Here Zeus spurs Athene to intervene in the Trojan war, and she descends to earth in the guise of a glorious soaring hawk, nose-diving. 

See also the bestellar reviews, complete with rich quote-mosaics, of Adam Nicolson’s magnificent Why Homer Matters, and Christopher Logue’s War Music, a muscular rendition of several books of the Iliad. 

‘Speaking so, he stirred Athene, who was eager before this,

and she in the likeness of a wide-winged, thin-crying

hawk plummeted from the sky through the bright air.’

Source: Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1961 (1951)), book XIX, p. 401