Metis's swallowing by Zeus did more than resolve a succession myth; her name became, in twentieth century classical scholarship, the label for an entire recognized category of Greek intelligence, thanks above all to the French classicists Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, whose influential 1974 study, published in English as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, used metis as a technical term for a specific mode of practical, adaptable, often deceptive cunning that Greek myth and culture prized as distinct from and sometimes opposed to sophia, the more contemplative, theoretical wisdom later associated with philosophy. Detienne and Vernant traced this quality across a wide range of Greek figures who share little else in common, Odysseus and his stratagems, the fisherman's cunning in catching prey that resists direct force, the blacksmith's skill in working stubborn metal, and, at the origin of the whole concept, the goddess Metis herself, arguing that these figures together reveal a coherent, previously under-recognized Greek category of intelligence organized around flexibility, disguise and the ability to seize a fleeting advantage.
The book's influence extended well beyond classics into anthropology and other fields studying practical knowledge and skill, and metis, in this scholarly sense, has since become a standard term of art cited across disciplines whenever a body of hands-on, situational cunning is being distinguished from formal, rule-based expertise, a considerable scholarly afterlife for a goddess whose own myth ends with her being swallowed and absorbed, quite literally, into someone else's head.