A Roman Athena Statue in Perge, Turkey, May Once Have Held a Snake From a Dark Greek Myth

A marble Athena unearthed in southern Turkey carries a small clue that may point to one of the darker tales in Greek mythology. A study in Arkeoloji Dergisi (Ege University) argues that a stump on the statue’s right knee once held a serpent, and that the snake linked the goddess to the baby Erichthonios. The statue is headless and it came out of the ground in 2013, so the new work is a reading of old evidence, not a fresh dig.

Where the statue turned up

Perge sits near modern Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. It grew into a wealthy city in Hellenistic and Roman times, and its main colonnaded avenue still draws visitors. Excavators found the Athena during the 2013 season on the West Street. According to the study, the statue lay on the street surface in front of the Cornutus Palaestra, a gymnasium-type building, broken into six pieces. Conservators reassembled the fragments and filled in the missing part of the plinth.

What the study describes

Archaeologist Semih Orhan published the analysis in issue 36 of Arkeoloji Dergisi in April 2026 (pages 101 to 113). His paper is titled “A Statue of Athena Giustiniani Type from the West Street of Perge” (Turkish: “Perge Batı Caddesi’nden Bir Athena Giustiniani Heykeli”). The catalogue entry lists the surviving figure at 1.88 metres tall, 0.67 metres wide and 0.43 metres deep. The paper abbreviates the height as “Y.”, which most likely stands for the Turkish word for height. The sculptor carved the figure from a single block of fine-crystalline white marble, at close to life size.

The head is gone from the neck up. So are the left hand and forearm, the right big toe and much of the plinth. Wear affects the sandal, the right knee and calf, the drapery folds, the aegis and the Medusa relief on her chest, and the back shows breaks and cracks. Orhan dates the piece to the mid-2nd century AD on stylistic and iconographic grounds. It is a Roman-period copy of an older Greek design, which scholars generally place in the late 5th or early 4th century BC.

The Giustiniani type and the missing snake

The Athena Giustiniani is a well-known sculptural type, named after a version once in the Giustiniani collection. Orhan compares the Perge statue with other copies, including pieces in the Vatican, the Capitoline Museums, Lecce, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Ephesus and two from Kremna now in Burdur. In several surviving examples, a snake coils beside the goddess. Orhan notes that scholars connect those serpents to the myth of Erichthonios.

The Perge statue has no snake today. It does have a support projection on the outer side of the right knee. Orhan argues that this stump suggests the sculptor originally carved a serpent there, as on the other copies. He adds that the helmet pushed back on her head and her calm, static pose fit that reading. The snake is therefore an inference from a carving stub. Nobody has found a preserved serpent on this statue.

The myth behind the snake

In the Athenian tale, Athena entrusted the infant Erichthonios, a child with a serpent-like form, to a closed basket. She handed it to the daughters of Cecrops, the legendary king of Athens, and told them not to look inside. According to the account Orhan summarises, the sisters opened the basket, saw the child and threw themselves from the Acropolis. The paper does not name the individual sisters. Other ancient authors tell the story in different ways, so the details vary between versions.

Orhan reads the snake in this setting as a sign of Athena’s role as protector. He also links the type to the years after the Peloponnesian War, when he sees a longing for peace and justice, and he presents the goddess as a symbol of divine order. He suggests that sculpture workshops in Perge tied into imperial ideology as well.

Why it matters, and what stays open

The statue shows how a Classical Athenian image travelled to a provincial Roman city six centuries later. It also shows how a small broken stub can shape the interpretation of a whole figure. That makes the evidence modest. The snake rests on one projection, the head that might have shown more is lost, and the Erichthonios link follows other copies, not an inscription on this piece.

The viral framing deserves care too. Headlines can make this sound like a new discovery that “hid” a dark myth. The statue came out of the ground in 2013, and the study went through review between August and November 2025 before its April 2026 publication. The myth is dark, but the paper argues from comparison and does not claim proof.

Sources

• Semih Orhan, “A Statue of Athena Giustiniani Type from the West Street of Perge,” Arkeoloji Dergisi 36 (2026), pp. 101-113, DOI 10.51493/egearkeoloji.1766905 (journal page; full text)
• Greek Reporter, 11 November 2026 (secondary coverage that prompted this post)

No image from the paper was available for reuse here. All details come from the published article.