Minerva's masterpiece showed all the great gods and had Minerva herself taking centre-stage in the act of winning the competition with Poseidon to become patron of Athens. Settling down at their respective looms the two ladies each set about creating a wonderful tapestry that would outshine their rival's best efforts. The great goddess was not best pleased to hear such claims and she promptly challenged the presumptuous Arachne to a weaving competition. In the myth, a Lydian girl named Arachne unwisely boasts that her weaving skills are even better than Minerva's. Minerva is the protagonist in one of the most famous stories presented in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Like Athena, the goddess was renowned for her chastity, and she once famously refused the amorous advances of Mars, the god of war. Residing within the Temple of Vesta it was believed that the city would be safe from harm as long as the statue was preserved. In legend, the great hero Aeneas, who escaped from fallen Troy, brought a cult statue of the goddess to Rome. Considered the daughter of Jupiter, from whose head she was born, the goddess was first worshipped in Rome as one of the Capitoline Triad along with Jupiter and Juno. The scholarly consensus, however, is that Minerva was indigenous, passing to the Romans from the Etruscan goddess Menrva, and that her name derives from meminisse, meaning 'to remember'. Originally, Minerva was an Italian goddess of handicrafts closely associated to the Greek goddess Athena. In many ways similar to the Greek goddess Athena, she had important temples in Rome and was patron of the Quinquatras festival. Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, medicine, commerce, handicrafts, poetry, the arts in general, and later, war.

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