e and the spiritual expression which
serves best to embody the majesty and benignity of the god. After all,
we come back perhaps to the saying of Phidias himself, and his quotation
from Homer; here, too, it is the brow of the god that is emphasised, and
the nod that shook Olympus while it granted a prayer. It is in such
effects rather than in any detailed description that it is possible to
realise the nature of a great work of art.

What success in the attainment of its aim was here reached by the art of
the sculptor may perhaps best be estimated from the often quoted
sentence of Quintilian, perhaps the noblest praise ever accorded to an
artist by a critic: "The beauty of the statue even made some addition to
the received religion; the majesty of the work was equal to the god." We
might indeed, without irreverence, impute to Phidias the words uttered
in a very different sense by one who later gave a new and higher
interpretation to a formula of "the received religion" in Greece: "Whom
therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."

The other great Phidian ideal, that of Athena, was represented by
several statues, both in Athens and in other cities. As to these we have
a certain amount of information, and even a certain number of copies,
which show us the pose and the accessories of the various statues; some
of the better ones even suffice to give us some notion of the beauty of
their original. We have also descriptions by ancient writers, which tell
us, as in the case of the Olympian Zeus, much about the decoration of
the statue; but we have not in this case any appreciations of the effect
upon those who saw it. The ideal of Athena is in some ways more
difficult for us to comprehend than that of Zeus, partly because it is
less universally human, and more peculiarly characteristic of Greece and
even of Athens. The notion of the mother goddess is common to most
religions; that of the "queen and huntress, chaste and fair" is at least
familiar to us in literature, and readily commends itself to the
imagination. But Athena, though she has something of both these
characters, has a nature different from both. It is impossible to derive
her varied mythological functions from any one origin; but here it is
not the origin of her worship that concerns us, rather its meaning and
influence as these affected the people of her chosen city. Just as Zeus
was the ideal of all that was best in the Hellenic conception of manhood