The goddess was, indeed, in some ways representative of what was best in her chosen people; but she was not a mere symbol of its character and its greatness.

She existed before it, and would continue though it should disappear from the earth, unlike the Fortune of Antioch, whose very existence was bound up with that of the city she represented.
Another example of personification may be seen in the recumbent figures of river-gods--notably that of the Nile, with his sixteen cubits, as babies, playing around him.

River-gods were indeed an object of worship from early times in Greece, and so appear on coins and elsewhere; but this figure of the Nile, a product of Alexandrian art, is not like the earlier gods, who were looked upon as the givers of increase and fertility; it is a mere allegorical impersonation of the river, such as might be made by a modern artist who made no pretence to believe in the existence of such an anthropomorphic river-god.

It cannot be counted as religious art at all.

And the attributes and accessories of such a figure, the crocodile and hippopotamus, the sphinx and corn and horn of plenty, are all of them symbolic allusions such as are suitable to such a frigid personification.