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 of worship. We are not told that Pericles meant to
s