Athena’s role as a ‘musician’ is, for example, recorded by Diodorus and, probably, by an unfortunately fragmentary late Attic inscription, which records a dedication to ‘Athena Mousikê’. Furthermore, as Pindar stresses, Athena is the genius of the aulos who tried to imitate by the aulos’ sound the noisy chorus made by Euryalus and Stheno when Perseus decapitated their sister Medusa. Thus the first sound of the flute relates to the sinister threnody of the Gorgons. However, rather than just being a noise, the sound is initially supposed to be a melody, a harmony, according to Pindar, of the multicephalus nome … Within this range of evidence Athena not only invents the instrument, but also takes it upon herself to create a musical composition which suits its specific sound. The composition is therefore an imitation, a mimesis, in this case of a goos, a lamentation.
“Athena Salpinx and the Ethics of Music,” by Anastasia Serghidou; collected in Athena in the Classical World