The Goddess Athena in the Odyssey 1

T h e G o d d e s s A t h e n a
i n P l a t o ' s R e p u b l i c

[327a] Socrates: I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my devotions to the Goddess (presumably Bendis, though Athena is hreos for an Athenian), and also because I wanted to see how they would celebrate the festival, since this was its inauguration.
I was delighted with the procession of the citizens, but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful.

Plato Republic 378c (Loeb)

   [378b] Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the Gods.
   No, by heaven, said he, I do not myself think that they are fit to be told.
   Neither must we admit at all, said I, that Gods war with Gods and plot against one another and contend -- for they are not true -- [378c] if we wish our future guardians to deem nothing more shameful than lightly to fall out with one another; still less must we make battles of Gods and giants the subject for them of stories and embroideries (on the Panathenaic peplus of Athena), and we shall be silent about the innumerable other quarrels of Gods and heroes with their friends and relatives.
   But if they would only believe us we would tell them that no citizen ever quarrelled with his fellow-citizen and that the very idea of it is an impiety, [378d] this is what old men and old women should begin by telling children from the beginning and as they grow older, and we must compel the poets to keep close to this in their compositions.
   But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Hera his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and the battles of the Gods in Homer's verse are things that we must not admit into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.
   For the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.

Plato Republic 379e (Loeb)

Then we must not listen [379d] from Homer or any other poet the folly of such error as this about the Gods when he says

Two urns stand on the floor of the palace of Zeus and are filled with
Dooms he allots, one of blessings, the other of gifts that are evil,

and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two

Now upon evil he chances and now again good is his portion,

but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,

Hunger devouring drives him, a wanderer over the wide world,

[379e] nor will we tolerate the saying that

Zeus is dispenser alike of good and of evil to mortals.

But if any one asserts that the violation of oaths and treaties, which was really the work of Pandarus, was brought about by Athena and Zeus, we will not approve, nor that the strife and contention of the Gods [380a] was instigated by Themis and Zeus; nor again must we permit our youth to hear what Aeschylus says

A God implants the guilty cause in men
When he desires utterly to destroy a house,

but if any poets compose a 'Sorrows of Niobe,' the poem that contains these iambics verses, or a tale of the Pelopidae, or of the Trojan war, or anything else of the kind, we must either forbid them to say that these are the works of God, or if they are of God, he must devise some explanation of them such as we are seeking; he must say that God did what was just and right, and they were the better for being punished; but that those who are punished are miserable, and that God is the author of their misery -- the poet is not to be permitted to say; though he may say that the wicked are miserable because they require to be punished, and are benefited by receiving punishment from God; but that God being good is the author of evil to any one is to be strenuously denied, and not to be said or sung or heard in verse or prose by any one whether old or young in any well-ordered commonwealth.
Such a fiction is suicidal, ruinous, impious.

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