The Temple of Aphaia

The goddess who reaches Aegina under another name

Britomartis runs from Minos and throws herself into fishing nets to escape him. Artemis makes her a goddess. Pausanias then carries the story away from Crete: the people of Aegina say Britomartis still appears on their island, where they call her Aphaia and maintain her sanctuary.

The temple is the standing proof of that local name, but the identification is not simple. Aphaia had been worshipped at the hilltop site since the Mycenaean period, long before Pausanias linked her to Britomartis in the second century AD. His account explains how a Cretan story was read at Aegina. The archaeology shows that Aphaia’s sanctuary had a much longer life of its own.

Why the new temple changed the proportions

The building that survives was raised around 500–490 BC. It is a Doric temple surrounded by columns, with six on each short side and twelve on each long side. The Greek Ministry of Culture describes those proportions as a break from the more elongated plans of earlier Archaic temples.

Its builders were working at a point of change. The temple still belongs to the late Archaic world, but its tighter plan and sculptural programme move towards the Classical. That transition can be seen without leaving the building, because the two pediments do not handle the human figure in the same way.

Why Troy appears above Aphaia’s temple

Both pediments show fighting before Troy. Athena stands at the centre, while Aeginetan warriors and descendants of Aeacus take part around her. The subject turns a sanctuary of the local goddess into a statement about the island’s heroic ancestry.

Aphaia does not appear in the surviving battle groups. Her place is the whole sanctuary beneath them. Athena orders each composition from the centre, and the Aeginetan heroes connect the distant war to the island. The sculpture therefore works at two levels: the temple belongs to Aphaia, while its public faces tell viewers where Aegina places itself in the Trojan story.

The west pediment keeps the more formal arrangement of the sixth century BC. Its warriors turn and fall within a balanced scheme around Athena. The east pediment, dated to the early fifth century BC, gives the bodies more movement and reduces the older patterning. The Ministry’s record uses that contrast to mark the passage from Archaic to Classical sculpture.

What remained on Aegina and what went to Munich

A group of English and German architects found the pediment figures at the sanctuary in 1811. The Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen later restored them in Rome, and they were installed in the Glyptothek in 1827. The Munich museum still presents them as the Aeginetans, with the west pediment dated around 500 BC.

The move divided the temple from the sculpture designed for it. On Aegina, the columns and foundations preserve the building and its hilltop setting. In Munich, the figures preserve the two Trojan battles and the difference in style between the pediments. Neither part tells the whole history alone.

That division also keeps the subjects distinct. Britomartis explains one ancient account of who Aphaia was. The pediments show how Aegina used her sanctuary to speak about Athena, Aeacus and Troy. The temple joins those claims in one place: an old island cult below, Aeginetan heroes above and a local divine name that Pausanias tried to explain through Crete.