A statue in gold and ivory
Statues of this kind are called chryselephantine, from the Greek for gold and ivory. Over an inner structure, the visible surfaces were made of ivory and of gold. Ivory needed care: on the Acropolis, so high and dry, it was kept in good condition with water, where at Olympia the ivory Zeus needed olive oil against the damp.
The gold was also a reserve of money. When war with Sparta began in 431 BCE, Perikles reminded the Athenians of the wealth they could draw on: in an emergency, even the gold of the statue, forty talents of pure gold, all of it removable, provided it was all put back afterwards.
What did she look like?
The fullest description comes from the travel writer Pausanias, who saw it in the Roman period, when a portrait statue of the emperor Hadrian also stood in the temple. Athena stood upright in a tunic reaching to her feet. On her breast was the head of Medusa, worked in ivory. Her helmet carried a sphinx in the middle and griffins on either side. In one hand she held a Victory about four cubits high, in the other a spear; at her feet lay a shield, and near the spear was a serpent, which Pausanias identifies as Erichthonius.
Read together, these are Athena’s signs at their most solemn: the helmet and spear of the warrior, the Gorgon’s head on her breast, the serpent, and a Victory held out in her hand.
Stories carved on the statue
The statue was covered with smaller images. The outside of the shield showed a battle with the Amazons, the inside a battle of the gods and the Giants; even her sandals carried the fight of the Lapiths and the Centaurs. The pedestal showed the birth of Pandora, the first woman, with some twenty gods. The same three battles appear on the metopes outside, so the statue repeated, in gold, what the building showed in marble.
Pheidias on trial
A statue made of state gold was also a political target. Plutarch tells how enemies of Perikles attacked him through his friend Pheidias. An assistant accused the sculptor of stealing gold, but the charge could not be proved, because the gold could be taken off and weighed. The second charge was harder: on the shield, Pheidias was said to have carved himself as a bald old man lifting a stone, and a fine likeness of Perikles fighting an Amazon. According to Plutarch, Pheidias was taken to prison and died there.
The copies, and what they cannot show
No Roman copy reproduces the original at full size or in its materials. The best known is a small marble statuette found in Athens near the Varvakeion school, about a metre tall: it shows the stance, the helmet, the Victory on the right hand, the shield and the serpent at her left side. What no copy can give back is the effect of the original, gold and ivory more than ten metres high inside the cella. Marble copies also lose the colour: Greek sculpture was usually painted, and this one shone with precious materials. The statue stood at the centre of the temple, which is why it matters for what the temple meant.
Where to see it
The original is lost. The Varvakeion Athena is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and the room where the statue stood can be seen inside the Parthenon on the Acropolis. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24.5-7 and 5.11.10, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Perseus Digital Library).
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.18, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.13.5 (Perseus Digital Library); Plutarch, Life of Pericles 31 (LacusCurtius).
- Acropolis Restoration Service (YSMA), “Parthenon”.
