The sculptor who surpassed all others in dealing with this type is Pheidias, and the greatest monuments of her worship are associated with his name. To understand these, it is necessary to remember what had been accomplished by the archaic and transitional period. Enough, perhaps, has already been said about her form in the archaic art; her predominant character there is warlike, although the peaceful and even the maternal idea appeared in some of the monuments, such as the seated figures found on the Acropolis: and already the older art had depicted her as the goddess of victorious peace, and the fertility that peace brings, under the type of Nike Apteros. Within its own narrow limits of expression it had sometimes been able to show the maidenly aspect of the war-goddess; but usually the forms and proportions are scarcely distinct from those of other goddesses, and the face has rarely any clear or individual character. Nor does the drapery add much to the ideal; in the later archaic period she wears often an Ionic chiton with sleeves, and over this a mantle which is looped up on one shoulder, and falls down from beneath the aegis in stiff parallel zigzag folds, as we see it on the form of Athena from the western Aeginetan gable, a work that represents the utmost that archaic art could do in rendering this type (PI. XXII. a).

The oldest worship of Zeus, as of all other Greek divinities, was without an image, and remained so on Mount Lycaeum and probably elsewhere for a longer time than the other cults. In Homer we have an explicit reference to an idol of Athene and an allusion to one of Apollo, but no hint that he ever knew of an image of Zeus. And the most archaic statues that have come down to us are representations of Artemis and perhaps Apollo, but not of the Supreme God. The reason why the most primitive religion, both of Greece and Rome, was destitute of images, was, of course, want of imagination and helplessness of hand rather than the piety that Clemens claims for the Pelasgians; but obviously this would not explain why, when the iconic age had begun, the cult of Zeus was later in admitting the iconic form than the other divinities. We may allow that the cause here lay in a certain religious reserve.

For a long period he was worshipped on the mountain tops with altar and sacrifice only; in the next stage, or during the same period, certain aniconic objects were consecrated to him. The strangest of these was the stone which Pausanias saw near Gythium in Laconia, upon which Orestes had sat and had been healed of his madness,‘ and which had been called Zeus the stayer in the Dorian tongue.’

The worship of Aphrodite was perhaps as widely diffused around the Mediterranean lands as that of any other Hellenic divinity. We find it in North Greece, and in especial honour at Thebes; in the country of Attica, in the city, and the coast; in Megara, Corinth, and the Corinthian colonies; in Sicyon, Hermione, Epidauros, and Argos; in Laconia there was a special and important form of the worship; there are comparatively slight traces of it in Arcadia, but abundant testimony of its prevalence in Elis and on the coast of Achaea. The most famous centres of the cult were the Greek islands, Cyprus, Cythera, and Crete. It spread with Greek colonization over the shores of the Black Sea, to Phanagoria for example; and it was one of the chief public worships in most of the Greek cities of the coast of Asia Minor, notably at Cnidos; while from the Troad issued the worship of Aphrodite, that was associated with the name of her favourite hero Aeneas, and was borne to the mainland of Greece, to Sicily, and Italy. Finally we have proofs of the worship of the goddess at Naucratis and Saguntum.

But in spite of its wide prevalence in the Hellenic world, there is no valid evidence that the cult of Aphrodite belonged to the aboriginal religion of the Hellenic nation.

As we can trace very primitive elements in the worship of Artemis, so in her earliest monuments we find the very ancient type of the religious emblem, the rude stock or the shaped stone without any human semblance. The Artemis of Icaria was represented by a piece of unhewn wood according to Arnobius, and Pausanias describes the emblem of the Artemis Patroa of Sicyon as a pillar of stone. A cone-shaped stone, decorated below with metal bands and surmounted with a human head, was the form under which she was worshipped in her temple at Perge, which is represented with the idol inside on coins of the city, and we see an Artemis-idol of similar shape on a Neapolitan vase. The temple-statue of the Ephesian goddess of many breasts also preserves in the treatment of the lower limbs much of the aniconic form; and it is not unlikely that the statue of Artemis Μονογισήνη, which the legend ascribed to Daedalus, was of the same type, showing the transition from the pillar to the human likeness. It is an interesting fact that the most primitive representation of the human form which has come down to us from the beginnings of Greek sculpture, and which illustrates that transition, is an image of Artemis found in Delos, and now in Athens, and dedicated according to the inscription by Nicandra of Naxos ‘to the far-darting one, the lover of the bow’ (Pl. XXVIII).

