In Greek mythology, Ate (Ancient Greek: Ἄτη) is the personification of ruinous delusion and reckless folly. She embodies the moral blindness or infatuation, often inflicted by a god, that drives a person to disastrous action, as well as the calamity and ruin that follow from it. Her parentage is reported differently by the ancient authors: Homer makes her the eldest daughter of Zeus, while Hesiod counts her among the fatherless children of Eris (Strife).
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Ate (mythology)" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family
The ancient sources give Ate two different genealogies. In Homer she is named as the eldest daughter of Zeus, with no mother mentioned. In Hesiod's Theogony she is instead one of the offspring of Eris, the goddess of strife, who bears her children alone without a father.
Under the Hesiodic account her siblings are the other personified evils born of Eris, among them Horkos (Oath), the Machai (Wars or Battles), Limos (Famine), and Dysnomia (Lawlessness), a brood that together embodies the harmful and painful aspects of human life.
II.Character and role
Ate personifies the delusion and reckless impulse that precede catastrophe, and she is closely associated with divine retribution. She is described as swift and unseen, walking lightly upon the heads of mortals rather than upon the ground, bringing harm wherever she goes.
In Greek tragedy, and especially in the plays of Aeschylus, she stands for both the instigating delusion and the destruction that results from it, functioning as an agent through which folly and its consequences are visited upon human beings.
III.Mythology
The most famous episode involving Ate concerns the birth of Heracles. Ate so blinded Zeus that he was deceived by Hera over which child, born on a fated day, would rule over his neighbours, allowing the rights of kingship to fall to Eurystheus rather than to Heracles. Enraged when he realized the trick, Zeus seized Ate by her bright-tressed head and swore a mighty oath that she should never again return to Olympus and the starry heaven, hurling her down to the tilled fields of mortal men.
In Homer's Iliad, Ate is paired with the Litai, the Prayers, who are described as the lame and wrinkled daughters of Zeus. Ate is strong and swift and far outruns them, doing harm to mortals across the whole earth, while the Prayers come limping behind to heal the damage she has done; whoever honours the Prayers when they approach is helped, but whoever rejects them suffers when Ate returns as punishment.
According to the mythographer Apollodorus, when Ate was cast down from heaven by Zeus she landed in Phrygia at a place called the hill of the Phrygian Ate, and it was there that the city of Troy was founded.