On January 7, 1998, a Greek votive stele dedicated to Zeus Meilichios, dated to the fourth century BCE, was stolen from the Louvre. The theft formed part of a troubling 1990s sequence of losses at the museum, alongside the 1994 theft of Robert Nanteuil's Portrait de Jean Dorieu, the 1995 theft of Lancelot-Theodore Turpin de Crisse's Daims dans un paysage, and the later May 1998 disappearance of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Le Chemin de Sevres. Documentation of the Corot case notes the January stele theft as the immediately preceding Louvre art theft, while the Louvre history page records the same date and object. The incident is significant less for market value than for what it exposed about public-gallery security around portable antiquities.
The theft became part of the security context that framed later scrutiny of Louvre losses in 1998.