The Athenian sculptor Phidias (490-430 BC) was the inspiration for many Roman copies of his statue of the Greek goddess Athena, the monumental sculpture in the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. The one in the ‘Grande Galerie’ du Louvre, dated to the 2nd century AD, is a good example. Copyists often reproduced several different parts of statues of the same subject. Here, all the attributes of the goddess of war are present, such as the helmet, the shield, the aegis with its medusa head and its snakes. Her right arm, restored, probably originally held a spear.