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So it was in Greece. We may be convinced that the Iliad and the Odyssey should be described as art. They are art to our way of thinking; that is to say, to our minds they are clearly more akin to “Paradise Lost” than to the religious poetry of the Jews. But to the Greek they were at once religion and art and philosophy.

Exactly the same remark must preface our consideration of the third class into which the sculptures of fifth-century Greece may be divided—the temple statues, erected to such deities as Zeus, Hera, and Athena.

For five hundred years or more the best elements in the religious faith of ancient Greece had been fostered and sustained by the Homeric poems. These, at least, offered an antidote to the brutal temple myths which had gradually gathered around the names of the gods, the nature of which can be realized from the pages of Hesiod. But the Greeks must at times have hungered for more definite representations of the great gods and goddesses.

In the fifth century, however, the sculptors shook off the bonds of realism, which had prevented the portrayal of such a purely ideal figure as the deity “who dwelt in the heights of the air,” and whose voice could be heard in the rustling of the oak-leaves of Dodona. It was realized that a divine image, as satisfying to the imagination of the Greek as the word-pictures of Homer, was possible. The success of the great artists of the fifth century was instantaneous. Within a short time all the great temples of the Hellenic world were furnished with statues of the deities in whose honour they were erected.