A Perfect but Fatal Weaving
In the contest Athena wove the majesty of the gods; Arachne wove their scandals — Zeus’s two dozen shape-shifting seductions — with stitching so precise the goddess could find no flaw. Technically she had won; politically she was doomed. Athena tore the cloth apart, the girl hanged herself, and the goddess made her weave forever as a spider. The horror of this story is that she was punished not for weaving badly, but for weaving too well.