The Palladium was born from the hands of Athena herself, or so the Trojans believed. Some said the goddess had carved it from the wood of a sacred olive tree on the citadel of Troy, shaping it in her own image with spear in hand and distaff at her side, a figure of war and weaving, of protection and domestic order. Others said it had fallen from the sky, dropped by Zeus as a gift to his favoured city, a divine sign that Troy was under the protection of heaven. Still others said it had been made by the craftsman Daidalos, the same man who built the labyrinth for the Minotaur on Crete, and that he had given it to the Trojans as a gift. Whatever its origin, the statue was small, no taller than a man, and it was made of wood, not gold or marble, which made it all the more sacred, for the Greeks believed that the gods loved simple offerings more than costly ones.

The Palladium stood in the temple of Athena on the citadel of Troy, the highest point of the city, where the goddess could watch over her people. An oracle had declared that as long as the image remained within the walls, Troy could never fall. The Trojans guarded it with their lives. Priests tended it day and night, and the kings of Troy, from Laomedon to his son Priam, offered sacrifices before it before every battle. The statue was not merely a religious object. It was the soul of the city, the visible proof that the gods had chosen Troy to stand forever, and its presence made the Trojans fight with a courage that no Greek army could break. For nine years the Greeks besieged the city, and for nine years the walls held, because the Palladium stood on the citadel and Athena's eye was upon it.

But the Greeks were cunning as well as strong. The prophet Calchas, who had revealed the cause of Apollo's plague at the beginning of the war, now revealed the secret of Troy's invincibility. The city could not fall while the Palladium remained within its walls. The Greek leaders, Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae and commander of the armies, and Odysseus, the cunning king of Ithaca whose ten-year voyage home would become the subject of Homer's Odyssey, devised a plan. They would send two men into the city by stealth to steal the image, and without it Troy would be vulnerable to any attack.

Odysseus and Diomedes volunteered for the mission. Diomedes was the prince of Argos and one of the greatest Greek warriors, a man who had once wounded Ares, the Olympian god of war, in single combat with Athena's help. Odysseus was the craftiest man in Greece, the inventor of the wooden horse that would one day breach the walls of Troy itself. Together they crept through the night, disguised as beggars or crawling through a sewer, depending on which poet tells the tale, and made their way up to the citadel. The guards were few, for the Trojans believed their city was impregnable, and Odysseus and Diomedes slew them silently. They entered the temple of Athena, and there stood the Palladium, small and wooden and ancient, its painted eyes staring into the darkness. Diomedes reached for it, but some say Odysseus wanted the glory of the theft for himself and tried to kill Diomedes once the image was in his hands. Others say Diomedes struck first. In the end they carried it out together, and the luck of Troy went with them.

The theft of the Palladium was the turning point of the war. With the image gone, the divine protection of Troy was broken, and the Greeks knew that the city could now fall. But the walls were still high and the Trojans still brave, and a direct assault would cost thousands of lives. Odysseus devised the wooden horse, a giant hollow statue built from the timbers of the Greek ships, and the Greeks hid their best warriors inside it. The Trojans, believing the horse was a gift to Athena, dragged it within their walls, and that night the Greeks emerged, opened the gates, and burned the city to the ground. The Palladium was gone, and Troy fell in flames. Some said that the Greeks took the statue back to Argos or Sparta as a trophy, but the more important tradition held that it was never in Greek hands at all.

For in the chaos of the sack, the Trojan hero Aeneas, the son of Venus and the mortal Anchises, whose union had been blessed by Aphrodite herself, carried the Palladium from the burning temple. Aeneas was one of the few Trojans to escape the destruction, and he took with him his father, his son, and the sacred image of Athena. He sailed across the Mediterranean, wandering for years as Odysseus would later wander, until he reached Italy and founded the city that would become Rome. The Palladium went with him, and when Rome rose to power the statue was housed in the temple of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, where the eternal flame burned and the Vestal Virgins tended it day and night. The Romans believed that as long as the Palladium remained in Rome, the city would stand forever, just as the Trojans had believed the same of Troy. The image had travelled from one empire to another, and its power had never faded.

In later ages, the word palladium came to mean any safeguard or protection, any object or institution that keeps a people safe from harm. The British called their empire a palladium of liberty, and the Americans called their constitution the same. The statue itself was said to have been transferred to Constantinople when the Roman Empire moved east, and then to have been lost in the chaos of history, but its name lived on. Every national relic, every sacred banner, and every symbol that a people believe protects them from destruction carries something of the wooden image that Athena carved or that fell from the sky, the small statue that made Troy invincible and then, when it was stolen, let the city burn.