Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/86

 HlSToKN ART IN I'll"] iri .M ITS 1 >KI'IN1)KNCIKS. city or tribe. Greece had great poets, a llesiod, and above all a Homer, whose words every Greek knew by heart; she had great festivals, such as those of Delphi and Olympia, where all the natives of Hellas could meet as brothers for at least a few days ; she had an art which, in its desire tor a universal audience, gave fixed types to each of the dwellers on Olympus. Phoenicia was not so fortunate. The. efforts she made to counteract the separating influence of her modes of life, and of the configuration of her soil, were slight, and consequently we find the particular municipal character much more strongly marked in her divinities than in the gods of Greece. All this must have had a great effect I'ygmy. l-'ruin a I'liu-nidan teira-cotta in the I.mivre. Height 9^ inches. in retarding the development of the religious idea, and of the plastic arts. Among certain races, of which the Greeks were one, plurality of gods has been a direct result of the infinite variety of divine attributes imagined by the national intellect. The Hellenic polytheism implies a profound analysis of the qualities of man and of the laws of life ; it embodies the theology of a people who were in later days to give birth to philosophy. The second- ary deities of Phoenicia represent no such systematic effort of the intellect ; they correspond mainly to geographical and political divisions.