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The athenian goddess Athena Polias and the adventures she shared with the city, named after her

• Παπαχατζής, Ν.

There are clear traces of the evolution of the cult of Athena ‘Polias’ from the middle of the 12th c. BC until the abolition of the cult by the Christian state of Byzantium just before the death of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Proklos (in AD 485). The goddess had sanctuaries not only on the Acropolis and in the city of Athens, but throughout the whole of Attica, which were just as old as the sanctuary on the Acropolis.During the so-called Dark Ages (1150-900 BC), part of the population of Attica (presumably the Pelasgians, who were the majority in the plain surrounded by the mountains of Parnes, Pendele and Hymettos) worshipped only Athena, who at that time was a goddess of peace, vegetation and all forms of fertility, and not of war, like the same goddess in later times.Another part of the population, the Ionians, who formed a majority after 1000 BC (when the Ionians, displaced from Aigialeia in the Peloponnese, came to Attica), worshipped mainly Poseidon ‘Gaieochos’, a chthonic deity who was called Erechtheus in Attica. The Ionians and Pelasgians of Attica were continually at odds, and frequently they came to blows, over the question of domination of the area around the Acropolis. Their opposition and conflict was frequently presented by local poets, as the opposition and conflict of their gods, Athena and Erechtheus- Poseidon, who competed for possession of the Acropolis. Athena proved to be the more popular of the two. Her emblem (as goddess of vegetation) was the olive-tree and from this time on an olive-tree became predominant in the countryside to the west of the Erechtheion, and at the same time the goddess gave her name not only to the settlement on the Acropolis, but also to the houses around it, which were known collectively, as a single settlement, as ‘Athenai’. To the victrix in the conflict between the gods, was erected (between 710 and 680 BC) the first temple on the Acropolis, on the site of the later Erechtheion. The goddess accepted Erechtheus as the co-occupant of her temple, and the joint cult was preserved for more than a century. Meanwhile the Athenians built a new temple exclusively devoted to Athena, in the centre of the hill, between 650 and 630 BC. The Peisistratid Hippias renewed and extended this temple about 525 BC. The renewed (peripteral Doric) temple continued to exist after the erection of the Parthenon, when it was known as the ‘old temple of Athena’. A short distance to the east of it was built the altar of the goddess which was used throughout antiquity for sacrifices during the Great Panathenaia. This was the only altar of the goddess on the Acropolis. The only cult statue of the goddess was the small wooden statue kept in the ‘old temple’ and ultimately in the Erechtheion. Neither the chryselephantine Athena by Pheidias, nor the large bronze statue made by the same sculptor and erected in the open-air in the middle of the hill, were cult statues. Like the Parthenon itself, these sculptures were made to serve not piety but art, which indeed they did much to promote during the period of Pericles. Outside the Acropolis, a genuine cult was practised in the small temple of Athena built on the tower erected to the right as one approached the Propylaia. In the earth deposits of the tower was found a ‘grill’ of Archaic date, which was later replaced by an altar. The grill and altar served the cult of Athena Nike.

• History and Archaeology

• Αρχαιολογία
• Mythology

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