Arachne

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Arachne is a figure of Greek and Roman myth: a mortal woman, famed for her skill at the loom, who set her weaving against the goddess Athena and was turned into a spider. Her name is simply the Greek word for spider, and the biological order to which spiders belong — Arachnida — still carries it.

The fullest surviving account is Roman, not Greek. Ovid tells the story at length in Book 6 of the Metamorphoses, where the weaver is a Lydian of humble birth whose work is so fine that nymphs leave their streams to watch her. Pride undoes her: she refuses to credit Athena, here called Minerva, as the source of the art, and declares she would gladly compete with the goddess herself. Athena comes disguised as an old woman to counsel humility, is rebuffed, and reveals herself; the two then weave against each other. The goddess depicts her own victories and the punishments visited on mortals who challenged the gods. Arachne weaves the opposite case — a catalogue of the gods’ deceptions, the disguises under which Zeus and others seized mortal women. The work is flawless, and that is the offense. The goddess strikes the tapestry, beats the weaver, and when Arachne hangs herself in shame, transforms her into a spider, condemned to spin forever.

How old the tale is beneath Ovid is harder to fix. Virgil alludes to the spider hated by Minerva in the Georgics but does not name Arachne, and no extended Greek treatment survives; scholars generally read the figure as belonging to a wide ancient pattern of stories in which a mortal who rivals a deity in a particular craft is destroyed for it, the weaving contest serving as the version proper to a goddess of, among other things, handwork. Ovid’s telling is the one that fixed the details for everything that followed, and his Arachne is pointedly sympathetic: her craft is genuinely unmatched, and her woven indictment of the gods is, within the poem, true.

That ambivalence is what has kept the myth alive. The standard reading takes it as a fable of hubris — the overreaching of human pride against the divine, punished as such overreaching always is. Against this runs a counter-reading, prominent in modern criticism, that notices how Ovid stacks the case: the mortal artist tells the truth about the powerful and is silenced for it, her voice reduced to thread. Velázquez and others returned to the scene for exactly this doubleness. The transformation that ends the story is the kind of detail Ovid’s whole poem turns on — a person becoming the thing their fate had already made of them, the weaver left weaving, the boast answered by an endless web.

→ Related: Leda · Danae · Orestes