Athena asks Zeus to help Odysseus
I illustrated the moment Athena tries to persuade Zeus to let Odysseus return to Ithaca.
As with every Odyssey related illustration, I tried to take every archaeological evidence and Homeric description there is into consideration to come up with something that is close to the original vision of the ancient Greeks.
Here, that endeavor required a lot of speculation since Homer’s descriptions of the Gods and Olympus are really sparse. What he tells us is that the Olympians have a council at Zeus’ palace with only Poseidon not attending. So I should have depicted every God? Not really. First of all because doing that would require months of research and second because my illustration would have been packed with tons of information making my endeavor to create a focal point impossible. So my solution to this was illustrating a closeup of the room with only Athena and Zeus visible to you (the rest of the Gods are just outside of our point of view). After this decision I had to find a way to depict the palace and the two Olympians. In the Illiad, Homer tells us that Zeus’ palace is covered in bronze and the throne room has a golden floor and golden thrones for all the Gods. Athena is described as being blue (or grey) eyed sometimes wearing the aegis (and other weapons that I will not include here since this isn’t a war scene) and Zeus as having long hair, dark brows, a beard and holding a sceptre.
As you can see, there are many gaps that I have to somehow fill. But where does someone find answers to cover Homer’s silence? Archaeology. The Homeric stories supposedly happened during the 12th or 13th century BCE. This was the time of the Mycenaeans. The remains of that civilization can give us a good picture of how things looked back then. But do they tell us anything about the appearance of their Gods? Not really. So we had to dig deeper.
Throughout their history, the Greeks viewed their Gods as a more powerful version of themselves. In the statues (that I couldn’t use as references since they were of later periods) they look like regular fit people wearing regular-expensive clothes (with the aegis being an exception). With that thought in mind I tried to look at elite Mycenaean fashion and implement that to the Gods with some gold touches for extra luxury. For Athena I used the images of those frescoes that depict women in some kind of a festival and for Zeus I used that other fresco that depicts wealthy male figures. As you can see there is a great difference in skin color between them. That’s because Athena is wearing some kind of makeup throughout her body that makes her look whiter than Zeus' tanned skin tone. The evidence behind that artistic choice is again those frescoes that depict Mycenaean women with such aesthetics.
Moving to the accessories, I had to add the aegis on Athena to make the viewer make a visual connection with the more familiar images of the Goddess. The thing is that the more standardized appearance of it is not what Homer tells us about it. In the Iliad it is described to be consisting of a hundred golden tassels and, of course, in the center there is the terrifying face of the Gorgon Medusa. For that my references were those archaic depictions of the figure (the earliest ones that I could find). Moving to Zeus, he is holding a sceptre that I based on those depictions on Greek pottery (much later than Mycenaean period but better than my 21st century imagination) and since Homer gives us a description of it having golden suns I added those golden spheres. His throne is based on Mycenaean throne reconstructions.
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For the room behind them, I looked at how Mycenaean throne rooms looked. They consisted of a throne, a fireplace in the center (with a ceiling opening for the smoke to escape) and four columns holding the immense weight of the roof. So, for the only one of those columns that is visible, my reference were those elaborate Mycenaean columns from “Atreus’ tomb”. For the wall patterns I created a scene in which a griffin hunts a deer based on similar depictions from Mycenaean palaces.
A small excerpt from the Odyssey that mentions this scene:
Athena said:
“Aegisthus deserved the punishment he received. Yet it is not his fate that troubles me. My heart grieves for Odysseus, who remains stranded on the lonely island of Ogygia, far from his home and friends. There, the nymph Calypso keeps him against his will, hoping he will forget Ithaca. But all he longs for is to see his homeland once more. Have you forgotten the countless sacrifices he offered you during the Trojan War? Why do you still allow him to suffer?”
Zeus answered:
“How could I ever forget Odysseus, whose wisdom and devotion to the gods surpassed that of other men? It is Poseidon who stands in his way. Odysseus blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus, and ever since, the sea god has sought revenge by preventing his return. Yet if we stand together, Poseidon will eventually yield. Let us decide how we may help him.”