s of which some may be meant to represent
individual men, so even in the age of Phidias we sometimes meet with a
figure of athletic type or of youthful beauty as to which it is possible
to doubt whether it is an Apollo; this may be partly the result of the
great popularity of the type in all ages of Greek sculpture which led to
its more rapid development and earlier individualisation. But the Apollo
of this period is never the mere dreamy youth of later time; it has been
well said that he is the god who, in the mythical athletic contest,
could surpass Hermes in the foot-race and Ares in boxing; the embodiment
of all-round physical and intellectual excellence, the combination of
music and gymnastic, which again brings us back to a national Hellenic
ideal. Throughout the representations of the gods in the art of the
fifth century we find the same essential character. They embody in
themselves the expression, by means of the most perfect physical forms,
of the qualities attributed to the god himself, or given by him to his
worshippers. They are no impersonal abstraction of these qualities, but
are real and living beings, in whom these qualities exist to a degree
impossible for a mere mortal. But, on the other hand, they have nothing
of the passions and emotions, the weaknesses and imperfections of mortal
nature. In this they are inconsistent, perhaps, with that Homeric
presentment of the gods which the greatest artists consciously set
before themselves. But we cannot wonder that an age of such clear and
lofty intellectual and moral perceptions should have rejected what it
felt to be unworthy in the current notions of the gods, and should have
selected only what it felt to be truly divine. Art did not, however,
remain very long upon its highest level of religious feeling; but in
Greece, by a fortunate coincidence, the age of the greatest religious
ideals was also that of the highest perfection of physical type in art
as well as of technical skill in execution. We do not therefore find in
this age that the sculptor lacks the power to express his ideas, or that
his ideas are too strong for the forms in which they are expressed;
there is rather that perfect harmony between the two that, here as
elsewhere, is characteristic of Hellenic art.

CHAPTER VI

INDIVIDUALISM

The great religious ideals of the fifth century were, as we have seen,
closely bound up with the subordination of the individual to the State;
and thei