Kind of a tricky question.  If memory serves, Homer refers to the city of Athens by name in the Catalogue of Ships, and you can argue ad nauseam about the actual age of Homer in general or that passage in particular, but it’s certainly one of the oldest things in Greek literature.  In any case I’d be happy to accept that the names of both the city and the goddess go back to the beginning of the ‘historical’ period.

Before that… well, there was almost certainly a Mycenaean citadel on the Acropolis in the Late Bronze Age, and people have drawn a connection here with the various jumbled stories about Erechtheus, the mythical king of Athens, living in Athena’s temple (the Mycenaeans didn’t have temples, as far as we can tell; religious and political authority were probably united under one roof).  We don’t know what the Mycenaean city was called, though.  I would bet good money it was something like the Classical “Athenai” because place names tend to be conservative, but we have no Linear B from Athens, so it’s not really possible to be airtight on that.  One of the Knossos tablets does mention something called a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, and po-ti-ni-ja is a title commonly given to goddesses (the later Greek equivalent is potnia, which is one of the things Homer calls Athena), so possibly the reference is to a goddess called “Mistress Atana,” and just conceivably it might indicate that Athena is ultimately an aspect of the Minoan “great goddess” (and here much is made of the fact that snakes are sacred to Athena).  The trouble is, these texts don’t actually tell us anything about the gods they mention; they’re just lists of the resources allocated to festivals and sacrifices and such, for accounting purposes.  So we know that Athena probably exists and is worshipped in the Bronze Age in one form or another, but we don’t know whether she was anything like the Classical goddess, and we have no idea what, if any, connection she has to the city of Athens.

So yeah.

Do they, though?  Do they really?

Well, the likelihood, I would estimate, is “close to zero.”  They’re done with that generation; they’ve moved on; they’re doing other things now.  Unless the remake train keeps steaming on to the point that we actually get remakes of Black and White, I doubt it’ll ever happen.  Setting it in the mythical past would be cool, but the trouble is that it does sort of lock certain things in – like, we know that Reshiram and Zekrom destroyed Unovan civilisation the last time they fought.  It happened; the player can’t win and the story can’t have a happy ending.  Unless of course they’re willing to pull some kind of alternate universe situation, of the sort implied by Delta Episode, where this hypothetical Grey version is actually a prequel to a completely different version of the Black and White universe that we’ve never seen.  That would be kinda weird.

Was Kalos at war with Unova?  I always got the impression it was a civil war; I don’t think Unova is ever mentioned in connection with that conflict.

Yes, no, no, hell yes.

Eheheh…

Not often.  Sometimes what seems to happen is that people get the idea that I’m here answering questions and decide that means it’s a good time to ask them, not realising that, 90% of the time, the questions I’m answering are ones that have been sitting in my inbox for 3-10 days.  Like, at the moment I have three or four questions in here that are clearly responses to stuff I’ve just been talking about, but when those came in I already had four or five that were almost a week old and which I have to answer first.  And of course some of the people who are chiming in on the whole ‘is Pokémon slavery’ thing at the moment clearly haven’t read any of the old stuff that I linked to in the post that started that conversation, because they’re asking me to talk about things that I’ve actually done in excruciating detail in the past.  I really wish people would use the Disqus comments if they want to respond to things I’ve said; it’s just less hassle.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.  I like getting questions, for the most part, but it’s frustrating when people try to join a conversation that way because it simply doesn’t work, given the reality of when and how I can deal with these things.

Well, why doesn’t it make sense?  War has lethal consequences, and humans have perfected that to a frightening degree.  People do horrible things to each other.  I think if someone insists that Pokémon has to be read in this kind of darker light, or extrapolates from that to argue that liking Pokémon makes us worse people, then they’re just trying to spoil other people’s fun, but that’s not what this is about; this is about a story that exists for its own reasons and wants to develop its own ideas.  Alterity is basically supposed to be a story about what it means to be considered ‘different’ and marginalised by the dominant groups in a society (hence the title), and I think Pokémon offers some very interesting possibilities for examining that theme, which the author (in my opinion) does extremely well.  I mean, I don’t expect everyone to like it, and that’s fair enough – there’s some heavy ideas in there, and Pokémon is normally very lighthearted.  I don’t think there’s any point in complaining that it’s unrealistic, though.

I have.  Digimon is a lot of fun, but I would suggest that comparing a story-driven anime to a gameplay-driven RPG is really rather fallacious, and a lot of the comments you make don’t really apply to the Pokémon anime, which does often give Pokémon agency.

Are you telling me to stop liking Pokémon?  ’cause you’re gonna need to do a lot better than that.

Can’t say I have.  I’ll take a look, but I don’t have time to read the whole thing right now.

Y’know, it’s weird that I spend so much time on nicknames, because one of my odder beliefs about Pokémon is that they actually don’t understand or have any use for the concept of personal names; I think it’s purely something that humans project on them because it fits the way we like to think about our relationships with them.  I guess coming up with nicknames is just fun!  I always feel a deep sense of satisfaction when I think of a clever one, especially if I can shoehorn some Latin or Greek into it.  Like so…

Invicta was my Volcarona from my Black team – it’s the feminine form (because she was a female) of invictus, a Latin word that means “unconquerable;” I chose it because the sun god worshipped in the Roman Empire during the late 3rd century was called Sol Invictus – “the unconquerable sun.”

My Sealeo on Alpha Sapphire is called Lennon, after the Beatles’ John Lennon, because of their song “I am the Walrus.”

My Girafarig is called Panama, because of the classic palindrome that goes “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!”

My Heracross, who is female, is called Alcmene, after the mother of Heracles, because Heracross is supposed to be a Hercules beetle.

My Golduck is called Mad Eileen, for… reasons which… to be honest, now escape me.

Back on X now, my Pinsir is called Wesley, because Pinsir crushes things between its horns, making him Wesley the Crusher.

The first Smeargle I caught is called Fabius, after a Roman historian named Fabius Pictor – “pictor” being the Latin word for “painter.”  The shiny one I found soon after I caught him is called Mona, for obvious reasons.

My Sigilyph is called Digamma, after a letter of the archaic Greek alphabet that fell out of use by the classical period, because Sigilyph’s wings remind me of the shape of the letter.

My Floatzel is called Ronald, because Floatzel is orange and Weasley.

My (female) Gourgeist is called Claudia in reference to a somewhat obscure satire written by the Roman philosopher Seneca upon the death of the Emperor Claudius, who is its main target.  Its title is the Apocolocyntosis, which is a Greek compound word meaning something like “ascension to pumpkinhood” (contrast apotheosis, ascension to godhood, which is what’s supposed to happen to emperors when they die).

And my Delibird is called Jamesy because… well, sometimes there are inside jokes that only a few of my friends will get. 😉