seen
through the light of some mystic and spiritual devotion like, but
transcending, the love of man for woman. Or, if the way of Athena is too
hard for us common men, it is not hard to find a true religious ideal in
such a figure as Persephone. In Persephone there is more of pathos and
of mystery. She has more recently entered the calm ranks of Olympus; the
old liturgy of the dying and re-risen Year-bride still clings to her. If
Religion is that which brings us into relation with the great
world-forces, there is the very heart of life in this home-coming Bride
of the underworld, life with its broken hopes, its disaster, its
new-found spiritual joy: life seen as Mother and Daughter, not a thing
continuous and unchanging but shot through with parting and death, life
as a great love or desire ever torn asunder and ever renewed.

'But stay,' a reader may object: 'is not this the Persephone, the
Athena, of modern sentiment? Are these figures really the goddesses of
the _Iliad_ and of Sophocles?' The truth is, I think, that they are
neither the one nor the other. They are the goddesses of ancient
reflection and allegory; the goddesses, that is, of the best and most
characteristic worship that these idealized creations awakened. What we
have treated hitherto as the mortal weakness of the Olympians, the fact
that they have no roots in any particular soil, little hold on any
definite primeval cult, has turned out to be their peculiar strength. We
must not think of allegory as a late post-classical phenomenon in
Greece. It begins at least as early as Pythagoras and Heraclitus,
perhaps as early as Hesiod; for Hesiod seems sometimes to be turning
allegory back into myth. The Olympians, cut loose from the soil,
enthroned only in men's free imagination, have two special regions which
they have made their own: mythology and allegory. The mythology drops
for the most part very early out of practical religion. Even in Homer we
find it expurgated; in Pindar, Aeschylus, and Xenophanes it is
expurgated, denied and allegorized. The myths survive chiefly as
material for literature, the shapes of the gods themselves chiefly as
material for art. They are both of them objects not of belief but of
imagination. Yet when the religious imagination of Greece deepens it
twines itself still around these gracious and ever-moving shapes; the
Zeus of Aeschylus moves on into the Zeus of Plato or of Cleanthes or of
Marcus Aurelius. Hermes, Athena, Apollo