The Peplos of Athena

The Panathenaic peplos was not an item of clothing in the ordinary sense. It was a civic offering in the shape of a garment, produced by a team of Athenian women and girls, the ergastinai, who began weaving it on the loom roughly nine months before the festival, working under the supervision of the priestess of Athena Polias. Two young girls called arrephoroi, chosen from noble Athenian families and typically between seven and eleven years old, lived on the Acropolis for the duration of their year of service and took part in setting up the loom in a ritual that opened the weaving. The finished cloth, dyed saffron yellow and sea purple, carried a woven scene of the Gigantomachy, the mythical battle in which the Olympian gods, Athena prominent among them, defeated the earth-born giants, a subject that cast the goddess as a defender of cosmic order rather than only a patron of craft and war.

The robe was not sized for a living body. It was made to be draped over, or in some reconstructions hung beside, the ancient olive-wood statue of Athena Polias kept in what later became the Erechtheion, a cult image far older and, to Athenian religious sensibility, more sacred than the chryselephantine Athena Parthenos that Phidias built for the Parthenon itself. Bringing a newly woven garment to that old image every year, or every four years in the grander form of the rite, renewed the city's relationship with its patron goddess in the most literal terms available, clothing her again.

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.