Religion and Art in Ancient Greece | Page 8

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