d it involved, as we shall see, a great deal
of reciprocal influence on the part of religion and art. But in earlier
times the case is not so simple; and even in statues of the fifth
century it is not easy to understand the conditions under which the
sculptor worked without some reference to the historical development
that lay behind him.

Before the rise of sculpture in Greece, images of the gods, some of them
only rudely anthropomorphic, had long been objects of worship; and it
was by no means safe in religious matters to depart too rashly from the
forms consecrated by tradition. This was partly owing to the feeling
that when a certain form had been accepted, and a certain means of
communication had worked for a long time satisfactorily, it was a
dangerous thing to make a change which might not be agreeable to the
powers concerned, and which might, so to speak, break the established
connection. But while hieratic conservatism tended to preserve forms and
formulae almost for what we may call magic reasons, there was also a
sentiment about the matter which gave popular support to the tendency.
Thus Pausanias probably expresses a common feeling when he says that the
images made by Daedalus, "though somewhat strange in aspect, yet seem to
be distinguished by something in them of the divine."

It is true that these early images attributed to Daedalus showed already
a considerable advance on the shapeless or roughly shaped stocks or
stones that had served as the most primitive objects of worship; but it
was their resemblance to these rather than their difference from them
that impressed the imagination of Pausanias. He appreciated them not so
much as examples of an art that promised much for the future, but rather
as linked with the past by the tradition of an immemorial sanctity. We
find, in fact, that the rude early images remained the centres of state
cult and official worship, as well as of popular veneration, long after
the art of sculpture had become capable of providing their worshippers
with more adequate embodiments of the gods they represented. It was the
early image of Athena, not the Athena Parthenos by Phidias, that was
annually washed in the sea, and for which the peplos was woven by the
chosen women of Athens. The connection between art and religion is, in
such a case, reduced to narrow limits; but, on the other hand, we hear
of many instances where new statues of the gods were made as temple
statues, to be