She does not oppose her hand in the Greek--the wind could not meet the
lance straight--she catches it in her hand, and throws it off. There is
no instance in which a lance is so parried by a mortal hand in all the
Iliad, and it is exactly the way the wind would parry it, catching it,
and turning it aside. If there are any good rifleshots here, they know
something about Athena's parrying; and in old times the English masters
of feathered artillery knew more yet. Compare also the turning of
Hector's lance from Achilles: Iliad, xx. 439.

37. The last instance I will give you is as lovely as it is subtile.
Throughout the Iliad, Athena is herself the will or Menis of Achilles.
If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms him; if angered, it is she
who inflames him. In the first quarrel with Atreides, when he stands at
pause, with the great sword half drawn, "Athena came from heaven, and
stood behind him and caught him by the yellow hair." Another god would
have stayed his hand upon the hilt, but Athena only lifts his hair. "And
he turned and knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon him." There is
an exquisite tenderness in this laying her hand upon his hair, for it is
the talisman of his life, vowed to his own Thessalian river if he ever
returned to its shore, and cast upon Patroclus' pile, so ordaining that
there should be no return.

38. Secondly, Athena is the air giving vegetative impulse to the earth.
She is the wind and the rain, and yet more the pure air itself, getting
at the earth fresh turned by spade or plough, and, above all, feeding the
fresh leaves; for though the Greeks knew nothing about carbonic acid,
they did know that trees fed on the air.

Now, note first in this, the myth of the air getting at ploughed land.