Born in Full Armor From the Head of Zeus

Athena's birth is one of the strangest in Greek mythology and Hesiod's Theogony tells it directly: Zeus's first consort was the Titaness Metis, whose name means cunning intelligence, and when a prophecy warned that Metis would bear a son destined to overthrow him, Zeus swallowed her whole while she was already pregnant, absorbing her wisdom into himself. Some time later Zeus suffered a tremendous headache, and when the smith god Hephaestus, in some versions of the story, split his skull open to relieve it, Athena emerged fully grown and already armored, born as her father's daughter alone rather than through any mother's labor. That unusual origin marked her from the start as a different kind of goddess, patroness of strategic warfare and disciplined skill rather than the raw battle frenzy associated with Ares, and patroness equally of wisdom, weaving and practical craft. She won her city's patronage from Poseidon by gifting Athens the olive tree, judged more useful than his saltwater spring, and she features throughout Greek myth as a protector of favored heroes, guiding Perseus against Medusa, Heracles through several of his labors, and Odysseus across the whole of his ten year journey home.