shall not have a single example of it set before you, but shall
rather learn to recognise afterwards what is base by its strangeness.
These, which are to come early in the third group of your Standard
series, will enough represent to you the elements of early and late
conception in the Greek mind of the deities of light.

[Footnote 13: See Note in the Catalogue on No. 201.]

153. First (S. 204), you have Apollo ascending from the sea; thought of
as the physical sunrise: only a circle of light for his head; his
chariot horses, seen foreshortened, black against the day-break, their
feet not yet risen above the horizon. Underneath is the painting from
the opposite side of the same vase: Athena as the morning breeze, and
Hermes as the morning cloud, flying across the waves before the sunrise.
At the distance I now hold them from you, it is scarcely possible for
you to see that they are figures at all, so like are they to broken
fragments of flying mist; and when you look close, you will see that as
Apollo's face is invisible in the circle of light, Mercury's is
invisible in the broken form of cloud: but I can tell you that it is
conceived as reverted, looking back to Athena; the grotesque appearance
of feature in the front is the outline of his hair.

These two paintings are excessively rude, and of the archaic period; the
deities being yet thought of chiefly as physical powers in violent
agency.

Underneath these two are Athena and Hermes, in the types attained about
the time of Phidias; but, of course, rudely drawn on the vase, and still
more rudely in this print from Le Normant and De Witte. For it is
impossible (as you will soon find if you try for yourself) to give on a
plane surface the grace of figures drawn on one of solid curvature, and
adapted to all its curves: and among other minor differences, Athena's
lance is in the original nearly twice as tall as herself, and has to be
cut short to come into the print at all. Still, there is enough here to
show you what I want you to see--the repose, and entirely realised
personality, of the deities as conceived in the Phidian period. The
relation of the two deities is, I believe, the same as in the painting
above, though probably there is another added of more definite kind. But
the physical meaning still remains--Athena unhelmeted, as the _gentle_
morning wind, commanding the cloud Hermes to slow flight. His petasus is
slung at his back, meaning that the clouds are