Arachne and Athena: Two Artists, One Contest and Ovid at the Loom

Beside the old imperial forums in Rome, two half-buried columns still carry a stretch of carved frieze from the Forum of Nerva, finished at the end of the first century CE. Women spin and weave along it under the patronage of Minerva, and one damaged panel is usually read as the punishment of Arachne. It is the myth told as an imperial lesson: the goddess presides, the crafts are orderly, presumption is corrected. Ovid, who had told the story about ninety years earlier, is much harder to pin down. His version is a contest between two genuine artists, and he describes both works so vividly that the reader is made to judge.

Famous for nothing but her hands

Arachne, Ovid insists, owed nothing to birthplace or family. Her father, Idmon of Colophon, dyed wool with Phocaean purple; her mother, also humbly born, was dead; she lived in the small town of Hypaepa in Lydia. Yet her name had spread through the Lydian cities, and the nymphs left the vineyards of Mount Tmolus and the waters of the Pactolus to watch her work. Ovid’s attention is on process. The nymphs come to see not only the finished cloth but the making: raw wool wound into a ball, softened with the fingers, drawn out into long fleecy threads, the spindle turned by a practised thumb, the needle at work in embroidery.

You could tell, Ovid says, that Pallas had taught her. That is precisely what Arachne will not accept. Let the goddess compete with me, she says; if I lose, I will refuse no penalty.

Athena comes, disguised as an old woman with grey hair and a staff, and offers sensible advice: seek fame among mortals, but yield to the goddess and ask her pardon. Arachne almost strikes her. The disguise falls away. The nymphs and the Lydian women bow down; Arachne does not, though her face reddens and pales, Ovid says, like the sky at sunrise. She persists, and the two looms are set up side by side.

Two tapestries, two ideas of art

Ovid lingers over the technique: purple threads beside threads of gold, colours shading into one another so finely that, as in a rainbow, neighbouring tones look identical while the ends of the scale are wholly different. Then he describes the two pictures.

Athena weaves a state monument. On the rock of Mars in Athens sit the twelve gods on high thrones, Jupiter in the middle, each recognizable by his or her own features. Neptune strikes the rock with his trident and a stream of sea water springs up; Athena, with spear, shield, helmet and aegis, strikes the earth and an olive tree grows, pale and laden with fruit. The gods marvel; Victory completes the work. In each corner she adds a small warning scene of mortals punished for rivalling the gods, and she frames the whole with her own olive.

Anyone who knew Athens would recognize the subject. Pausanias records that the west pediment of the Parthenon showed this very contest between Athena and Poseidon for the land. Athena’s tapestry is a temple pediment in wool: symmetrical, hierarchical, centred on her own triumph.

Arachne weaves something else entirely: the gods in disguise, deceiving mortal women. Europa is carried off by a bull so lifelike you would think it real, on a sea you would think real; she looks back toward the shore and draws her feet up from the spray. Then Jupiter as an eagle, a swan, a satyr, a husband, a shower of gold, a flame, a shepherd, a serpent; Neptune as a bull, a river, a ram, a horse, a bird, a dolphin; Apollo, Bacchus, Saturn. Every figure, Ovid says, has its own face and every scene its own setting, and around it all runs a border of flowers twined with ivy. There is no centre and no throne, only episode after episode.

Neither Pallas nor Envy itself could fault that work. The golden-haired warrior maiden grieved at its success and tore the embroidered cloth, with all the crimes of heaven.

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

Ovid in the narrator’s chair

Notice what the narrator has just admitted. He never says Arachne’s work was worse; he says even the goddess could find no flaw. Athena does not answer the tapestry with criticism. She answers it with a shuttle to the forehead: three or four blows with the boxwood shuttle from Mount Cytorus. Arachne cannot bear it and ties a noose around her neck. The goddess, in what passes for pity, lifts her and says: live, then, but hang, and let the same penalty fall on all your descendants. She sprinkles her with the juice of Hecate’s herb. Arachne’s hair falls away, then her nose and ears; her head shrinks, her whole body grows small, her slender fingers cling to her sides as legs, and the rest is belly. From it she still draws thread, and as a spider she works at her old webs.

Ovid’s sympathies are hard to miss, and they are not simple. His own poem is Arachne’s kind of art: crowded, unframed, full of the gods’ disguises and the victims who pay for them. The episode also opens a run of stories about mortals who challenge gods and lose, including the satyr Marsyas, flayed by Apollo a few hundred lines later. Readers have long seen the poet in the weaver, especially since Augustus banished Ovid to the Black Sea in 8 CE for what Ovid himself called “a poem and a mistake”. That reading needs care. The Arachne episode was almost certainly written before the exile, so it cannot be a coded complaint about it. What it shows instead is an artist who understood, before he paid for it, what happens when skill tells uncomfortable truths about the powerful.

What the spider kept

Athena was the patron of weaving, Athena Ergane, the Worker, and in Athens woven cloth was offered to her as worship: at the Panathenaea a new robe made by Athenian women and girls was presented to her ancient olive-wood statue, a ceremony the Parthenon frieze seems to show. Hesiod has her teach weaving to the very first woman, as our story of Pandora’s making describes. Human skill at the loom was meant to be a gift returned to the goddess, not a rival claim.

Arachne’s offence, then, is not bad art but independence: she will not say who taught her. Her punishment keeps the skill and removes the signature. The spider still weaves, perfectly and anonymously, forever.

Later artists noticed Ovid’s tilt. In Velázquez’s painting in the Prado known as The Spinners, ordinary women work wool in the foreground while, in a bright alcove behind them, Athena confronts Arachne before a tapestry of Europa and the bull. The goddess wins; the weaver’s picture stays on the wall. Ovid gave a similar afterlife to another silenced woman, the nymph whose voice outlives her body, in the story of Echo.