what do you suppose she wove?

The web which she wove was full of enchanting pictures of flowers and gardens, and of castles and towers, and of mountain heights, and of men and beasts, and of giants and dwarfs, and of the mighty beings who dwell in the clouds with Zeus.  And those who looked upon it were so filled with wonder and delight, that they forgot all about the beautiful web which Arachne had woven.  And Arachne herself was ashamed and afraid when she saw it; and she hid her face in her hands and wept.

"Oh, how can I live," she cried, "now that I must never again use loom or spindle?"

And she kept on weeping and saying, "How can I live?"

The transformation is startling, no? Especially the addition of the seasons, nowhere to be found in Ovid, which seems to be a particularly northern European obsession.

And there’s the clever left turn of making life not worth living for Arachne, without having to go so far as to introduce a noose.

Athena (in this version) takes pity on Arachne. She is a kind goddess, as of course all Olympian divinities are in the universe created for the young:

"I would free you from your bargain if I could, but that is a thing which no one can do.  You must hold to your agreement never to touch loom or spindle again.  And yet, since you will never be happy unless you can spin and weave, I will give you a new form so that you can carry on your work with neither spindle nor loom."

Then she touched Arachne with the tip of the spear which she sometimes carried; and the maiden was changed at once into a nimble spider, which ran into a shady place in the grass and began merrily to spin and weave a beautiful web.

There you have it. A rash girl is punished, as children should be when their executive functioning fails them, but the punishment is actually something nicer and more full of grace than a punishment might normally be.

And they lived happily ever after.

There is a lot more to unpack, but I’ll leave it at this for now. I’ll just say that long ago, when I was a young teen, I spent a summer living in an outbuilding—something more than a garage and less than a mother-in-law apartment—where every morning a large garden spider with her black and gold legs would weave an enormous web in my open doorway. I admired that spider’s persistence, especially since every morning I had to break the web to get out of the door. I have never feared spiders since.

(Image of spider web by Albrecht Fietz from pixabay.com)