Corone (crow)

Greek mythological woman

In Greek and Roman mythology, Corone (Κορώνη ) is a young woman who attracted the attention of Poseidon, the god of the sea, and was saved by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. She was a princess and the daughter of Coronaeus. Her brief tale is recounted in the narrative poem Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. Several other myths surround the crow about its connection to Athena.

According to Ovid, one day as Corone was walking by the seashore, the sea god Poseidon saw her and attempted to seduce her. When his efforts failed, he attempted to rape her instead. However, Corone fled from his rapacious advances, crying out to men and gods. While no man heard her, "the virgin goddess feels pity for a virgin"; Pallas Athena transformed her into a crow. An unspecified time later, she recounted her woes during a conversation with the raven, Lycius, who had similar grievances of his own. She also cited her resentment that her place as Athena's bird servant had been usurped and taken over by the owl, the metamorphosed Nyctimene, because that transformation was punitive. Ovid himself does not mention her by name and simply calls her cornix, or "the crow", in Latin. Instead her name proper is attested by an anonymous Greek paradoxographer.

The relation between Athena and the crow is not always amicable. In one myth, after Hephaestus tried to assault Athena and the infant Erichthonius was born from his semen that fell on the earth, Athena put the child in a box and gave it to the daughters of Cecrops, instructing them not to open the box before she returned. The maidens disobeyed her, and the crow flew to Athena bearing the news. Athena, angered over the ill news the crow had brought her, cursed it to never be able to fly over the Acropolis again. The narrative featuring Poseidon seems to have developed as an elaboration of this version, as otherwise it has no starting point in a historical cult of Athena and the crow. In one of Aesop's fables, a crow invites a dog to a banquet and makes a sacrifice to Athena. The dog remarks that this is no use, as Athena dislikes her. The crow then answers that Athena might not like her, but she will sacrifice to her nonetheless in an effort to make amends with the goddess. A fragment from the Hellenistic poet Callimachus implies the existence of a story, not surviving, where the crow warned the owl (Nyctimene?) against tale bearing, lamenting that the wrath of Athena is a terrible thing. The traveller Pausanias wrote that in Corone, a small town in Messenia in southwestern Peloponnese, a statue of Athena held in her outstretched hand a crow instead of the accustomed owl.