... the reverberation of the trumpet is a kind of doublet of the goddess’s piercing voice, that very voice which, in fact, confirmed her arrival in the world. Furthermore, through resembling the trumpet’s sound, Athena’s voice takes the breath away, makes the listener shiver, and wreaks havoc in the cosmos. It functions as a threatening element which disrupts the celestial landscape and the nourishing soil of the earth which, in turn, utters a battle cry. Thus it is described in the Homeric Hymn to Athena, where, once again, the verb ίάχω is used, not, in this case, as reference to the trumpet, but as an allusion to the shrill cry of the goddess,57 a cry which, according to Pindar, is reverberating and piercing, a clamour which penetrates the world with a stroke of a bronze-forged axe. Therefore, the shrill cry of the goddess invokes the metaphor of the sound of the salpinx simply because the proclamatory tone of her voice may easily be assimilated to the trumpet’s invocation of sonority.
“Athena Salpinx and the Ethics of Music,” by Anastasia Serghidou; collected in Athena in the Classical World
