Religion and Art in Ancient Greece | Page 4

attached to a post, round which we still see the
Maenads dancing on fifth-century vases. The notion that such carved
eyes or ears actually served to transmit impressions to the god is well
illustrated by Professor Petrie's discovery at Memphis of a number of
votive ears of the god, intended to facilitate or to symbolise his
reception of the prayers of his votaries. In fact, the taunt of the psalmist
against the images of the heathen--"Eyes have they, but they see not;
they have ears, and yet they hear not"--is not a merely rhetorical one, as
it seems to us, but real and practical, if spoken to men who gave their
gods ears and eyes that they might hear and see.
An imagination so entirely materialistic may belong to a more primitive
stage than any we can find among the Greeks. As soon as religion has
reached the polytheistic stage the gods are regarded as travelling from
image to image, just as they travel from temple to temple. Even in
AEschylus' Eumenides it will be remembered that when Orestes, by the
advice of Apollo, clasps as a suppliant the ancient image of Athena at
Athens, the goddess comes flying from far away in the Troad when she
hears the sound of his calling. The exact relation of the goddess to the
image is not, in all probability, very clearly realised; but, so far as one
can trace it from the ritual procedure, what appears to be implied is that
a suppliant will have a better chance of reaching the deity he addresses
if he approaches one of the images preferred by that deity as the abode
of his power; often there is one such image preferred to all others, as
this early one of Athena at Athens. The deity was not, therefore,
regarded as immanent in any image--at least, in classical times; the
gods lived in Olympus, or possibly visited from time to time the people
whom they favoured, or went to the great festivals that were held in
their honour. But the various images of them, especially the most
ancient ones, that were set up in their temples in the various cities of
Greece were regarded as a means of communication between gods and
men. The prayer of a worshipper addressing such an image will be
transmitted to the deity whom he addresses, and the deity may even
come in person to hear him, if special aid is required. A close parallel
may be found even in modern days. I have known of a child, brought
up in the Roman Catholic religion, who had a particular veneration or
affection for a certain statue of the Virgin, and used often to address it

or, as she said, converse with it. And she said she had an impression
that, if only she could slip in unawares, she might see the Virgin Mary
herself approaching or leaving the statue, whether to be transformed
into it or merely to dwell in it for a time. On Greek vases we see the
same notion expressed as in the Eumenides, when a god or goddess is
represented as actually present beside the statue to which a sacrifice or
prayer is being offered.
In such a stage of religious belief or imagination it is clearly of high
importance that the image of any deity should be pleasing to that deity,
and thereby attract his presence and serve as a ready channel of
communication with him. From the point of view of art, it would seem
at first sight that the result would be a desire to make the image as
beautiful as possible, and as worthy an embodiment of the deity as the
sculptor could devise. This doubtless was the result in the finest period
of art in Greece, and it involved, as we shall see, a great deal of
reciprocal influence on the part of religion and art. But in earlier times
the case is not so simple; and even in statues of the fifth century it is
not easy to understand the conditions under which the sculptor worked
without some reference to the historical development that lay behind
him.
Before the rise of sculpture in Greece, images of the gods, some of
them only rudely anthropomorphic, had long been objects of worship;
and it was by no means safe in religious matters to depart too rashly
from the forms consecrated by tradition. This was partly owing to the
feeling that when a certain form had been accepted, and a certain means
of communication had worked for a long time satisfactorily, it was a
dangerous thing to make a change which might not be agreeable to the
powers concerned, and which might, so to speak, break the established
connection. But while hieratic conservatism tended to preserve