It is generally believed that the worship of Zeus was primeval among the Hellenes, their ancestors bringing it from a common Aryan centre, and that in the popular religion no organized system of divinities existed prior to the Olympian. Stated thus, this belief is reasonable, and yet we must take notice of cults that were perhaps pre-Hellenic, or at least belonged to an earlier period than the developed ‘ Olympian ’ religion and survived long in certain localities by the side of this. We have to account for the prevalent legends concerning Cronos with his Titan dynasty and the Titanomachia which overthrew them. The question of origins must here be glanced at, for on the answers will depend whether we shall consider Cronos as a real personage in tradition and worship. Welcker, who maintains that Zeus is the starting-point of Greek religion, explains away Cronos very ingeniously: he arose from a misunderstanding of an epithet of Zeus—Kρoνίδης or Kρoνίων: this meant originally the Son of Time, a figurative way of naming the ‘ Eternal ’ or ‘ the Ancient of Days.’ At a pre-Homeric period this was misinterpreted and understood as a son of Cronos, a mere nominis umbra. This theory, though accepted by some later writers, was born of false philology, a misleading theological bias, and an ignorance of what is really primitive in ancient religion.

The history of Greek religion, so much neglected in our country, is often mistaken for a discussion concerning its origins. The main scope of the present work is not the question of origin, but a survey of the most important texts and monuments that express the actual religious conceptions of the various Greek communities at different historical epochs. Such a study evidently concerns the student of the literature no less than the student of the archaeology of Greece, although the subject has been hitherto approached rather from the archaeological side. The question of origins may be put aside, although it may be true that one does not fully and perfectly know the present character of a fact unless one also knows the embryology of it. Yet this dictum expresses more the ideal of knowledge than a practical method of working. In dealing with so complicated a phenomenon as the religion of a people, it is surely advisable to consider separately and first the actual facts, the actual beliefs in the age of which we have history, rather than the prehistoric germ from which they arose. Again, this is the only aspect of the problem that directly concerns the student of the Greek world pure and simple, for the other line of inquiry, touching the birth of the nation's religion, can never be followed out within the limits of that nation's literature and monuments.

We cannot quote from the period before Pheidias any great monument that presented the inner character of the goddess by means of spiritual expression in the face or whole form. It would be tempting to take as a masterpiece of the religious sculpture of this period the Sosandra of Calamis, the greatest master before Pheidias in this field of work, and to call it Aphrodite. But reasons have been adduced against this interpretation. A beautiful bronze, of the pre- Pheidian style, has been recently acquired by M. Caraponos and published in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique under the name of Aphrodite. A female figure of tall slim maidenly form stands holding a dove in her left hand and in her right hand some object that has disappeared but was probably a flower; the face is very earnest, and free from all sentiment, so far as one can judge from the photograph. The nobility and purity of the work, its naive unconscious grace, would give it an important place and an original value among Aphrodite-monuments, if the name were sure. A religious dedication of some kind it is undoubtedly, and the drapery with the folds of the chiton ποδήρης and its arrangement of the upper mantle strikingly recalls the Vesta Giustiniani; the symbols also are appropriate to Aphrodite. But no certain representation of this period shows us an Aphrodite of these virginal forms, these half-developed features, and this girlish simplicity in the arrangement of the hair.

The female divinities of the Greek religion have so much of common character as to suggest the belief that they are all different forms under different names of the same divine personage. Such a theory can only be criticized a posteriori, after a minute examination of the various cults and the various ideas attaching to those cults. And it is at any rate convenient to study side by side such cognate forms as Artemis, Hekate, Demeter, Persephone, and Aphrodite. Of these the most prominent among the scattered tribes and communities of the Greek world was Artemis. Perhaps no other figure in the Greek Pantheon is so difficult to understand and explain, not because the conceptions that grew up in her worship are mystic and profound, but because they are, or at first sight appear, confusing and contradictory.

Most of her cult is genuinely Hellenic, although in some places we can discover Oriental influences and ideas. We can trace it back to a prehistoric period, and it is found in all the chief places of prehistoric Greek settlement; in Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Sicyon, Achaea, Elis, Argolis, and, in its most primitive form, in Attica Laconia and Arcadia. Partly from its wide prevalence, and partly from certain most primitive features that it possessed, we must hold that this cult was either an aboriginal heritage of the Greek nation, or that it was borrowed by all the tribes at some very remote time, and as no trace or remembrance of its foreign origin has been preserved in the earliest traditions that were rife in the chief centres of the worship, the latter supposition appears idle and gratuitous.