They are no impersonal abstraction of these qualities, but are real and living beings, in whom these qualities exist to a degree impossible for a mere mortal.

But, on the other hand, they have nothing of the passions and emotions, the weaknesses and imperfections of mortal nature.

In this they are inconsistent, perhaps, with that Homeric presentment of the gods which the greatest artists consciously set before themselves.

But we cannot wonder that an age of such clear and lofty intellectual and moral perceptions should have rejected what it felt to be unworthy in the current notions of the gods, and should have selected only what it felt to be truly divine.

Art did not, however, remain very long upon its highest level of religious feeling; but in Greece, by a fortunate coincidence, the age of the greatest religious ideals was also that of the highest perfection of physical type in art as well as of technical skill in execution.