Cunning intelligence — μῆτις

Use in the book

Athena has already been praised for martial force and as mother of the arts. At XXXII.10 the speaker says that she is male and female by nature, then calls her war-bearing and μῆτι. The noun joins capability of mind to the hymn’s forceful and productive portrait. It need not be taken as blameworthy deceit: the range of skilled thought fits the goddess’s arts and effective action. Nor should the nearby sex-pair convert μῆτις into a technical name for a gender theory. The lexical point is that an abstraction can be voiced as an address, presenting the goddess as intelligence in action or as its concentrated possessor. The verse does not introduce a separate character called Metis to replace Athena as its addressee.

Places to read

1. Hymn XXXII · Line 10The noun of skill or cunning becomes a direct address within Athena’s epithets.

Translation

The English ends the line with “cunning,” a natural concise description but one that makes the Greek nominal form less apparent. “O resourceful intelligence” would expose the grammar at the cost of a less fluent hymn. The headword therefore preserves μῆτις and explains the address rather than silently recataloguing the form as an adjective. Its wider lexical association with counsel does not establish a particular philosophical school here.

Attested forms

μῆτι

Occurrence inventory

1 in total. XXXII.10

Lexical references

LSJ n67551 (n67551)

Further source

LSJ, n67551. Checked lexical range and formation against the official Perseus LSJ entry.