Pallas

This Pallas is a second-generation Titan, son of Crius and Eurybia, and his significance lies in his children: by the Oceanid Styx he fathers Nike (Victory), Kratos (Power), Bia (Force) and Zelos (Zeal), the four personifications who, in Hesiod, take their place permanently beside the throne of Zeus because their mother Styx was first to bring her children to his side in the Titan war. They are less independent gods than the standing attributes of sovereign power. Pallas himself has almost no narrative; a late tradition, explaining the epithet Pallas that Athena bears, held that she killed him and took his name and skin.

The name Pallas is borne by several unrelated figures in Greek myth, a Giant, an early Athenian, a companion of Aeneas, and they should not be run together. The four children Pallas fathers on Styx, Nike, Kratos, Bia and Zelos, are themselves worshipped, where they are worshipped at all, chiefly as attributes of other gods rather than as independent cult figures in their own right, Nike above all attracting temples and statues, most famously the Temple of Athena Nike on the Athenian Acropolis, so that Pallas's own obscurity stands in some contrast to the considerable later prominence of at least one of his children.

Ancient sources disagree about why Athena carries the name Pallas, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly rather than resolved into a single tidy story. One tradition, noted elsewhere, holds that Athena slew the Titan Pallas described here and took his name, along with his goatskin, as a trophy of victory, folding the goddess's epithet into the wider Titan war narrative. A separate and, to many classicists, older tradition, preserved by Apollodorus, tells a considerably different story with no Titan involved at all: in this version Pallas is a childhood companion of Athena, often described as a daughter of the sea god Triton, with whom the young goddess trained in mock combat, and Athena accidentally kills her friend when Zeus distracts Pallas at a crucial moment by interposing the aegis, causing her to drop her guard; grief-stricken, Athena is said to have taken her friend's name in permanent memorial and to have carved a wooden image, the Palladion, in her honor, the same sacred image later central to the mythology of Troy's protection and its eventual theft by Greek heroes.

The two traditions cannot both be literally true, and ancient mythographers themselves show no consistent preference between a hostile Titan slain in war and a beloved friend killed by accident as the true origin of one of Athena's most familiar epithets, an unresolved variance that fits a broader pattern in Greek myth where a single name or image, here the epithet Pallas and the sacred Palladion, could carry more than one explanatory story simultaneously without either version driving the other out of circulation.