What success in the attainment of its aim was here reached by the art of the sculptor may perhaps best be estimated from the often quoted sentence of Quintilian, perhaps the noblest praise ever accorded to an artist by a critic: "The beauty of the statue even made some addition to the received religion; the majesty of the work was equal to the god." We might indeed, without irreverence, impute to Phidias the words uttered in a very different sense by one who later gave a new and higher interpretation to a formula of "the received religion" in Greece: "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you." The other great Phidian ideal, that of Athena, was represented by several statues, both in Athens and in other cities. As to these we have a certain amount of information, and even a certain number of copies, which show us the pose and the accessories of the various statues; some of the better ones even suffice to give us some notion of the beauty of their original. We have also descriptions by ancient writers, which tell us, as in the case of the Olympian Zeus, much about the decoration of the statue; but we have not in this case any appreciations of the effect upon those who saw it. The ideal of Athena is in some ways more difficult for us to comprehend than that of Zeus, partly because it is less universally human, and more peculiarly characteristic of Greece and even of Athens. The notion of the mother goddess is common to most religions; that of the "queen and huntress, chaste and fair" is at least familiar to us in literature, and readily commends itself to the imagination. But Athena, though she has something of both these characters, has a nature different from both. It is impossible to derive her varied mythological functions from any one origin; but here it is not the origin of her worship that concerns us, rather its meaning and influence as these affected the people of her chosen city. Just as Zeus was the ideal of all that was best in the Hellenic conception of manhood and the god of a united Hellas, so Athena is especially the goddess of Athens, the giver and fosterer of all those qualities that made the Athenians what they were, the creatress of that ideal city sketched in the wonderful speeches of Pericles. Her gifts are the arts of war and peace, and all artistic and intellectual activity, as well as the olive and other characteristic products of Attic soil, and the clear and luminous air and stimulating climate which Attic writers are never tired of extolling, and of associating with the peculiar genius of the Athenian race. One can imagine how Dion Chrysostom might have recognised the expression of these various qualities in the broad and majestic, yet keenly intellectual brow, in the wide and clear eyes, and in other features; but the extant copies of the Athena Parthenos cannot do more than assist our imagination in realising how the sculptor represented the goddess of Athens.