A Sail Carried Through the City

By the Classical period the peplos of the Great Panathenaea, the larger celebration held every fourth year, had grown from a garment a person could carry into something rigged like a sail on the mast of a wheeled ship, hauled through the streets of Athens as part of the great procession from the Kerameikos to the Acropolis. Aristophanes jokes about the size of the completed cloth in his comedies, and the change in scale between the annual and quadrennial versions of the offering is one of the clearer signs that the Panathenaea itself grew steadily grander across the Archaic and Classical periods as Athenian civic identity and the festival became more tightly bound together.

The frieze that runs around the top of the cella wall inside the Parthenon's colonnade is usually identified, though the identification is debated in some particulars, as showing the Panathenaic procession itself, culminating in a scene on the east side where a folded cloth is handed between a priest, a child and the figures generally read as Athena's own family of gods seated in witness. If that reading is right, the temple built to house the goddess's festival statue also carried a permanent stone record of the ordinary offering made to her older one, a garment renewed year after year standing beside a monument meant to last.