At the top of the stele, framed by slender pilasters and a horizontal cornice, stand two figures. On the right is Athena, helmeted patron of Athens. On the left is Hera, the great goddess of Samos, whose island temple was among the largest in the Greek world. Athena reaches out and clasps Hera's hand. The gesture is diplomacy made visible: not two cities signing a treaty, but their divine protectors joining hands as equals. The scholars Petersen and Collignon suggested the figure of Hera echoes a famous statue by the sculptor Alkamenes. Whatever its model, the handshake carries the whole meaning of the monument in a single image.

Beneath the relief, the marble carries three Athenian decrees passed by the Boule, the council, and the demos, the people. The carved Greek names a secretary, Kephisophon of Paiania, and addresses its honors plainly: "To the Samians who became allies of the Athenian People." The stele stands 1.65 meters tall and just over half a meter wide, quarried from the bluish marble of nearby Mount Pentelikon, the same stone that built the Parthenon. The three texts have been fully studied and translated, and they remain a vital source for understanding the chaotic final years of the Peloponnesian War, when alliances dissolved almost overnight.

The story behind the stone is harsh. After Aegospotami, the people of Samos drove out their own oligarchs and sent two envoys to Athens, offering to keep fighting at the side of a city that was clearly losing. Their reward came swiftly and cruelly: in 404 BC the Spartan commander Lysander besieged Samos, exiled its democrats, and installed an oligarchy in their place. The Samians who had risked everything for Athens lost their homes. It was only after democracy returned to Athens that the Athenians honored those exiles, carving into marble a debt they could no longer repay in any other way.

The monument we see was pieced back together over many years. Two fragments turned up first, in 1876, among the ruins of the Theatre of Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis. The largest and most important piece emerged in 1888, during the great excavations on the Acropolis itself. A fourth fragment was identified later and joined to the rest in 1903. The inscriptions confirm the timeline: the first decree dates to the archonship of Alexias in 405/4 BC, the last two to the archonship of Eucleides in 403/2 BC, the relief cut at the same time as those final texts. The carving froze a moment of gratitude that has now outlasted both cities' empires by twenty-four centuries.