In the Encyclopédie, Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt wrote an article on ‘Minerva’. He writes that she is the “goddess of wisdom and the arts, the only child of Jupiter who merited participation in the privileges associated with the highest status of divinity” and that every mythologist and poet speaks of her this way.
What surprised me most about this article is the statement that she got the ‘nickname’ Athena (Ἀθήνη) later, which isn’t true. Ἀθήνη, the greek Goddess and equivalent of Minerva, existed in myths and other resources before Minerva.
Perhaps this wasn’t known back then, which surprises me. They knew a lot about the Greek and Roman mythology due to the neoclassicism, yet weren’t aware of the historical order. However, this could
What surprised me most about this article is the statement that she got the ‘nickname’ Athena (Ἀθήνη) later, which isn’t true. Ἀθήνη, the greek Goddess and equivalent of Minerva, existed in myths and other resources before Minerva.
Perhaps this wasn’t known back then, which surprises me. They knew a lot about the Greek and Roman mythology due to the neoclassicism, yet weren’t aware of the historical order. However, this could