DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9177#0055
Ill
THE GREEK TEMPLE
35
personify the powers of nature, to make them objective and
definite by means of poetry, of art, and of music. The aston-
ishing humanity which prevails in the Homeric Olympus is
reflected in every part of the world of Greek art. As time
went on the gods were moulded ever more and more after the
fashion of a refined and beautified humanity, until they came
too near to the human level, and men in ceasing to look up to
them ceased to believe in them, and fell back upon the super-
stition of the pre-Hellenic ages and races, or upon the reasoned
theism of the philosophers. The whole beauty and all the
history of Greek art belong to the great national movement
which created an Olympus remarkable not for sublimity and
awfulness but for human interest and aesthetic charm.
The temple was invented or grew up at a time when the gods
had been thoroughly humanized. The god, or his accepted
surrogate, the image, dwelt in a temple as the king dwelt in his
hall, or megaron, and the forms of the temple repeat, in the
main, but in an enlarged and beautified manner, the forms of
the palace. But when the temple arose, it is quite clear that
the belief in the gods had not begun to decay, that there was
nothing of the familiarity akin to contempt with which artists
and poets in the fourth century treated the deities of Olympus.
Never would vast sums have been expended, and infinite pains
taken, to provide abodes for deities who were not regarded as
in close relations with man, and a present help in times of
trouble. The rationalism of the philosophers and the spread
of Oriental enthusiasms in time destroyed Greek national reli-
gion ; but the process was a very slow one, not completed even
in the days of Alexander the Great. And with religion, art
and the drama and literature lowered their tone: only phi-
losophy and science raised it.
The purposes of the Greek temple may be easily discerned
from the study of its plan; but besides, those purposes are em-
THE GREEK TEMPLE
35
personify the powers of nature, to make them objective and
definite by means of poetry, of art, and of music. The aston-
ishing humanity which prevails in the Homeric Olympus is
reflected in every part of the world of Greek art. As time
went on the gods were moulded ever more and more after the
fashion of a refined and beautified humanity, until they came
too near to the human level, and men in ceasing to look up to
them ceased to believe in them, and fell back upon the super-
stition of the pre-Hellenic ages and races, or upon the reasoned
theism of the philosophers. The whole beauty and all the
history of Greek art belong to the great national movement
which created an Olympus remarkable not for sublimity and
awfulness but for human interest and aesthetic charm.
The temple was invented or grew up at a time when the gods
had been thoroughly humanized. The god, or his accepted
surrogate, the image, dwelt in a temple as the king dwelt in his
hall, or megaron, and the forms of the temple repeat, in the
main, but in an enlarged and beautified manner, the forms of
the palace. But when the temple arose, it is quite clear that
the belief in the gods had not begun to decay, that there was
nothing of the familiarity akin to contempt with which artists
and poets in the fourth century treated the deities of Olympus.
Never would vast sums have been expended, and infinite pains
taken, to provide abodes for deities who were not regarded as
in close relations with man, and a present help in times of
trouble. The rationalism of the philosophers and the spread
of Oriental enthusiasms in time destroyed Greek national reli-
gion ; but the process was a very slow one, not completed even
in the days of Alexander the Great. And with religion, art
and the drama and literature lowered their tone: only phi-
losophy and science raised it.
The purposes of the Greek temple may be easily discerned
from the study of its plan; but besides, those purposes are em-