wer, and then he frees himself, and he
is a neighing horse, and he is sitting on the prancing horse (which is
himself, you know, and is the sky too), in the shape of two warriors,
and also----" "May Cerberus devour you!" cries the artist. "How can I
represent all this? Do you want a warrior, or a cow, or the heavens, or
a horse, or do you want a warrior with the hoofs of a horse and the
horns of a cow? Explain, for, by Juno, I can give you only one of these
at a time."

Thus, in proportion as the gods were subjected to artistic manipulation,
whether by sculptor or poet, they lost their supernatural powers. A
period there doubtless was when the gods stood out quite distinct from
nature, and yet remained connected with it, as the figures of a high
relief stand out from the background; but gradually they were freed from
the chaos of impressions which had given them birth, and then, little by
little, they ceased to be gods; they were isolated from the world of
the wonderful, they were respectfully shelved off into the region of
the ideal, where they were contemplated, admired, discussed, but not
worshipped even like their statues by Praxiteles and their pictures
by Parrhasius. The divinities who continued to be reverenced were the
rustic divinities and the foreign gods and goddesses; the divinities
which had been safe from the artistic desecration of the cities, and the
divinities which were imported from hieratic, unartistic countries like
Egypt and Syria; on the one hand, the gods shaped with the pruning-knife
out of figwood, and stained with ochre or wine-lees, grotesque mannikins,
standing like scarecrows, in orchard or corn-field, to which the
peasants crowded in devout procession, leading their cleanly-dressed
little ones, and carrying gifts of fruit and milk, while the listless
Tibullus, fresh from sceptical Rome, looked on from his doorstep, a
vague, childish veneration stealing over his mind; on the other hand,
the monstrous goddesses, hundred-breasted or ibis-headed, half hidden
in the Syrian and Egyptian temples, surrounded by mysterious priests,
swarthy or effeminate, in mitres and tawny robes, jangling their sistra
and clashing their cymbals, moving in mystic or frenzied dances, weird,
obscene, and unearthly, to the melancholy drone of Phrygian or Egyptian
music, sending a shudder through the atheist Catullus, and filling his
mind with ghastly visions of victims of the great goddess, bleeding,
fainting, lashed