Athene, by the time she appears in art, has completely shed her animal form, has reduced the shapes she once wore of snake and bird to attributes, but occasionally in black-figured vase-paintings she still appears with wings. On the obverse of the black-figured cup[800] in fig. 86 the artist gives her wings: but for her helmet we might have called her an Erinys. In the _Eumenides_ of Aeschylus, a play in which Athene is specially concerned to slough off all traces of primitive origin, she lays suspicious emphasis on the fact that she can _fly without wings_[801]: ‘With foot unwearied haste I without wings, Whirred onward by my aegis’ swelling sail.’ On the reverse of the vase she is wingless: the artist has no clear conviction. The vase is instructive as showing how long the art type of a divinity might remain in flux. [Illustration: FIG. 86.] APHRODITE. The next of the three ‘Maidens’ to be considered is Aphrodite. A doubt perhaps arises as to her claim to bear the name. Kore she is in her eternal radiant youth: Kore as virgin she is not. She is rather _Nymphe_ the Bride, but she is the Bride of the old order; she is never wife, never tolerates permanent patriarchal wedlock. In the lovely Homeric hymn it is clear that her will is for love, not marriage. Admitted to the patriarchal Olympus, an attempt foolish and futile is made to attach her to one husband, the craftsman Hephaistos, and, significantly enough, her other name as his bride is Charis[802]. She is the Charis of physical beauty incarnate. In Homer it is evident that she is a new-comer to Olympus, barely tolerated, an alien, and always thankful to escape. Like the other alien, Ares, she is fain to be back in her own home. Her Homeric titles, Kypris and Kythereia, show that originally and locally she is goddess of the island South, never really at home in the cold austere North, where Artemis loved to dwell. She has about her too much of the physical joy of life ever to find an abiding home far from the sunshine. Another note of her late coming into Greece proper is that she is in Homer a departmental goddess, having for her sphere one human passion. The earlier forms of divinities are of larger import, they tend to be gods of all work. When the fusion of tribes and the influence of literature conjointly bring together a number of local divinities, perforce, if they are to hold together, they divide functions and attributes, i.e. become departmental. Poseidon, who locally was Phytalmios, is narrowed down to the god of one element; Hermes, who at home had dominion over flocks and herds and all life and growth, becomes merely a herald.