Athena's Little Owl

Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, has protected the city of Athens for 7,000 years, the first settlers having occupied the Acropolis in the Neolithic age. And she always hangs out with her Little Owl (Athene noctua), who prefers to nest in nooks and crannies and has likewise frequented the Acropolis since prehistoric times.

The city-state of Athens minted the first silver owl around 526 BCE, near the end of the Archaic Era. The coin was a tetradrachm, about seventeen grams of silver worth four drachms or about four days' labor.

That's a lot of money. Typically you would spend obols or drachms on everyday items; you would spend any owls you might accumulate on luxuries like jewelry or horses or you might save them.

Unlike earlier coins, Athenian owls had a head and a tail: Athena's head was on the obverse and her companion and emissary, the Little Owl, on the reverse.

Silver bullion for the owls came from Laurium, a village thirty-seven miles to the southwest on the Aegean, where ten thousand or more slaves extracted around a thousand talents a year (with one Attic talent equal to 26 kg or 57 lb). Athens owned the mines and rented out some of the mining rights for a percentage of the production.

At the mint in Athens, in a kind of ancient production line, slaves heated the silver in an oven and molded pieces (or flans) by weight. Other slaves carved dies, from bronze or iron, with the image to be imprinted on the coin in the negative. So, for the owl, the carvers hollowed out Athena's helmeted head, in profile, on the obverse die and the Little Owl in three-quarters view with the head turned full front on the reverse die. And other slaves still struck the coins, one at a time, by "sandwiching" hot flans between dies, hitting them with a mallet, and tossing them into a vat of water to cool.

Now in 483 BCE, seven years after the Greeks had turned back the Persians at Marathon, a rich new lode of silver came to light at Laurium. Herodotus (484 to 425 BCE), whom we used to call the "Father of History" when I was in school, tells the story: Themistocles convinced the Athenians to use the money for defense, to build warships, in case the Persians mounted another invasion.

Which, as it happens, they did, in 480 BCE. Only through the exceptional valor of Leonidas and his Spartan 300 were the Persians delayed, at the Battle of Thermopylae, on their way to destroy Athens. For Xerxes, son of the first invader Darius, was as intent as his father on punishing Athens for its part in inciting rebellion in the Ionic colonies in Asia Minor.

Fortunately, the Athenians had time to prepare for the attack, at least to some extent. One citizen buried his owls and other treasures on the Acropolis, and we did not discover his hoard, in the burn layer dated to this event, until 1886.

So the Athenians went to Salamis and witnessed the sea-battle between the Greeks, in warships paid for with owls, and the Persians. The Greeks won, and Xerxes returned to Persia, leaving one of his generals in charge of the conquest of Greece. That general was beaten at the Battle of Plataea a year later.

The Athenians treated the damage to the Acropolis as a "lest we forget" monument and did not start rebuilding until 447 BCE, when Pericles began his building program that included the Parthenon (constructed under the supervision of Phidias from 447 to 432 BCE) and the new Athenian mint, put up in the Agora in 430 BCE. The new public buildings were paid for with owls.

An ancient Athenian "owl," or tetradrachm, about seventeen grams of silver, circa 480 to 420 BCE. Held by the Museum of  Fine Arts, Lyon. In daily use, the Athenian drachmas were called glaukes (γλαῦκες, owls).

Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC by 2.5. Uploaded by Jastrow.