The Parthenon and a City Named for Its Goddess

Athena's cult was inseparable from the city that bore her name: Athens treated her as its founding patron and protector, and the Acropolis, the city's fortified high sanctuary, was built above all as her sacred precinct. The Parthenon, completed in 438 BCE under the statesman Pericles, housed a colossal gold and ivory cult statue of the goddess by the sculptor Phidias and stands today as the single most recognized building to survive from the ancient Greek world, though it was only the grandest of several temples to her kept on the Acropolis. The Panathenaea, Athens's largest civic festival, was celebrated in her honor every year, with a still grander version held every four years that included athletic and musical competitions and a great procession carrying a newly woven robe, the peplos, up to the Acropolis to clothe her ancient wooden cult image, a rite that bound the city's civic identity directly to acts of textile craft associated with the goddess herself. Athena Polias, Athena of the city, was her primary civic epithet at Athens, but her worship extended across the Greek world under other titles as well, including Athena Promachos, the front line fighter, and Athena Ergane, patron of craftsmen and artisans, reflecting the same range of practical skill and disciplined strength her birth myth had marked her with from the start.