Pallas Athena and the Palladium

The name reaches through the asteroid to Greek myth. The minor planet Pallas was itself named for Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom and just war, and behind her stands the Palladium, the ancient wooden image of Athena believed to have fallen from heaven and to protect the city of Troy so long as it remained within the walls; the theft of the Palladium by Odysseus and Diomedes was said to have sealed Troy's fall. Wollaston, naming his metal after the freshly found asteroid, thus unknowingly tied it to one of the most potent talismanic objects of classical legend, a sacred statue whose presence guaranteed a city's safety. The link is one of astronomical naming rather than any property of the metal, but it gives palladium the richest mythological pedigree of the platinum group.

Olbers named Pallas himself in 1802, continuing the era's fashion for classical mythological names in the newly opened field of asteroid astronomy; it was his second asteroid, Vesta, that he invited the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to name five years later. In an unexpected modern echo of its ancient protective reputation, palladium's price surged past gold's in December 2018 for the first time in sixteen years, driven by tightening automotive emissions standards that increased catalytic converter demand, a purely industrial and financial development that nonetheless briefly made this myth-laden metal literally more precious than gold.