God created man in His own image"; for the legends about
the origin of the human race varied considerably and many of them
represented crude philosophical theorising rather than religious belief.
But the monstrous forms which we find in Egypt and Mesopotamia as
embodiments of divine power were alien to the Greek imagination; if we
find here and there a survival of some strange type, such as the
horse-headed Demeter at Phigalia, it remains isolated and has little
influence upon prevalent beliefs. The Greek certainly thought of his
gods as having the same human form as himself; and not the gods only,
but also the semi-divine, semi-human, sometimes less than human beings
with which his imagination peopled the woods and mountains and seas. His
Nereids had human feet, not fishy tails like our mermaids; and if
centaurs and satyrs and some other creatures of his imagination showed
something of the beast within the man in their visible shape, they had
little about them of the mysterious or the unearthly. It would be a
great mistake to regard all these creatures as mere impersonations or
abstractions. If "a pagan suckled in a creed outworn" could

"Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn,"

much more were such sights and sounds familiar to his forefathers, to
whom the same beliefs were fresh and real. Even to the present day Greek
peasants may often be found who can tell of such experiences; to them,
as to the Greeks of old, desert places and remote woods and mountains
are terrible, not because they are lonely, but because when a man is
alone then is he least alone; hence the panic terror, the terror of Pan.

The same idea, which later takes the religious or philosophic form of
the belief in the omnipresence of the deity, peopled the woods with
dryads, the streams and springs with nymphs and river-gods, the seas
with Nereids and Tritons. When an artist represented a mountain or a
river-god, a nymph or a Triton, or added such figures to a scene to
indicate its locality by what seems to us at first sight a mere artistic
convention, he was not inventing an impersonation, but he was
representing something which, in the imagination of the people, might
actually be seen upon the spot--at least, by those whose eyes were
opened to see it. It was the same gift of imagination that made Blake
say: "'What,' it will be questioned, 'when the sun rises, do you not see
a disc of fire, somewhat