Nor had any of the poets presented Hera in forms so winning and gracious as those in which the best art of this age embodied her, as the Argive Goddess ‘of good works’ “in whose face and person brightness appeared by the side of majesty.”[101.2] The poetic presentation of Apollo is blurred and incomplete compared with such plastic types as the Apollo of the Parthenon frieze and the Pheidian statue in the Museo delle Terme. The older poetic ideal of Aphrodite was shallow and trite compared to the Aphrodite of the Pheidian type, such as we see presented by the Laborde head in the Louvre; here is something of the majesty of the great cosmic goddess imagined by Æschylus in his Danaides, but combined with an emotion of human love in the countenance and a winning appeal that the verses of the great poet do not clearly convey. And we may surmise that the ‘Ourania’ Aphrodite of Pheidias had some influence on the theory of Plato and his distinction between the heavenly and the sensual love. The full imagination of the personality of Kore would combine the radiance and the grace of the young cornfield with the awe and mystery of the lower world; the former is masterfully presented by a coin[101.3] of Lampsakos that shows her rising from among the cornstalks with uplifted yearning face; the unknown artist of the great Syracusan medallion struck towards the close of the fifth century combines this aspect of her, in a type of surpassing {102} loveliness, with a touch of melancholy that hints at the character of the Goddess of death.[102.1] And yet this triumphant anthropomorphic art must have failed, and judged by the fragments that survive did fail, when it tried to reveal in clear outline and full light the half-shrouded forms of the nether world, the Chthonian Goddesses and the Eumenides whose nature appealed to the sense of religious awe, to what the Greeks called τὸ φρικῶδες, and did not brook to be wholly revealed. We may doubt therefore if even the statues of the Holy Ones, the Semnai, carved by Kalamis and Skopas, were types so expressive of the real moral-religious imagination that fashioned these figures of cult as were certain awestruck verses of Sophocles in the Œdipus Coloneus. Nevertheless, this ideal Greek art, by expressing in palpable forms of benign beauty the half-palpable personages of the lower world, did one service to religion and the religious imagination; it banished the uncouth and the terrible and helped to purge and tranquillise the Greek mind by investing the Chthonian powers with benevolence and grace. We discern here the influence of the Bacchic and Demeter mysteries working upon the artist and of the artist upon the popular faith. That the average Greek of the classic period was saved from the vampire terrors that Mr. Lawson has discovered in modern Greece[102.2] was due equally to the religion and to the art that he saw around him.