In early depictions of the Gigantomachy, Apollo fights alongside his sister Artemis,
and they both use their bows, which are their traditional attribute. Then, about 500
BC, Apollo, now by himself, is suddenly shown fighting giants with a sword, as he
does on the Parthenon metope, and this becomes the new convention for him;
however, his use of the sword is strictly limited to fights with giants (Figure 26.6).
For all other scenes the bow continues to be his most common attribute. A sudden
and dramatic change in a time-honored convention such as this must have conveyed a
specific meaning to Athenians and it was not by chance that the distinctive sword-
swinging pose was used in 477 BC by the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes for their
famous statue of the tyrant slayer Harmodios, which stood in the agora. We can only
guess at what that meaning might have been in 500 BC and in 477 BC, but we should
also recognize that in 430 BC, a generation later, it may have held different meaning.
When religion lacks texts to maintain orthodoxy, images can transmit traditions from
generation to generation, but the meaning transmitted by such images does not
necessarily remain the same over time. A generation separating images is not a
statement of proximity but of distance.
To return to the Panathenaea, the most basic purpose of any festival was to thank
the deity for past favors and to encourage the deity’s continued benevolence toward
the city. For the Panathenaea that benevolence applies to those who tend the olive
Figure 26.6 Reconstruction of east metope 9 from the Parthenon showing Apollo with a
sword fighting a giant. After Praschniker 1928: fig. 126
408 T.H. Carpenter