Bibliographic record
Abstract
At Zeus service: Hermes in the representations of the birth of Athena 1 From narrative to imagesIn the Theogony Hesiod narrates that Zeus, having become king of the cosmos, consolidates his power through a series of marriages.First, the son of Cronus marries Metis ("the cunning intelligence") and, when she is pregnant with Athena, he swallows her on the advice of Gaia and Uranus, in order to acquire the qualities necessary for a stable and eternal government and to avoid the goddess later generating a son stronger than his father.¹Metis' pregnancy is brought to term by Zeus himself, who delivers Athena from his head.²On this unusual birth, Apollodorus states that Zeus bore his daughter after Hephaestus hit him on the head with an axe.³This detail, absent in Hesiod,⁴ is certainly ancient since it is found in most of the iconographic representations of the birth of Athena.The corpus is well known and has been analyzed from different perspectives.⁵The purpose of this contribution is to investigate the role of Hermes in these scenes starting from a rather exceptional circumstance: the long inscription that runs vertically, from top to bottom, along the body of the god on the Kyllenios Painter amphora found in Cerveteri, in Etruria, and today preserved in Berlin (fig.1).⁶This black-figure amphora, made in Athens between 570 and 560 BC, presents an articulated representation of the birth of Athena in the presence of various deities, all named through inscriptions.The case of Hermes is particular.He has an inscription that is not limited to the theonym alone, but which consists of a sort of sentence, a real self-presentation, which the son of Maia pronounces before Hephaestus: hερμες ειμι Κϙλελνιος ("I am Hermes Kyllenios").The length of the inscription and its particular discursive nature have caused some amazement among art historians, who defined the artist as the Kyllenios Painter by virtue of the epithet that Hermes attributes to Hes., Th. 886 -900. Hes., Th. 924-926.Cf. also Hom., h.Ap.307-309. Apollod.1.3.6. The version of Athena's birth which includes the intervention of Hephaestus assumes that the god was born before the goddess.In Hesiod, however, the order of birth is reversed: Zeus gives birth to Athena from his head and Hera, angry, generates Hephaestus "without joining in love with anyone" (Hes., Th. 924-929).Also in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (305 -355), the birth of Athena by Zeus arouses the anger of Hera, who, in this case, takes her revenge by generating Typhon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".