ATHENA PARTHENOS

Athena Parthenos, or "Athena the Virgin" is the title of a massive gold and ivory sculpture of the Greek goddess Athena, made by Phidias and his assistants and housed in the Parthenon in Athens. Its epithet was an essential character of the goddess herself. A number of replicas and works inspired by it, both ancient and modern, have been made.

It was the most renowned cult image of Athens,^[considered one of the greatest achievements of the most acclaimed sculptor of ancient Greece. It continued to stand in the Parthenon in the 5th century AD, when it was removed by the Romans. 

The statue itself is made of ivory, silver and gold. On the middle of her helmet is placed a likeness of the Sphinx and on either side of the helmet are griffins in relief. The statue of Athena is upright, with a tunic reaching to the feet, and on her breast the head of Medusa is worked in ivory. She holds a statue of Victory about four cubits high, and in the other hand a spear; at her feet lies a shield and near the spear is a serpent. This serpent would be Erichthonius. On the pedestal is the birth of Pandora in relief.

I've always wanted to see this statue but the history tells us that this valuable piece of art was stolen by the race enemy of Greece. It had a huge replica at Nashville, Tennessee. I saw it on a movie called Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. They battled a five headed Hydra in front of the replica.

When the Roman Empire conquered Greece, they took the Parthenos as a way of breaking Greece's spirit. As Athena became Minerva, she lost her status as a war goddess; the capture of the Parthenos was seen as an act of belittlement to Athena, and the source of the seemingly eternal conflict between Greek and Roman  demigods. According to legends among the Romans, every civil war between the Greeks and the Romans was started by children of Athena. In every subsequent generation after the Parthenos's capture, Athena charged one of her children to recover the statue, by following the Mark of Athena through the city of Rome. The Parthenos itself was protected by Arachne, who wove spider webs around it to contain its power, though the Parthenos was still powerful enough that monsters burrowed up under the floor, leaving only a thin layer of tile and spider webs between Arachne's chamber and a pit straight to Tartarus. All of Athena's children, up to Annabeth Chase, had failed in retrieving the statue.

credits to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena_Parthenos