Bronze Age Mediterranean
Minoan Crete, Ancient Greece and Roman Bath
Minoan Crete | Classical Athens | Roman Britain
Statues from classical Greece and Rome show the goddess Athene with a python at her feet.
‘Some say that the goddess Athene can trace her roots to the Minoan goddess of a millennium before classical times,' said Miranda. 'Athens might have resisted all the invasions that overtook other city states during the Greek Dark Ages and some things might have been preserved from the Mycenaean age. Jacquetta Hawkes says: In the dim inner sanctuary of the Parthenon, Phidias’s towering statue of Athena was of gleaming ivory and gold. Half hidden in the shadow behind her golden shield lurked a bronze-green python.
And there are other statues from classical times that show her with this python.
‘Athene wasn't the first Greek goddess to be associated with a snake in Greek mythology,' replied Quintin. 'The Gorgon Medusa had snakes for hair. And she helped to guard the Apples of Immortality in the Gardens of the Hesperides far to the west, according to Hesiod. Some ancient writers believed these Gardens to lie in the land of the Hyperborians, which might have been Britain.
‘Then have a look at this,’ said Miranda, clicking onto a website that she had already saved in a tab. ‘This was carved by Roman Britons at the Roman baths at Bath. It is likely to be an old British deity glancing back to the times before the Roman invasion. A god with snakes for hair!’
