Goddess of Craft, Wisdom, and War

Minerva was the Roman goddess of handicraft, skilled intelligence, and the arts, and with Jupiter and Juno completed the Capitoline Triad at the heart of Roman state cult. Her name is Italic, and her cult reached Rome partly through the Etruscans, among whom she was Menrva; from an early period she was thoroughly identified with the Greek Athena and took over that goddess's attributes of the helmet, spear, aegis, and owl, and her birth, fully armed, from the head of Jupiter.

What Minerva chiefly governed was skill, the intelligence expressed in making and doing: weaving and spinning, carpentry and metal-work, the trades of the craftsman, but also the arts of the physician, the schoolteacher, the sculptor, and the poet. Her warlike aspect, inherited from Athena, made her a goddess of strategic and disciplined war rather than of the battle-frenzy that belonged to Mars.