Religion and Art in Ancient Greece | Page 7

alien to the Greek
imagination; if we find here and there a survival of some strange type,
such as the horse-headed Demeter at Phigalia, it remains isolated and
has little influence upon prevalent beliefs. The Greek certainly thought
of his gods as having the same human form as himself; and not the
gods only, but also the semi-divine, semi-human, sometimes less than
human beings with which his imagination peopled the woods and
mountains and seas. His Nereids had human feet, not fishy tails like our
mermaids; and if centaurs and satyrs and some other creatures of his
imagination showed something of the beast within the man in their
visible shape, they had little about them of the mysterious or the

unearthly. It would be a great mistake to regard all these creatures as
mere impersonations or abstractions. If "a pagan suckled in a creed
outworn" could
"Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea And hear old Triton blow
his wreathed horn,"
much more were such sights and sounds familiar to his forefathers, to
whom the same beliefs were fresh and real. Even to the present day
Greek peasants may often be found who can tell of such experiences; to
them, as to the Greeks of old, desert places and remote woods and
mountains are terrible, not because they are lonely, but because when a
man is alone then is he least alone; hence the panic terror, the terror of
Pan.
The same idea, which later takes the religious or philosophic form of
the belief in the omnipresence of the deity, peopled the woods with
dryads, the streams and springs with nymphs and river-gods, the seas
with Nereids and Tritons. When an artist represented a mountain or a
river-god, a nymph or a Triton, or added such figures to a scene to
indicate its locality by what seems to us at first sight a mere artistic
convention, he was not inventing an impersonation, but he was
representing something which, in the imagination of the people, might
actually be seen upon the spot--at least, by those whose eyes were
opened to see it. It was the same gift of imagination that made Blake
say: "'What,' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see a
disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?' 'Oh no, no! I see an innumerable
company of the heavenly host, crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
God Almighty!" I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I
would question a window, concerning a sight. I look through it, and not
with it.'"[1]
[Footnote 1: Blake, "Aldine" edition, p. cvi.]
In the case of the gods, the matter is somewhat less simple than in that
of all these daemonic creatures of the popular imagination. Gods imply
a greater power of generalisation and a higher stage of religious
development. It was not thought likely that the gods would show

themselves to mortal eyes, as had been their habit in the Golden Age,
except perhaps upon some occasion of a great national crisis; and even
then it was the heroes rather than the gods who manifested themselves.
But the ordinary Greek believed that the gods actually existed in human
form, and even that their characters and passions and moods were like
those of human beings. The influence of the poet and the artist could
not have been so vigorous if it had not found, in the imagination of the
people, a suitable and sympathetic material.
(2) Official or state religion consisted in the main of an organisation of
popular ritual. There was no priestcraft in Greece, no exclusive caste to
whom the worship of the gods was assigned, although, of course, the
right to practise certain cults belonged to particular families. But a
priesthood, as a rule, was a political office like any other magistracy,
and there was no exclusive tradition in the case of the chief cults of any
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