A name from Greek mythology, associated with Pallas Athena and ancient meanings linked to battle or wisdom.
Pallas is one of antiquity's most resonant names, an epithet of Athena herself — the great goddess of wisdom, warfare, crafts, and civilization. The origin of the epithet remains productively mysterious: some ancient sources derive it from the Greek "pallein," to brandish or wield, appropriate for a war goddess; others connect it to the story of Pallas, a giant whom Athena slew and from whose skin she fashioned her aegis. A gentler tradition holds that Pallas was a childhood companion of Athena accidentally killed during a training exercise — and that the goddess adopted the name as a form of mourning and memorial, an act of love preserved in language.
In the classical world, Pallas Athena was the patron of Athens itself, the divine protector whose sacred olive tree and whose image crowned the Parthenon. The name carried enormous weight: philosophical, martial, aesthetic. Later, the Roman poet Virgil gave the name to a young Arcadian prince in the Aeneid, Pallas the son of Evander, whose death becomes one of the epic's most grief-laden moments.
Shakespeare echoed this resonance in his later works, and the name circulated in Renaissance humanist culture as a symbol of learned virtue. Modern bearers of the name include Pallas, an asteroid designated 2 Pallas discovered in 1802 — the second asteroid ever found, named in the tradition of bestowing classical names on celestial bodies. As a given name today, Pallas is arrestingly rare and genuinely striking: mythological without being theatrical, learned without being stuffy, equally suited to any gender in an era of expanding naming freedom.