liest
historic period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine
could be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was
more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest human
beauty.

In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured,
dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work
wonders on the European continent. In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia,
for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in
remote times--so the legend ran--an old black wooden image, a woman with
a horse's head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a
dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other. And this image may have
been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and
Poseidon--that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the
other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the
place, till the Phigalians were glad--for it was profitable as well as
honourable--to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the
loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the
earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth,
and restore fertility to the world. And it may be true--the legend as
Pausanias tells it 600 years after--that the old wooden idol having been
burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a famine ensued, the
Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary
of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a bronze replica of the old idol,
from some old copy and from a dream of his own. The story may be true.
When Pausanias went thither, in the second century after Christ, the cave
and the fountain, and the sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside,
which was to be polluted with the blood of no victim--the only offerings
being fruits and honey, and undressed wool--were still there. The statue
was gone. Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some
were not sure that it had ever been there at all. And meanwhile
Praxiteles had already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the
ideal of Demeter, mother-like, as Here--whom we still call Juno now--but
softer-featured, and her eyes more closed.

And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of the
divine was the human. Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however
slowly, of a people of rare