Apart from this special fact, a phenomenon so momentous in the spiritual world as the flowering of this religious art in the fifth century claims {103} prominent notice even in the slightest sketch of the whole history of Greek religion; for it must have worked an effect which no student of insight would be tempted to belittle upon the religious mood and thought of the people. Greek records sufficiently attest its religious working; even the alien Roman, Æmilius Paulus, when he approached the Pheidian masterpiece of Zeus Olympios felt the thrill of the ‘real presence’[103.1]; when Aristophanes fervently calls on Athena as “the Maiden who holdeth our city in her hand and alone hath visible power and might and is called the Warder of the Gate,”[103.2] he is thinking of the bronze statue carved by Pheidias and set to guard the entrance to the Akropolis. It is impossible, then, that this beautiful idolatry, against which the philosophers might occasionally protest,[103.3] could have weakened the popular faith in the native deities. Introduced suddenly into Rome it helped to destroy the old Roman animistic religion. But the religious instinct and history of Greece was wholly different from that of Rome. Greek polytheism would probably have perished or been transformed by alien systems of cult far sooner than it was, if Greek art had not fortified and ennobled it, rooting it deeply in the æsthetic-religious emotions and perceptions of the people. By establishing so convincingly the individuality of the Greek divinities, it preserved them from a too rapid absorption into the personalities of Oriental religions, when the fusion of west and east had been achieved by Alexander and his successors. {104}