Athena's birth is one of the most deliberate images in Greek myth. Zeus swallows the pregnant Metis, whose name means cunning intelligence, and afterwards Athena springs from his head, fully grown and armed. Hesiod tells it so that Zeus internalises wisdom itself and then produces a daughter who is that wisdom made active. She has, in the standard accounts, no mother in the ordinary sense and never marries: the epithet Parthenos, the virgin, is central rather than incidental to her.
She is the goddess of practical, disciplined intelligence, the skill in the craftsman's hand and the strategy in the general's mind. This distinguishes her sharply from Ares. Both are war deities, but where Ares is the blind violence of battle, Athena is war conducted with forethought, and Greek storytellers side with her without hesitation.
Her attributes are a compact code: the aegis (a fringed goatskin bearing the Gorgon's head), the spear and helmet, the owl, and the olive. The owl marked her sharp sight; the olive was her gift, and Athens minted it on the coins that carried her owl across the Mediterranean.