Aegis

Also Known As: Greek aigis; the word is tied to aix, “goat”, and was also used of a sudden storm-wind; Zeus’s standing epithet aigiochos, “aegis-bearing”, comes from it
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: When a god shakes it over an army, courage drains out of the men who see it and they break and run.
Role in Mythos: It is the war-gear of Zeus, lent to Athena and Apollo, and the ancient writers gave it at least five different origins.
Relation to Humans: No mortal ever carries it; mortals only feel it, as the terror that turns a battle line or a crowded hall into a stampede. Its human echo is the phrase “under the aegis of”, the Greek idea that a strong power can hold its cover over you.

Cloud first. Then the thunder. Zeus reached for his tasselled aegis, all gleaming, wrapped the whole of Mount Ida in cloud, sent the lightning down and shook the thing once, and on the plain below the Greeks turned and ran. Homer gives the moment four lines in the seventeenth book of the Iliad and moves on, as if everyone listening already knew what the aegis was and what happened when it moved.

They did not, quite, and neither do we. The word itself will not hold still. Aigis sounds like aix, a goat, and so most Greeks heard “goatskin”. But the same word could mean a squall, a violent rush of wind, and “Zeus who holds the aegis”, aigiochos, the epithet that follows him through Homer like a shadow, may once have meant nothing more complicated than the sky holding a storm. The object and the weather were never fully separated. When the aegis appears in the Iliad, cloud comes with it.

The fullest look Homer allows comes in the fifth book, when Athena arms for war. She lets her soft embroidered robe fall on her father’s floor, puts on the tunic of Zeus, and throws the aegis over her shoulders. Around its edge, set like a crown, is Rout. Inside it are Strife and Valour and Onset, the chilling one, Phobos and Eris and Alke and Ioke in Homer’s Greek, and in the middle the head of the Gorgon, dread and awful, a portent of Zeus. It is less a garment than a crowd. Elsewhere he gives it a shaggy fringe and a hundred tassels of pure gold, each one tightly woven and each worth a hundred oxen, and calls it ageless and deathless. When Athena carries it through the Greek host in the second book it dazzles, and the men who see it find that war has become sweeter to them than sailing home.

Who made it depends on who is telling. Homer is plain: Hephaestus, the bronze-smith, gave it to Zeus to wear for the routing of warriors. Later writers were not content with a smith and a gift, and began to insist that the aegis had once been alive. Hyginus, writing in Latin, tells of Aex, a daughter of the Sun, whose body was beautiful and whose face was so horrible that the Titans begged Earth to hide her, and Earth put her in a cave on Crete, where she became one of the nurses of the infant Zeus. When Zeus prepared to fight the Titans an oracle told him to go to war protected by a goat’s skin and the Gorgon’s head. He did, he won, and afterwards he gave the aegis to Athena.

Diodorus of Sicily tells a stranger version, one he sets inside an account of the Libyan Dionysus. There the Aegis was an earth-born monster that breathed fire. It first appeared in Phrygia and burned it so thoroughly that the region was still called Burned Phrygia, then scorched the forests from the Taurus mountains to India, set Lebanon alight, crossed Egypt and Libya and fell at last on the woods of Ceraunia. People died or fled. Athena killed it, partly by intelligence and partly by strength, and covered her breast with its hide as armour and as a trophy. Earth, its mother, answered by sending up the Giants. Euripides puts the killing in that war instead: in his Ion, Earth bears the Gorgon at Phlegra to help her sons, Athena kills it, and the snake-armoured skin she wears on her breast is what men call the aegis. Apollodorus has Athena flaying a Giant named Pallas and using his skin to shield her body in the same fight. The one detail that almost everyone shares is the Gorgon’s head, and Apollodorus explains it most simply: Perseus, home from his errand, gave the head to Athena, and she set it in the middle of her shield.

Herodotus, describing the peoples of Libya, offered a human answer. The Libyan women, he says, wear tasselled goatskins stripped of hair and dyed red with madder over the rest of their dress, and the Greek images of Athena copy them exactly, except that the Libyan tassels are leather thongs and Athena’s are snakes. The Greek word aigis, he adds, was formed from the Libyan goatskins. Modern scholars have looked east instead. Hans Güterbock established a rough, shaggy goatskin hunting bag, the kurša, as a sacred object in Hittite texts and images, and Calvert Watkins argued in 2000 that the aegis descends from it.

