The Project Gutenberg EBook of Religion and Art in Ancient Greece, by
Ernest Arthur Gardner

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Title: Religion and Art in Ancient Greece

Author: Ernest Arthur Gardner

Release Date: February 6, 2007 [EBook #20523]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGION AND ART IN ANCIENT GREECE ***

Produced by Ron Swanson

RELIGION AND ART
IN
ANCIENT GREECE

BY
ERNEST A. GARDNER

YATES PROFESSOR OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND PUBLIC ORATOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
LONDON; LATE DIRECTOR OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS

LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS
45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1910

PREFACE

Greek religion may be studied under various aspects; and many recent
contributions to this study have been mainly concerned either with the
remote origin of many of its ceremonies in primitive ritual, or with the
manner in which some of its obscurer manifestations met the deeper
spiritual needs which did not find satisfaction in the official cults.
Such discussions are of the highest interest to the anthropologist and
to the psychologist; but they have the disadvantage of fixing our
attention too exclusively on what, to the ordinary Greek, appeared
accidental or even morbid, and of making us regard the Olympian
pantheon, with its clearly realised figures of the gods, as a mere
system imposed more or less from outside upon the old rites and beliefs
of the people. In the province of art, at least, the Olympian gods are
paramount; and thus we are led to appreciate and to understand their
worship as it affected the religious ideals of the people and the
services of the State. For we must remember that in the case of religion
even more than in that of art, its essential character and its influence
upon life and thought lie rather in its full perfection than in its
origin.

In a short sketch of so wide a subject it has seemed inadvisable to make
any attempt to describe the types of the various gods. Without full
illustration and a considerable expenditure of space, such a description
would be impracticable, and the reader must be referred to the ordinary
handbooks of the subject. A fuller account will be