Greek state to keep the point of view of the priests different from that of the people generally. The tendency of state religion was, as a rule, conservative, for reasons that we have already noticed; innovations in the matter of ritual are dangerous, for the new rite may not please the gods as well as the old; and the same feeling applies to the statues that form the centres of ritual. Pericles, for example, doubtless wished to make the Athena Parthenos of Phidias the official and visible representation of the goddess of Athens, and thereby to raise the religious ideals of the Athenians. In this last part of his attempt he was successful; the statue became the pride and glory of the city in its fitting shrine, the Parthenon; but the old image was still preserved in the temple of Athena Polias, and remained the official centre of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to supersede it; but it is very probable that he intended to do so, and was only prevented by the religious conservatism that curtailed other plans of his for the beautifying of the Acropolis. On the other hand, there is no evidence that in Greece—at least, in the best period of Greek art—any statesman held the views as to the official religion frankly expressed in Rome, that it was expedient for this religion to be accepted by the common people, but that educated men could only reconcile their consciences to taking part in it by a philosophical interpretation.

There is something unreal and artificial about any such compromise. If Pericles was intimate with Anaxagoras, who was prosecuted for atheism, he was also the friend of Phidias, who expressly said that his Zeus was the Zeus of Homer, no mere abstract ideal of divinity. If this was the case with Pericles, who held himself aloof from the common people, it must have been much more so with other statesmen, who mingled with them more freely, or even, like Nicias, shared their superstitions. Under such conditions the influence of art upon the representations of the gods could not well go in advance of popular conceptions, though it might accompany and direct them. The making of new statues of the gods, to be set up as the centres of worship in their temples, in some cases received the formal sanction of the Delphic oracle, the highest official and religious authority. Public commissions of this sort are common at all times, but commonest in the years immediately succeeding the Persian Wars, when the spoils of the Persians supplied ample resources, and in many cases the ancient temples and images had been destroyed; and at the same time the outburst of national enthusiasm over the great deliverance led to a desire to give due thank-offerings to the gods of the Hellenic race, a desire which coincided with the ability to fulfil it, owing to the rapid progress of artistic power. Such public commissions, and the popular feeling which they expressed, offered an inspiration to the artist such as has rarely, if ever, found a parallel. But any great victory or deliverance might be commemorated by the setting up of statues of the gods to whom it was attributed; and in this way the demands of official religion offered the sculptor the highest scope for the exercise of his art and his imagination.

(3) The influence of poetic mythology upon art can hardly be exaggerated. The statement of Herodotus that Homer and Hesiod "made the Greek theogony, and assigned to the gods their epithets and distinguished their prerogatives and their functions, and indicated their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any modern mythologist. But it is nevertheless true that the clear and vivid personality and individuality given to the gods by the epic poets affects all later poetry and all Greek art. The imagination of the poets could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions. But it fills these conceptions with real and vivid character, so that the gods of Homer are as clearly presented to us as any personalities of history or fiction. They are, indeed, endowed not only with the form, but with the passions, and some even of the weaknesses of mankind; and for this reason the philosophers often rejected as unworthy the tales that the poets told of the gods. But even an artist such as Phidias expressly stated that it was the Zeus of Homer who inspired his greatest work, quoting the well-known passage in the Iliad in which the god grants the prayer of Thetis:—

"He said; and his black eyebrows bent; above his deathless head
  Th' ambrosian curls flowed; great heaven shook."

Descriptive passages such as this are not, indeed, common, because, as Lessing clearly pointed out, the poet depends more upon action and its effect than on mere enumerative description. Even here it is the action of the nod, and the shaking of heaven that follows it, that emphasises the impression, rather than the mere mention of eyebrows or hair. In many other cases the distinctive epithet has its value for all later art—the cow-eyed Hera, the grey-eyed Athena, the swift messenger Hermes; but, above all, it is the action and character of the various gods that is so clearly realised by the poet that his successors cannot, if they wish, escape from his spell.

The influence of the various Greek poets is not, indeed, for the most part, to be traced in contemporary Greek art. This is obvious in the case of the Homeric poems, for the art of the time was of a purely decorative character, and was quite incapable of representing in any adequate way the vivid and lively imagination of the poets; and, for that matter, for many centuries after the date of the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey, Hellenic art made no attempt to cope with any so ambitious problems. Even when the art of sculpture had attained to a considerable degree of mastery over material and expression, we find its aims and conceptions lagging far behind those of the poet. This will become clearer when, in the next chapter, we consider the conditions of artistic expression in Greece; but it must be noted here, in order to prevent possible misconception. As soon, however, as art became capable of aiming at something beyond perfection of a bodily form—a change which, in spite of Pausanias' admiration of something divine about the works of Dædalus, can hardly be dated earlier than the fifth century B.C.—the Homeric conceptions of the gods came to have their full effect. Zeus, the king and father of gods and men; Athena, the friendly protectress of heroes, irresistible in war, giver of all intellectual and artistic power; Apollo, the archer and musician, the purifier and soothsayer—these and others find their first visible embodiment in the statues whereby the sculptors of the fifth century gave expression to the Homeric conceptions.

The tales, too, that were told about the gods, some of them trivial enough, but others full of religious and ethical significance, had for some time before this been common subjects upon reliefs and vase-paintings, and on these also the influence of the poets was very great. Here we have not only the Iliad and Odyssey to consider, but many other early epics that are now lost to us. The vase-painter or sculptor did not, indeed, merely illustrate these stories as a modern artist might; often he had a separate tradition and a repertory of subjects belonging to his own art, and developed them along different lines from those followed by the poets. But although this tradition might lead him to choose a version less familiar to poetry, or even to give a new form to an old story, his conception was essentially poetical, in that it implied an imaginative realisation of the scene or action, and even of the character of the deity or hero represented.

The conception of the gods to be found in other early epics probably did not differ essentially from that we find in the Iliad and Odyssey; but with the Homeric hymns and with some of the earlier lyric poets we find a change setting