| Type: | Greek |
| Ate | |
| Deity Of: | Personification of Ruin |
| Abode: | Mount Olympus or Underworld |
| Parents: | Eris (Hesiod) or Zeus (Homer) |
| Member Of: | the Family of Eris |
| Offspring: | Peitho |
In Greek mythology, Ate, Até or Aite (; Ancient Greek: Ἄτη) was the goddess of mischief, delusion, ruin, and blind folly, rash action and reckless impulse who led men down the path of ruin. She also led both gods and men to rash and inconsiderate actions and to suffering.
In the Iliad, Agamemnon describes Ate as she "that blindeth all—a power fraught with bane; delicate are her feet, for it is not upon the ground that she fareth, but she walketh over the heads of men, bringing men to harm, and this one or that she ensnareth."[1]
Homer called Ate the eldest daughter of Zeus, with no mother mentioned.[2] While, according to Hesiod's Theogony, Ate was the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife, with no father mentioned:[3]
Of these offspring of Eris, all personified abstractions, only Ate has any actual identity.[4]
Aeschylus, in his tragedy Agamemnon, has the Chorus call Peitho "the unendurable child of scheming Ruin [''Ἄτας'']".[5]
Ate appears in a story in the Iliad, where it is told how she came to be thrown out of Olympus, and never permitted to return. Zeus held Ate to blame for blinding him to Hera's trickery which resulted in the loss of the birthright Zeus intended for his son Heracles: to be lord over the Argives.[6] As punishment, an enraged Zeus:
According to the mythographer Apollodorus, when Ate was thrown down by Zeus, Ate landed in Phrygia at a place called "the hill of the Phrygian Ate", where the city of Troy was founded.[7]
In the Argonautica, Hera says that "even the gods are sometimes visited by Ate".[8]
In Nonnus's Dionysiaca, Ate, in order to gratify Hera, persuades the boy Ampelus whom Dionysus passionately loves, to impress Dionysus by riding on a bull from which Ampelus subsequently falls and breaks his neck.[9]
Among the tragic writers, Ate appears in a different light: she avenges evil deeds and inflicts just punishments upon the offenders and their posterity,[10] so that her character here is almost the same as that of Nemesis and Erinnys. She appears most prominent in the dramas of Aeschylus, and least in those of Euripides, with whom the idea of Dike (justice) is more fully developed.[11]
A fragment from Empedocles refers to the "Meadow of Ate",[12] which probably signifies the mortal world.[13]
In the play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare introduces the goddess Ate as an invocation of vengeance and menace. Mark Antony, lamenting Caesar's murder, envisions:
Shakespeare also mentions her in the play Much Ado About Nothing, when Benedick says, referring to Beatrice,
So too, in King John, Shakespeare refers to Queen Eleanor as "An Ate stirring him to blood and strife",[14] and in Love's Labour's Lost Birone jeers "Pompey is moved. More Ates, more Ates! stir them on, stir them on!"[15]
In Spenser's The Faerie Queene, a fiend from Hell disguised as a beautiful woman is called Ate. This is a possible parallel to the fallen angels.