The Temple of Aphaia

A goddess with another name

The Temple of Aphaia stands on a hilltop on the Greek island of Aegina. It was the main building in the sanctuary, or holy ground, of a local goddess called Aphaia.

The ancient writer Pausanias tells a story that links her to Crete. Britomartis runs from Minos of Crete and throws herself into fishing nets to escape him. The goddess Artemis makes her a goddess. The people of Aegina say that Britomartis later appears on their island. There they call her Aphaia and keep her sanctuary.

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

A new temple with new proportions

The building that survives was raised around 500 to 490 BC. It is a Doric temple, built in one of the main Greek styles of columns. Columns run all the way round it, six on each short side and 12 on each long side. These proportions break with the longer, narrower plans of earlier temples of the Archaic period.

Its builders were working at a time of change. The temple still belongs to the late Archaic world. Its tighter plan and its sculpture move towards the Classical style that followed. You can see that change on the building itself, because its two pediments treat the human figure in different ways. A pediment is the triangle under the roof at each end of a temple, which held sculpture.

Troy above Aphaia’s temple

Both pediments show fighting before Troy, the city of the Trojan War. The goddess Athena stands at the centre. Around her fight warriors from Aegina and descendants of Aeacus. The subject turns the sanctuary of a local goddess into a statement about the island’s heroic ancestors.

Aphaia does not appear in the surviving battle scenes. Her place is the whole sanctuary beneath them. Athena orders each scene from the centre, and the heroes of Aegina tie the distant war to the island. So the sculpture works on two levels. The temple belongs to Aphaia, while its public faces tell viewers where Aegina places itself in the story of Troy.

The two pediments also differ in style. The west pediment keeps the more formal arrangement of the sixth century BC. Its warriors turn and fall in a balanced pattern around Athena.

The east pediment is dated to the early fifth century BC. It gives the bodies more movement and relies less on the older patterns. Modern scholars use this contrast to mark the move from Archaic to Classical sculpture.

What stayed on Aegina and what went to Munich

A group of English and German architects found the pediment figures at the sanctuary in 1811. A sculptor later restored them in Rome. In 1827 they were installed in the Glyptothek, a museum of ancient sculpture in Munich. They are still on display there as the Aeginetans. The west pediment dates to around 500 BC.

The move separated the temple from the sculpture made for it. On Aegina, the columns and foundations keep the building and its hilltop setting. In Munich, the figures keep the two battles at Troy and the difference in style between the pediments. Each place keeps only part of the history.

The split also keeps the subjects apart. 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 these claims in one place: an old island worship below, heroes of Aegina above, and a local divine name that Pausanias tried to explain through Crete.