In Greek and Roman mythology, the Palladium or Palladion (Greek Παλλάδιον (Palladion), Latin Palladium)[1] was a cult image of great antiquity on which the safety of Troy and later Rome was said to depend, the wooden statue (xoanon) of Pallas Athena that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was later taken to the future site of Rome by Aeneas.
[3] The Trojan Palladium was said to be a wooden image of Pallas (whom the Greeks identified with Athena and the Romans with Minerva) and to have fallen from heaven in answer to the prayer of Ilus, the founder of Troy.
"The most ancient talismanic effigies of Athena", Ruck and Staples report, "were magical found objects, faceless pillars of Earth in the old manner, before the Goddess was anthropomorphized and given form through the intervention of human intellectual meddling.
"[4] The arrival at Troy of the Palladium, fashioned by Athena[5] in remorse for the death of Pallas,[6] as part of the city's founding myth, was variously referred to by Greeks, from the seventh century BC onwards.
Odysseus, according to the epitome of the Little Iliad (one of the books of the Epic Cycle) preserved in Proclus's Chrestomathia, went by night to Troy disguised as a beggar.
According to the Narratives of the Augustan period mythographer Conon as summarised by Photius,[12] while the two heroes were on their way to the ships, Odysseus plotted to kill Diomedes and claim the Palladium (or perhaps the credit for gaining it) for himself.
Pliny the Elder[14] said that Lucius Caecilius Metellus had been blinded by fire when he rescued the Palladium from the Temple of Vesta in 241 BC, an episode alluded to in Ovid[15] and Valerius Maximus.
[16] When the controversial emperor Elagabalus (reigned 218–222 AD) transferred the most sacred relics of Roman religion from their respective shrines to the Elagabalium, the Palladium was among them.
The cult image of the Poliás was a wooden effigy, often referred to as the "xóanon diipetés" (the "carving that fell from heaven"), made of olive wood and housed in the east-facing wing of the Erechtheum temple in the classical era.