Athena Parthenos

The Athena Parthenos is a forty-foot-tall statue of the goddess Athena which was once the central figure in the Parthenon. The Parthenos had the figure of Athena carved from ivory, wearing a gold toga and holding the image of the goddess Nike on her palm. The statue's other hand held a shield, with a snake emerging from behind it. Annabeth Chase observed that the Parthenos was a perfect likeness of Athena, leading her to believe the sculptor had seen the goddess in person.

When the Roman Empire conquered Greece, it 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 a child of Athena. In every subsequent generation after the Parthenos's capture, Athena charged some of her children to recover the statue, 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.

In The Mark of Athena, Annabeth Chase finally succeeds where generations of her siblings have failed, successfully making her way to Arachne's chamber and outwitting and trapping the spider monster. The Argo II arrives, blasting open the ceiling, and Leo Valdez, Frank Zhang, and Jason Grace secure the Athena Parthenos, just barely fitting it inside the ship. However, Annabeth and Percy Jackson are dragged into Tartatus by Arachne.