Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Pallas.
The gallery
Temple of Hephaestus (Hephaisteion), Athens — East Frieze: Theseus and the Pallantides
Unknown (workshop of the so-called Hephaisteion Master), c. 449–415 BC
The best-preserved Doric temple in Greece, the Hephaisteion overlooking the Athenian Agora carries on the east frieze of its pronaos a sculpted battle scene flanked by seated gods, identified as Theseus's fight against the Pallantides — the fifty sons of Pallas, son of King Pandion II of Athens. Pallas and his offspring contested the Athenian throne with Theseus and were destroyed by him; the relief sets this dynastic combat under the watching Olympians, framing the slaughter of Pallas's line as the violent legitimation of Theseus's Athenian kingship. The marble frieze, carved in the high Classical style around the third quarter of the fifth century BC, is the principal surviving monumental image of Pallas's myth.
Temple of Hephaestus, Athens — South Colonnade
Unknown, c. 449–415 BC
A view along the southern flank of the Hephaisteion, the Classical Doric temple whose pronaos frieze on the east end depicts the battle of Theseus and the Pallantides in the presence of the seated gods. The Pallantides were the sons of Pallas, son of Pandion II, who marched on Athens to seize the throne from Theseus and were ambushed and killed. Erected in the marble-quarrying decades after the Persian Wars, the temple program weaves the destruction of Pallas's rival house into Athens's civic-heroic self-image, making this monument — rather than any single portrait — the enduring artistic witness to Pallas the Pandionid.