Arachne

You can tag along with Thor as he faces his own band of giants.

Or watch what unfolds when Arachne accidentally insults the goddess Athena.

When winter comes, get ready.

Discover Columbia's Amaze Puff collection.

goes so badly

Yeah, and decide that you need to insert Arachne, the Greek mythological figure, into Spider-Man.

But that's just a passing shot at that fiasco.

But the point is that it was really sort of kind of anybody's game in some ways.

Odysseus also famously invokes Athena to disguise him as a beggar upon his return home to Ithaca, and he tells his servants, his son, and even his wife, who don't recognize him, a long and complicated lie about who he is.

Speaking of disguises, many complicated plots in Greek myth find their origin in Zeus taking on the shape of an animal in order to seduce a mortal woman, and other gods too often partake in shapeshifting to trick mortals, like Athena does with Arachne.

So when all the Greek heroes and gods, so highly respected and emulated in Greek culture, lie their face off all the time, it's hardly surprising that the Romans would eventually give the Greek relationship with the truth a cynical nickname, Graeca Fides, Greek Faith.

Herodotus claims that the Persian king Cyrus once boasted he did not fear the Greeks, who have a place in the middle of their city where they meet in order to deceive each other with false oaths.

You men spin wool and bring back your tale of work in baskets when it is done.

You twirl round the spindle, big with fine thread, more deftly than Penelope, more delicately than Arachne, doing work such as an unkempt drab squatting on a log would do.

Everybody knows why Heister left all his property to his freedmen, why in his lifetime he gave so many presents to his young wife.

The woman who sleeps third in a big bed will want for nothing.

Like what is the origin story behind that? So I'm Greek and I'm really into Greek mythology and Athena is my favorite goddess.

And there's a story of Athena you've all heard of Arachne, like arachnid, like spiders.

So she was immortal and she had so much hubris.

She said, I can weave better than Athena, who is the goddess of many things, wisdom and war, but also weaving.

And Athena was like, bitch you thought and so she challenged her to a weaving competition and of course Arachne lost and Athena turned her into a spider so that's where Arachne comes from but I chose that because I'm also a knitter I'm selling some of my knitting at the merch table if you're interested and my knitting page is Athena Weaves and then Athena's Tapestry I was trying to like weave together like I'm weaving together songs and stories and I'm weaving yarn and I'm weaving is just kind of like the theme.

I love that.

And I love that your merch is like what you make as well.

You are secretly enjoying your exile, but your mind refuses to let go of serious topics.

Time and again, it returns to the story of Apollo and Daphne or Minerva and Arachne as you look out across the Black Sea or wander amongst your Scythian neighbors, partaking in their weed sauna rituals and drinking their unwatered wine and shaping your mouth to their language around their campfires.

You think back to the myths of transformation that made you famous.

The myths the emperor demanded.

It's like you've been transformed into something new, something cold and lost in this strange and foreign world.

Has freedom, true freedom from Augustus, robbed you of your tongue? You feel as rooted as Daphne to this ground, your arms long laurel branches, no longer able to hold your stylus, your throat filled with bark and leaves, no longer capable of speech.

You feel as twisted and knotted as Arachne, spinning and spinning, a web that never seems to withstand the storms that plague this area.

Once you built worlds out of your words.

You men spin wool and bring back your tale of work in baskets when it is done.

You twirl round the spindle, big with fine thread, more deftly than Penelope, more delicately than Arachne, doing work such as an unkempt drab squatting on a log would do.

Everybody knows why Heister left all his property to his freedmen, why in his lifetime he gave so many presents to his young wife.

The woman who sleeps third in a big bed will want for nothing.

The first modern illustration that made us think about a spider as a horror icon was probably the 19th century Victorian wallpaper series featuring cobwebbed corners.

That visual cue immediately connected to an older mythic image of the spider spinning fate, which scholars note appears in everything from Greek myths about Arachne to African tales of Anansi.

What would push the spider into Halloween decor was less a deep-rooted pagan belief and more an aesthetic that allowed decorators to create a claustrophobic, creepy atmosphere with minimal effort.

You might think the bats linked to vampires is purely folklore.

You men spin wool and bring back your tail of work in baskets when it is done.

You twirl round the spindle big with fine thread more deftly than Penelope, more delicately than Arachne, doing work such as an unkempt drab squatting on a log would do.

Everybody knows why Hyster left all his property to his freedman, why in his lifetime he gave so many presents to his young wife.

The woman who sleeps third in a big bed will want for nothing.