"The Spinners"

On Monday and Wednesday we discussed a lot about this painting during class.  However, I would like to talk about something that we didn't cover, or maybe I am just reading to much into the painting.  Like we alluded to in class, I believe that the elderly women in front of the spinning wheel is the Goddess Athena, and the women in white with her back to us is Arachne.  But what I would like to focus on is the three helpers to Athena and Arachne (the women in the left hand corner holding the curtain, the women in the red skirt in the center, and the women to the far right).  However, I don't want to focus on them specifically but on the fact that there is three of them.

Three seems to be a very important number in Ovid's Metamorphoses.  There are three main ruler Jove, Neptune, and Hades. The entrance to the underworld is guarded by a three headed dog, and there are nine muses, which is a multiple of three.  The three Graces, the three Furies, and the Goddess Hecate is described as being three-headed or three-formed.  These are just the occurrences of the number three that I can remember, and have found by glancing through Ovid's Metamorphoses, there are many more.
If you look in the background of the painting there appears to be three more women looking at the tapestry. The tapestry itself gets its theme from Titian's painting "Rape of Europa", which features three cherubs.