Résumé : The general principally polarized abelian variety of dimension at most five is known to be a Prym variety. This reduces the study of abelian varieties of small dimension to the beautifully concrete theory of algebraic curves. I will discuss recent breakthrough on finding a structure theorem for principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension six as Prym-Tyurin varieties associated to covers with $E_6$-monodromy, and the implications this uniformization result has on the geometry of the moduli space $A_6$. This is joint work with Alexeev, Donagi, Izadi and Ortega.