."

The holy tree carried in procession is, like the image of Athena, made
of olive-wood, just the incarnate life of Athens ever renewed.

The Panathenaia was not, like the Dithyramb, a spring festival. It took
place in July at the height of the summer heat, when need for rain was
the greatest. But the month Hecatombaion, in which it was celebrated,
was the first month of the Athenian year and the day of the festival was
the birthday of the goddess. When the goddess became a war-goddess, it
was fabled that she was born in Olympus, and that she sprang full grown
from her father's head in glittering armour. But she was really born on
earth, and the day of her birth was the birthday of every earthborn
goddess, the day of the beginning of the new year, with its returning
life. When men observe only the actual growth of new green life from the
ground, this birthday will be in spring; when they begin to know that
the seasons depend on the sun, or when the heat of the sun causes great
need of rain, it will be at midsummer, at the solstice, or in northern
regions where men fear to lose the sun in midwinter, as with us. The
frieze of the Parthenon is, then, but a primitive festival translated
into stone, a rite frozen to a monument.

* * * * *

Passing over a long space of time we come to our next illustration, the
Apollo Belvedere (Fig. 6).

It might seem that here at last we have nothing primitive; here we have
art pure and simple, ideal art utterly cut loose from ritual, "art for
art's sake." Yet in this Apollo Belvedere, this product of late and
accomplished, even decadent art, we shall see most clearly the intimate
relation of art and ritual; we shall, as it were, walk actually across
that transition bridge of ritual which leads from actual life to art.

[Illustration: Fig. 6. The Apollo Belvedere.]

The date of this famous Apollo cannot be fixed, but it is clearly a copy
of a type belonging to the fourth century B.C. The poise of the figure
is singular and, till its intent is grasped, unsatisfactory. Apollo is
caught in swift motion but seems, as he stands delicately poised, to be
about to fly rather than to run. He stands tiptoe and in a moment will
have left the earth. The Greek sculptor's genius was all focussed, as we
shall presently see, on the human figure and on the mastery of its many
possibilities of movement and action. Greek statues can roughly be dated
by the way they stand