power; and the true gods of
the City, who had grown out of the soil and the wall, were simply the
City herself in her eternal and personal aspect, as mother and guide and
lawgiver, the worshipped and beloved being whom each citizen must defend
even to the death. As the Kouros of his day emerged from the social
group of Kouroi, or the Aphiktor from the band of suppliants, in like
fashion +he Polias+ or +ho Polieus+ emerged as a personification or
projection of the city. +he Polias+ in Athens was of course Athena; +ho
Polieus+ might as well be called Zeus as anything else. In reality such
beings fall into the same class as the hero Argos or 'Korinthos son of
Zeus'. The City worship was narrow; yet to broaden it was, except in
some rare minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible
to love his next-door neighbours except by siding with them against the
next-door-but-one.

It proved difficult even in a city like Athens to have gods that would
appeal to the loyalty of all Attica. On the Acropolis at Athens there
seem originally to have been Athena and some Kouros corresponding with
her, some Waterer of the earth, like Erechtheus. Then as Attica was
united and brought under the lead of its central city, the gods of the
outlying districts began to claim places on the Acropolis. Pallas, the
thunder-maid of Pallene in the south, came to form a joint personality
with Athena. Oinoe, a town in the north-east, on the way from Delos to
Delphi, had for its special god a 'Pythian Apollo'; when Oinoe became
Attic a place for the Pythian Apollo had to be found on the Acropolis.
Dionysus came from Eleutherae, Demeter and Kore from Eleusis, Theseus
himself perhaps from Marathon or even from Trozen. They were all given
official residences on Athena's rock, and Athens in return sent out
Athena to new temples built for her in Prasiae and Sunion and various
colonies.[72:1] This development came step by step and grew out of real
worships. It was quite different from the wholesale adoption of a body
of non-national, poetical gods: yet even this development was too
artificial, too much stamped with the marks of expediency and courtesy
and compromise. It could not live. The personalities of such gods vanish
away; their prayers become prayers to 'all gods and goddesses of the
City'--+theois kai theesi pasi kai pasesi+; those who remain, chiefly
Athena and Theseus, only mean Athens.

What then, amid all this failure, did the Olympian