Temple of Athena Nike: Jewel of the Acropolis

The Story of the Temple of Athena Nike

As you climb toward the Acropolis, a small white temple appears on a high bastion to your right, almost floating above the city. This is the Temple of Athena Nike, dedicated to Athena in her role as bringer of victory. Nike was the Greek personification of victory, usually shown with wings, and Athenians who were about to march to war, or who came home triumphant, prayed here for the goddess's favor. The spot had been sacred long before the marble temple was built, and an older altar and shrine stood on the same bastion.

The Athenians first voted to build a temple here around the middle of the 5th century BC, but the work was delayed for many years. Most scholars date the building to the 420s BC, during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, when the city badly needed victories. The architect is generally believed to have been Callicrates, who also worked on the Parthenon. He designed a compact Ionic temple with 4 slender columns at the front and 4 at the back, a perfect miniature beside the massive gateway of the Propylaea.

A popular story explains a curious detail about the statue inside. The cult image showed Athena holding a pomegranate and a helmet, and the travel writer Pausanias tells us that the Athenians called her Wingless Victory. One later explanation was that they deliberately made her without wings, so that victory could never fly away from Athens. Whatever the reason, the name Athena Nike Apteros, meaning wingless, stuck to the temple for centuries.

The bastion beneath the temple also has its own legend. According to Pausanias, it was from this point that King Aegeus kept watch for his son Theseus, who had sailed to Crete to face the Minotaur. Theseus had promised to change his black sails to white if he survived, but he forgot. When Aegeus saw the black sails, he believed his son was dead and threw himself to his death. Another version places the same tragic scene at Cape Sounion, and the Aegean Sea is said to take its name from the grieving king.

The temple's decoration celebrated Athenian triumphs. Its sculpted frieze showed gods gathered together and scenes of battle, including Greeks fighting Persians, a reminder of the great victories of the Persian Wars. Around the edge of the bastion ran a marble parapet carved with winged Victories leading animals to sacrifice and setting up trophies. The most famous panel shows a Victory bending to adjust her sandal, her thin robe seeming to ripple over her body. It is one of the most admired reliefs of classical Greek art and can now be seen in the Acropolis Museum.

The little temple had a dramatic afterlife. In 1686 the Ottomans, preparing for a Venetian attack, pulled it apart and used its blocks to build a gun emplacement at the entrance of the Acropolis. After Greece won its independence, archaeologists recovered the pieces from the fortifications and reassembled the temple in the 1830s. It was taken apart and rebuilt again in the 1930s, and once more in a careful modern restoration completed in the early 21st century, so the temple you see today has been put back together three times.

Today the Temple of Athena Nike is one of the first monuments visitors see as they pass through the Propylaea. You cannot climb onto the bastion itself, but the temple is easy to admire from the steps of the entrance, with views stretching across Athens toward the Saronic Gulf. Look for the gaps where sculptures have been replaced by casts, and then visit the Acropolis Museum to see the originals, including the parapet Victories and the graceful sandal binder.