Athena's owl: from the coins of Athens to the symbol of wisdom

The scientific name of the little owl, Athene noctua, still preserves the bond between this small nocturnal bird of prey and the protecting goddess of Athens. No other animal has been so closely identified with both an ancient city and a deity at the same time. From the owl on Athenian coins to the owl of Minerva of the philosophers, the history of this symbol runs through religion, economics and European culture.

A goddess with shining eyes

Homer often calls Athena glaukōpis, an epithet that may mean «with shining eyes» or «with grey-blue eyes». The ancients already linked it to glaux, the Greek name for the owl, but the relationship between the two words remains uncertain. In the Homeric poems, moreover, the goddess sometimes turns into a bird without the species always being clear, while the explicit association with the owl became established above all in Athenian art of the archaic and classical periods.

The reasons for the link have been explained in many ways. The owl sees in the dark, as wisdom sees what remains hidden; it lived in large numbers among the rocks of the Acropolis; its frontal, fixed gaze seems that of an attentive observer. These are late or modern interpretations, but they show clearly why the animal lent itself to representing the goddess of intelligence, of the crafts and of strategy.

The «owls» of Laurion

From the late sixth century BC Athens struck silver tetradrachms with the helmeted head of Athena on the obverse and, on the reverse, an owl in profile with its head turned towards the viewer, an olive sprig and the letters ΑΘΕ. The silver came largely from the mines of Laurion, in Attica, which also financed the fleet with which the Athenians won at Salamis in 480 BC.

These coins, familiarly called glaukes, «owls», circulated throughout the Mediterranean and were imitated even in Arabia and Egypt. Their abundance gave rise to the proverb «bringing owls to Athens», already used by Aristophanes in the Birds to describe a pointless act, much like carrying coals to Newcastle in English. Even today the Athenian owl appears on the reverse of the Greek one-euro coin.

The owl of Minerva

The Romans transferred the symbol to Minerva, but in their culture nocturnal birds of prey often had a sinister reputation. Pliny the Elder calls the eagle owl, bubo, a bird of ill omen, and Virgil, in the fourth book of the Aeneid, has Dido hear the lament of a solitary owl on the rooftops before her death. The goddess's owl and the owl of omen thus coexisted as very different images.

In the modern age the owl became above all a symbol of knowledge once more. In the preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, of 1820, Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva begins its flight only as dusk falls, meaning that philosophy understands an age only when it has already run its course. The image enjoyed enormous success and helped make the owl the emblem of universities, libraries and academies.

The journey of this bird is remarkable: from a real animal of the Attic rocks to the mark of an international currency, from a funereal omen to a symbol of philosophical reflection. Anyone who today looks at an owl portrayed on an academic seal or on a Greek coin is continuing, often unknowingly, a tradition that began on the Acropolis more than twenty-five centuries ago.