In the Iliad it works like this. Zeus sends Apollo down to Hector with orders to take the tasselled aegis and shake it hard over the Greek fighters. Apollo walks ahead of the Trojan charge with a mist about his shoulders and the aegis in his hands. For a while he simply holds it still, and nothing changes: arrows and spears find their marks on both sides, and men keep falling. Then he looks the Greeks full in the face, shakes it, and shouts, and their hearts go out of them like cattle scattered by two beasts in the dark with no herdsman near. He kicks the banks of the trench into the ditch to make a road and knocks down the Greek wall as easily as a boy flattens a sandcastle with his hands and feet.

That is the whole power, and it is a strange one. The aegis kills no one. It does not cut, burn or strike. It works on the mind, turning a line of armed men into a herd, and it works the same way under a roof as on a plain: in the Odyssey, as the fight in Odysseus’s hall turns, Athena holds it up from the rafters and the suitors stampede through the house like cattle stung by a gadfly in spring. It also protects. When Ares, furious, drives his long spear against it in the battle of the gods, Homer calls it the terrible aegis that not even Zeus’s lightning can overcome, and the spear does nothing. Athena picks up a boundary stone and knocks him flat. At the end of the poem Apollo spreads the golden aegis over Hector’s corpse so that it is not torn as Achilles drags it behind his chariot.

Its limits are written into the same scenes. Held still, it is only a heavy skin. It has to be shaken, looked through, shouted behind, and the fear it sends belongs to whoever is shaking it. It never belongs to the one who carries it either. Athena and Apollo borrow it, and Homer keeps calling Zeus the aegis-bearer even while it hangs on someone else’s arm. And it is dangerous to friends. In the story Apollodorus tells about the Palladium, the girl Pallas was sparring with the young Athena when Zeus, afraid for his daughter, thrust the aegis between them. Pallas looked up at it, startled, and in that instant Athena’s blow went home. Athena carved a wooden image of her dead friend and wrapped the aegis around its breast, the very thing that had frightened her into dying.

The Romans kept it at the forge. Virgil sets the Cyclopes in Hephaestus’s workshop burnishing the aegis Athena wears in her anger, its surface gold and scaled like a snake’s skin, the serpents linked, the Gorgon’s severed head rolling its eyes on the goddess’s breast. The painters on Attic pots gave it a fringe of snakes and a Gorgon’s face. None of them, and none of the poets, ever said what it weighed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the aegis in Greek mythology?

The aegis is the war-gear of Zeus, a fringed hide or shield-like cover that he and the gods he lends it to shake over an army to fill it with panic. Homer describes it with a hundred golden tassels and the Gorgon’s head at its centre. Zeus’s regular epithet aigiochos, “aegis-bearing”, comes from it.

Who made the aegis?

In the Iliad the smith god Hephaestus made the aegis and gave it to Zeus. Later writers told different origins: Hyginus says it was the skin of Aex, a goat-nurse of the infant Zeus, which he wore against the Titans, while Diodorus and Euripides say Athena made it from the hide of a monster she killed, and Apollodorus says she flayed the Giant Pallas.

Is the aegis Athena’s or Zeus’s?

The aegis belongs to Zeus, who is called the aegis-bearer throughout Homer, but Athena wears it most often and Apollo carries it on Zeus’s orders in the Iliad. Hyginus says Zeus gave it to Athena after defeating the Titans. In art and later literature it became Athena’s signature.

Why does the aegis have Medusa’s head on it?

According to Apollodorus, Perseus gave Medusa’s head to Athena after his quest, and she set it in the middle of her shield. Homer already places the head of the Gorgon on the aegis in the Iliad. In Euripides’ Ion the whole aegis is the skin of a Gorgon that Athena killed at Phlegra.

What does the aegis actually do?

The aegis causes terror: when a god shakes it over an army, the soldiers lose their nerve and flee, as the Greeks do before Apollo in Iliad book 15 and the suitors do before Athena in the Odyssey. It also protects, since Homer says not even Zeus’s lightning can overcome it. It does not work when held still; it has to be shaken.