lmost a
psychological appreciation of their personality--the tale of Demeter's
mourning for her daughter Persephone, her wanderings and adventures; of
the love of Aphrodite for a mortal; of how Hermes invented the lyre and
tricked Apollo about his cattle; of the birth of Apollo and the founding
of his worship at Delos and Delphi; of the marvellous birth of Athena
from the head of Zeus. It is hardly too much to say that in the later of
these Homeric hymns--those that are mentioned first in the above
enumeration--an almost human interest is given to the gods, to their
sufferings and adventures. It is the same tendency which we see in the
lyric poetry of the Greeks, with its intensely personal note. The
reflexion of this tendency in art is not, indeed, to be seen until the
fourth century; not only the power of expression, but the desire to
express such a side of the character of the gods seems to be absent
until this period.

It may seem curious at first sight that art was so slow in this case to
follow the lead given it by poetry; but it is to be remembered that a
power of expression such as would have enabled it to do so was not
attained until the fifth century, and that in this age there was an
exaltation of national and religious enthusiasm, owing mainly to the
victories over the Persians, which checked the tendency to sentiment and
pathos; and it was not until this vigorous reaction had died away that
the tendency once more asserted itself. The early fifth century was also
marked by poets such as Pindar and AEschylus, who raised the religious
ideals of the nation on to a higher plane, who consciously rejected the
less worthy conceptions of the gods, and, whether in accordance with the
popular beliefs or not, gave expression to a higher truth in religion
than had hitherto been dreamed of. The gods whom the sculptors of the
fifth century were called upon to represent may have been the gods of
Homer, but they were the Homeric gods transformed by the creative
imagination of a more reflective age, and purified by a poetic, if not a
philosophic, idealism. But while AEschylus suggests "a deeply brooding
mind, tinged with mysticism, grappling with dark problems of life and
fate,"[2] and so was, in some ways, remote from the clarity and
definition of sculptural form, Sophocles "invests the conceptions of
popular religion with a higher spiritual and intellectual meaning; and
the artistic side of the age is expressed by him in p