ent of Herodotus that Homer and Hesiod "made the
Greek theogony, and assigned to the gods their epithets and
distinguished their prerogatives and their functions, and indicated
their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any
modern mythologist. But it is nevertheless true that the clear and vivid
personality and individuality given to the gods by the epic poets
affects all later poetry and all Greek art. The imagination of the poets
could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an
influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions.
But it fills these conceptions with real and vivid character, so that
the gods of Homer are as clearly presented to us as any personalities of
history or fiction. They are, indeed, endowed not only with the form,
but with the passions, and some even of the weaknesses of mankind; and
for this reason the philosophers often rejected as unworthy the tales
that the poets told of the gods. But even an artist such as Phidias
expressly stated that it was the Zeus of Homer who inspired his greatest
work, quoting the well-known passage in the Iliad in which the god
grants the prayer of Thetis:--

"He said; and his black eyebrows bent; above his deathless head
Th' ambrosian curls flowed; great heaven shook."

Descriptive passages such as this are not, indeed, common, because, as
Lessing clearly pointed out, the poet depends more upon action and its
effect than on mere enumerative description. Even here it is the action
of the nod, and the shaking of heaven that follows it, that emphasises
the impression, rather than the mere mention of eyebrows or hair. In
many other cases the distinctive epithet has its value for all later
art--the cow-eyed Hera, the grey-eyed Athena, the swift messenger
Hermes; but, above all, it is the action and character of the various
gods that is so clearly realised by the poet that his successors cannot,
if they wish, escape from his spell.

The influence of the various Greek poets is not, indeed, for the most
part, to be traced in contemporary Greek art. This is obvious in the
case of the Homeric poems, for the art of the time was of a purely
decorative character, and was quite incapable of representing in any
adequate way the vivid and lively imagination of the poets; and, for
that matter, for many centuries after the date of the composition of the
Iliad and Odyssey, Hellenic art made no attempt to cope wi