Abstract

The image of winged Athena appears relatively rarely in Archaic Greek art. Only a small number of monuments in various media attest this iconography. This corpus includes fragments of architectural temple decoration, works of vase painting, glyptic art, and painted terracotta sarcophagi. Their findspots and places of manufacture are geographically diverse: Asia Minor, Attica, and Etruria. Most of these objects are dated to the late sixth century BCE and coexist with numerous other representations of Athena without wings, following an established and readily recognizable iconography. Depictions of the chief Olympian gods (for example, Zeus) as winged are in general exceedingly rare and belong almost exclusively to the early Archaic period (with the exception of Artemis). Moreover, by the end of the sixth century BCE a fixed iconographic repertoire had formed for a specific group of gods and goddesses conventionally depicted with wings, among them Eos, Iris, Eris, Boreas, and others. Athena clearly did not belong to this group. There is no doubt that the artists who created images of winged Athena were fully aware of the canonical types for representing the goddess, and that there must have been compelling reasons to depart from the accepted norm. These unusual features were probably connected with regional nuances in the cult of Athena. The main difficulty of interpretation lies in the absence of textual sources that would shed light on the meaning of this image. Scholars have at their disposal only the monuments themselves. Yet they are in poor state of preservation and the winged Athena is often rendered as an isolated figure, without additional attributes or accompanying figures that might assist in understanding the image. Nevertheless, without claiming to offer an exhaustive interpretation, the authors advance a series of arguments that this unusual iconography of the deity was semantically linked to one of the central themes of ancient Greek culture — namely, the theme of heroic immortality.