Pallas

Also Known As: Greek Pallas, from pallo, “to brandish a spear”; called the Titan god of battle and warcraft, and in later sources conflated with a Giant of the same name
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He embodies the wielding of the spear, and fathers the four powers by which wars are won.
Role in Mythos: He is a second-generation Titan of warcraft whose children defect to Zeus and whose skin, in one tradition, becomes Athena’s aegis.
Relation to Humans: No Greek city is known to have given him a temple, a priesthood or a festival, so he reaches mortals only through the abstractions he fathered and through the goddess who carries his name. The town of Pellene in Achaea told Pausanias it was named after him, which is close to the only claim any community made on him.

A goatskin hangs over Athena’s arm in temple after temple, fringed and scaled and stiff as old harness, with a severed Gorgon’s face fixed at its centre. Painters gave the fringe snakes. Sculptors gave it weight, the drag of a real pelt across a shoulder. The Greeks were not entirely sure where the thing came from, but one strand of the tradition is blunt about it. The goddess of careful warfare took it off a body, and the body had a name.

The name is the first difficulty, because it is also hers. Pallas comes from pallo, to brandish or shake a spear, and Homer says Pallas Athena so often that the two words fuse. By Pindar’s day Pallas on its own meant the goddess and nobody had to ask which one. But underneath the epithet there is a male god called Pallas, and the Greeks kept more than one of him, and they were never especially bothered about telling them apart.

Hesiod gives the version with the best claim to age. In the Theogony, Eurybia, daughter of the sea, joins with the Titan Crius and bears three sons: Astraeus of the stars, Perses the destroyer, and Pallas. It is a family named like a stretch of night sky. Crius is simply the Ram. Astraeus fathers the winds and the morning star on the Dawn; Perses fathers Hecate. Pallas married Styx, the eldest daughter of Ocean, whose black water runs through the underworld and whose name is the oath the gods swear when they mean it.

Their children were Zelus, Nike, Cratus and Bia. Rivalry, Victory, Strength and Force. Hesiod says something strange and precise about them: they have no house apart from Zeus, no dwelling and no road except the one the god leads them down, and they sit forever beside him. When Styx came up out of the underworld at the start of the war against the Titans, she brought the four of them to Olympus and gave them to Zeus, and he took the oath of the gods in her name in return. So the god of warcraft supplied both sides of the ledger. His wife swore the loyalty oath of the winning regime and his children became its enforcers, and he stayed where he was.

What happened to him after that depends on which book is open. Apollodorus, running through the war of the Giants, records it in a single flat sentence: Athena stripped the skin off Pallas and used it to cover her own body in the fighting. The Suda, centuries later, still knew the story, and offered it as one of two explanations for the goddess’s name. Either she brandishes the spear, or she killed Pallas.

Picture the field afterward, which no ancient writer bothers to do. The noise has moved off somewhere else. A goddess crouches over a body in the churned ground, working a blade under the hide at the shoulder and pulling, and the skin comes away with the wet sound of a tent being struck, and she shakes it out and hangs it on her arm while it is still warm. Then she goes back into the battle wearing him.

He lost, and the tradition never pretends otherwise.

Beyond that hide, no one describes him. There is no statue, no vase painting securely his, no line of verse about his face or his height. What can be recovered is oblique: the aegis is a goatskin, which means the thing Athena flayed had a goat’s hide, and that has led readers to imagine a shaggy, horned, goatish god standing in a family of animal-named brothers. It is an inference and worth naming as one. The reading that goes further, tying him to the constellation Auriga and its storm-bringing goat-star Capella and making him the god of the late-spring campaign season, is a modern reconstruction rather than anything an ancient text says.

The other Pallases crowd in immediately. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes calls the Moon the daughter of lord Pallas, son of Megamedes; Ovid calls the Dawn Pallantis, the daughter of Pallas. Hyginus lists a Pallas among the Giants born of Earth and Tartarus, then hands that Giant both Styx and Hesiod’s four children, plus Scylla and the Fountains and the Lakes, which is the moment the Titan and the Giant become one confused person on the page. Cicero reports a tradition in which Pallas was Athena’s own father, and she killed him because he tried to rape her. Another Pallas was a son of Lycaon who founded a town in Arcadia. Another led the Pallantides against Theseus for the throne of Athens. Another died young in Virgil, the son of Evander, and had nothing to do with any of them.

The sources disagree, and they disagree without embarrassment. There was no one keeping the list.

What Pallas can do is legible even so, and it follows from the household rather than from any deed of his own. He is warcraft as capability, the shaken spear rather than the blood: the thing Ares is not. He generates the four qualities that decide battles and cannot be commanded directly, and through them, at one remove, he touches every fight the Olympians ever win. His wife holds the oath that makes divine promises binding.

His limits are the same facts read from the other side. He has no cult, no temple, no festival, no myth in which he acts rather than is acted upon. Everything he fathered walked out of his house and swore itself to the enemy, and the one story that gives him a starring role is the story of his death. The god of brandishing the spear ends as material, a hide stiffening on somebody else’s arm, and the name he was called by belongs now to the goddess who took it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pallas in Greek mythology?

Pallas is a Titan of the second generation, the son of Crius and Eurybia and the brother of Astraeus and Perses, regarded as a god of battle and warcraft. He married Styx and fathered Zelus, Nike, Cratus and Bia, the personifications of Rivalry, Victory, Strength and Force. His name comes from the Greek verb pallo, meaning to brandish or shake a spear.

Did Athena kill Pallas and make her aegis from his skin?

In one tradition, yes. Apollodorus records that during the war against the Giants, Athena flayed Pallas and used his skin to protect her body in the fighting, and the Byzantine lexicon known as the Suda gives that killing as one possible origin of Athena’s title “Pallas.” Other sources derive the title instead from the goddess brandishing her spear, and the Pallas killed in this story is often identified as a Giant rather than the Titan.

What is the difference between Pallas the Titan and Pallas the Giant?

Originally they were separate figures: the Titan is the son of Crius and Eurybia in Hesiod’s Theogony, while the Giant is one of the Gigantes born from Earth who fought the Olympians. By the second century AD the two had been merged, and Hyginus lists Pallas among the Giants while also giving him Styx as a wife and the Titan’s children. Ancient writers frequently treated the war of the Titans and the war of the Giants as the same event, which made the confusion easy.

Why is Athena called Pallas Athena?

Two explanations circulated in antiquity and neither ever won. One derives the name from pallo, to brandish a spear, which suits a warrior goddess. The other says Athena took the name from an opponent called Pallas whom she killed, either the Giant she flayed for her aegis or a childhood companion she struck down by accident.

What was Pallas the god of?

Pallas was a god of battle and warcraft, understood as the wielding of the spear rather than the slaughter itself. He is best defined through his children, since Victory, Strength, Force and Rivalry are the four powers that decide a war, and all four were his. He received no known temple, priesthood or festival anywhere in Greece.