Page 62 - English Expedition Class 2

9 The Wonderful Weaver

Do you have any skill or talent that people compliment you about? Do you believe you need
to be thankful for your skills or talents? Discuss this in class.
Greek mythology, like Indian mythology, has a great many characters and tales related
to gods and their meetings with human beings. The story that you are going to read is about

Arachne, who was an amazing weaver of cloth. Arachne meets Athena, the Greek goddess of
wisdom, arts and strength. Read on to find out what happened.

There was a young woman in Greece whose name was Arachne. She loved to sit in
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the sun and spin from morning till noon. From noon till night she would sit in the
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shade and weave .
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And oh, how fine and fair were the things which she wove in her loom ! Flax ,
wool, silk – she worked with them all and the cloth which she had made of them was
so thin and soft and bright that people came from all parts of the world to see it. And
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they said that the cloth was so rare that it was not made of flax, or wool, or silk, but
the rays of sunlight were woven together with threads of gold.
Every day she sat in the sun and spun, or sat in the shade and wove. She said, ‘In all
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the world there is no yarn so fine as mine, and in all the world there is no cloth so soft
and smooth, nor silk so bright and rare.’
‘Who taught you to spin and weave so well?’ someone asked.
‘No one taught me,’ she said. ‘I learnt how to do it as I sat in the sun and the shade.

No one showed me.’
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‘But it may be that Athena, the queen of the air , taught you, and you did not
know it.’
‘Athena, the queen of the air?’ exclaimed Arachne. ‘How could she teach me? Can
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she spin or weave goods like mine? I should like to see her try. I can teach her a thing
or two.’
As she finished saying this, she looked up and saw a tall woman wrapped in a long
cloak.

1 spin: make thread from wool, cotton, etc. 6 rare: uncommon; hard to fi nd
2 weave: make cloth with threads 7 yarn: the thread used for making cloth
3 fi ne: (here) of great quality 8 queen of the air: an expression to show that Athena is
4 loom: a machine used for making cloth from heaven
5 fl ax: (here) a plant whose stem is used to make thread 9 goods: products; things
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