But they also helped the people to imagine them better and more nobly. Perhaps the earliest art of Hellas that takes rank among the works of high religious inspiration are the Attic vase-paintings produced near to 500 B.C. that portray the thiasos of Dionysos. The strong spirit of that religion that lifted the votary above the conventional moral human life, the wild joy of self-abandonment, the ecstasy of communion with the God, all are here more startlingly expressed than even in the lyrics of the Bacchæ of Euripides or in the single perfect Bacchic ode of Sophocles’ Antigone. It was not till the time of Skopas in the fourth {100} century that Greek sculpture could so deal with this orgiastic theme. The plastic work of the fifth century dealing with divine forms is mainly tranquil, majestic, ethical, intellectual; the physical perfection of the divinities sculptured on the Parthenon impresses us not merely and not so much with the sense of physical beauty and strength, but rather with the sense of a higher and nobler vital power; so instinct is the beauty with that quality that the Greeks called σεμνότης, a quality partly ethical, partly spiritual, but palpable in material forms that hint at a tranquil reserve of strength. The expressive power of such an art can show benignity and mildness of mood without sentimentality, because without voluptuousness, intellectual thought without morbidness, majesty without self-display. The gentle and tranquillising spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries speaks in the famous Eleusinian relief showing the mother and the maid giving his mission to Triptolemos. The Pheidian Athena Parthenos was a more deeply conceived ideal than the Athena of the poets, for it showed her as the Madonna of the Athenian people, with a softer touch of maternal gentleness in the face. The Zeus Olympios of Pheidias transcended the portrait of the High God as given by Homer or even by Æschylus; for the chryselephantine statue impressed the later Greeks as the ideal of the benign and friendly deity, the divine patron of a Hellas united and at peace with itself; an image that appeared “to add something to the traditional religion,”[100.1] embodying, as Dio Chrysostom says, a conception of the God so {101} convincing and complete that “having once seen it one could not imagine him otherwise.”[101.1]