Overview

The Palladium was a small archaic wooden image of Pallas Athena, believed to have fallen from heaven at the founding of Troy. In Greek tradition the safety of the city depended on keeping the image within its walls, which is why the theft of the Palladium by Odysseus and Diomedes was remembered as the act that made Troy's fall possible. It is a legendary object rather than a recovered one: it is known entirely through literature and cult report, and no securely identified original survives or was ever described from direct inspection.

Roman literary tradition, not archaeology, is the entire basis for what is claimed about the Palladium: a small wooden cult image of Pallas Athena, said to have fallen from the sky at Troy and later carried to Italy by the Trojan refugee Aeneas, becoming one of the pignora imperii, the sacred pledges guaranteeing Rome's rule, kept in the Temple of Vesta among the city's most closely guarded relics. No archaeological find has ever been proposed as the Palladium, and none could be verified as such even if one were, since the object is known only through literary description. The word palladium itself entered general English usage as a metaphor for anything regarded as a safeguard or guarantee of a nation's or institution's welfare, a figurative sense that survives in ordinary English long after the literal legendary object it derives from ceased to be widely known outside classical scholarship.