The Temple of Athena Nike — Athena the Bringer of Victory — is the smallest building on the Acropolis but one of the most elegant. It sits on a rocky bastion at the south-west corner of the citadel, just to the right as you climb the entrance steps, and was built between 427 and 424 BCE by the architect Kallikrates.
The temple is a perfect amphiprostyle Ionic structure — four columns at each end, none on the sides — and its scale is intimate enough to take in at a glance. Tradition says the Athenians worshipped Athena here as a wingless Nike, so that victory could never fly away from the city. The frieze, depicting Greeks fighting Persians, is in fragments scattered between the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum.