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The sculptors were content for the most part to follow the imaginations of the earlier poets. They only sought to realize in the god-like forms their highest ideals of human beauty and dignity. They avoided the example of the Babylonians and Egyptians who had emphasized the unworldliness of their deities by investing them with strange shapes and symbols. The Greek imagination was content to add to the human form a more than human majesty. Gradually these statues became so much a part of their imagination that the Greeks found it impossible to picture the great gods apart from the artists’ portrayals. So widespread was the effect of sculpture on Greek and Roman religious thought that, at length, no other conception of the gods could be formed. In the wall paintings of Pompeii the deities are represented as of the colour and material of statues, the sculptural effect being imitated as closely as possible.

Lucian, too, in one of his dialogues, pictures the assembly of the Olympian deities who are dismayed that men no longer rest upon the faiths of their forefathers. In the course of the dialogue, Zeus orders “that the gods should be seated in order of merit. The gold gods first, then the silver, then the ivory, bronze, and stone,” he commands, “and give preference to any work of Phidias, or Alcamenes, or Myron, or Euphranor, or other artist of distinction.”