All these great movements must have produced many fresh currents in intellectual life too. And in fact the attempt to get free from tradition, from the long-standing culture that seemed, when reflected in the Homeric poems, so permanent and {157} complete in itself, is seen most clearly in the sphere of poetry. The poets threw off the tyranny of the epic convention. They ceased to obey its formal verse-rhythm. And with the freedom thus gained from its vocabulary of stock words, phrases, and images, it was inevitable that the point of view also should change and gain in width. The poet no longer turns his gaze away from his own time and his own person. He himself becomes the central figure of his poetry, and to express the ferment of his own emotions he invents for himself the most natural rhythm, in close alliance with music which now becomes an important and independent element in Greek life. It is as though the Greeks had just discovered the full extent of their own capacities and dared to make free use of them. In every branch of the plastic arts the hand of the artist wins in the course of the centuries an ever greater capacity to give visible shape to the imagined world of beauty. Even the ruins of that world reveal to us more plainly and impressively (because less mixed with conscious reflexion) than any literary achievement, the thing that is of permanent value in Greek art. It was impossible that religion, alone unaffected by the general atmosphere of change, should remain unaltered in the old paths. But here, even more than in other directions, we must admit that the inward reality of the change remains hidden from us. We can see indeed many external alterations, but of the directing spirit which called them forth we hardly catch more than a glimpse. It is easy, by comparing the later condition of religion with the Homeric, to see how enormously the _objects_ of religious worship have multiplied. We can see how much more sumptuous and elaborate ceremonial has become and observe the development in beauty and variety, in conjunction with the fine arts, of the great religious festivals of the different cities and peoples of Greece. Temples and sculpture bear unmistakable witness to the increased power and importance of religion. That an inward and far-reaching change had come over religious thought and belief might have been already guessed from the fame and importance which belonged to the oracle at Delphi, now coming into real power; and from the many new developments in Greek religious life taking their origin from this spiritual centre. At this time there grew up, under the influence of a deepening moral sense, that new interpretation of religion that we meet with in its completed form in Aeschylus and Pindar. The age was decidedly more "religious-minded" than that in which Homer lived. It is as though the Greeks then went through a period such as {158} most civilized nations go through at some time or other, and such as