As no description of the frieze survives from antiquity and many religious rituals involved secret symbolism and traditions left unspoken, so the question of the meaning of the sculpture has been a persistent and unresolved one. The first published attempt at interpretation belongs to Cyriacus of Ancona in the 15th century, who referred to it as the “victories of Athens in the time of Pericles”. What is now the more accepted view of the piece, however, namely that it depicts the Greater Panathenaic procession from the Leokoreion by the Dipylon Gate, to the Acropolis, was mooted by Stuart and Revett in the second volume of their "Antiquities of Athens", 1787. Subsequent interpretations have built largely on this theory, even if they disallow that a temple sculpture could represent a contemporary event rather than a mythological or historical one. It has only been in recent years that an alternative thesis in which the frieze depicts the founding myth of the city of Athens instead of the festival "pompe" has emerged.