Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/491

 MYTHES STIMULANTS TO GRECIAN ART. 459 paintings, statues, and reliefs, which rendered the temping, por- ticos, and public buildings, at Athens and elsewhere, objects of surpassing admiration ; and such visible reproduction contributed again to fix the types of the gods and heroes familiarly and in- delibly on the public mind. 1 The figures delineated on cups and vases, as well as on the walls of private houses, were chiefly drawn from the same source the mythes being the great store- house of artistic scenes and composition. To enlarge on the characteristic excellence of Grecian art would here be out of place : I regard it only in so far as, having originally drawn its materials from the mythes, it reacted upon the mythical faith and imagination the reaction imparting strength to the former as well as distinctness to the latter. To one who saw constantly before him representations of the battles of the Centaurs or the Amazons, 2 of the exploits performed by Perseus and Bellerophon, of the incidents composing the Trojan war or the Kalydonian boar-hunt the process of belief, even in the more fantastic of these conceptions, became easy in pro- portion as the conception was familiarized. And if any person had been slow to believe in the efficacy of the prayers of JEa- kus, whereby that devout hero once obtained special relief from Zeus, at a moment when Greece was perishing with long-con- tinued sterility, his doubts would probably vanish when, on visit- ing the .ZEakeium at JEgina, there were exhibited to him the statues of the very envoys who had come on the behalf of the distressed Greeks to solicit that .ZEakus would pray for them. 3 A Grecian temple 4 was not simply a place of worship, but the actual dwelling-place of a god, who was believed to be introduced by the solemn dedicatory ceremony, and whom the imagination of the people identified in the most intimate manner with his apeTais, the subjects of the works of Polygnotus at Athens (Melanthius ap. Plutarch. Cimon. c. 4) : compare Theocrit. xv. 138. 3 The Centauromachia and the Amazonomachia are constantly associated together in the ancient Grecian reliefs (see the Expedition Scientifique de More'e, t. ii. p. 16, in the explanation of the temple of Apollo Epikureius at Phigaleia). 3 Pausan. ii. 29, 6. a.! Gentes, vi. p 203, ed. Elmenhorst.
 * Ernst Curtius, Die Akropolis von Athen, Berlin, 1844, p. 18. Arnobim