Athena

Athena was the patron deity of Athens and one of the most worshipped figures in the Greek world. She held three domains at once — wisdom, defensive war, and the crafts — and the city took her name after she gave it the olive tree, winning a contest with Poseidon for the Acropolis. Her worship reached back at least to the 8th century BCE, with older roots in Mycenaean Greece where the name appears as “a-ta-na” in Linear B. At the height of Athenian power, between 447 and 432 BCE, the city built the Parthenon for her on the Acropolis and set inside it Pheidias’s Athena Parthenos, a statue over 12 metres high made of ivory and some 1,140 kilograms of gold. Every four years the Panathenaic festival carried a woven robe to her in procession through the city. She was honoured well beyond Athens, across the Greek mainland and colonies, and the Romans worshipped her as Minerva.

Her worship ended by imperial law. After Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Theodosius I issued the anti-pagan edicts of 391–392 CE: sacrifice was banned, entry to temples forbidden, and on 8 November 392 the worship of the old gods prohibited outright. The institutions that sustained Athena’s cult were shut down, and within a few generations the Parthenon itself was converted into a Christian church, its east end opened for an apse and parts of its sculpture cut away. The building still stands and is among the most visited monuments on earth; the Varvakeion Athena and the Mourning Athena relief sit in Athenian museums; Minerva remains a stock figure of Western art. None of it is worship. No one sacrifices to Athena now, and her fame is the exact measure of her death.