A goddess between two lions,[8] or on a mountain top guarded by lions, an armed god standing by (in a gold ring), reminds us of Cybele, or of Rhea, mother of the Gods of Homer. A goddess holding in each hand a water fowl or other animal is common in Aegean art; and a god in the same attitude, is a gold figure of the Aegina treasure (_circ_. 850 B.C.), in the British Museum. In the contemporary and later finds in the temple of Artemis Orthia, at Sparta, such female figures are very common, and in the earliest Ionian temple at Ephesus. They persist into the sixth century B.C., and are representations of Artemis as a goddess of the wild things, Homer's Artemis Agrotera.[9] Thus, undeniably, archaic and heroic Greece carried on Aegean representations of deities; even the Cretan goddess holding serpents has, in Greek art, an Artemis with snakes to represent her. But, so much earlier and nearer to Aegean times, in Homer, the goddess, as Artemis, shows her later and more truly Hellenic aspects, and is the chaste sister of Apollo. Indeed, the Homeric Olympians are already the beautiful beings which the best art of the Hellenic prime, in the fifth century, delighted to represent; while in art much earlier than Pheidias, but much later than Homer, the gods still appear in their old Aegean forms. This is the paradox of Homer. The poet lived while the Hellenes were but a small nation, occupying a narrow region in Thessaly; but his poems forestall the beauty which blossomed again, when art and religion were truly Hellenic. And in Homer the beauty bears none of the barbaric strains that deface the rites of Athens in her glory. "Homer's portrait of Artemis," says Mr. Farnell, "gives us not the first but the last point in the development of her character, and the conception of her in later Greek literature is not more advanced or more spiritual than his." But "Arcadian and Athenian rites and legends" (we may compare Boeotian and Spartan art of 800-700 B.C.) "provide us with testimony much earlier than Homer's."[10] How are we to explain the facts? Homer is the poet of Achaeans, regarded as a stronger but less civilised race, invaders of a more civilised people. Yet this Achaean people, or their poet, is already on the highest Hellenic level in his conception of the Olympians, while the practical ritual and legends of Athens in her glorious prime retain many traces of barbarous and even savage conceptions at which Homer seldom glances, though even in his mythology there are hints of a truly barbarous cosmogony, the revolution by which Zeus overthrew more ancient divinities. Homer knew Hesiod's myth of Cronos,[11] which is precisely that of the Maoris. How then did his taste, and that of his audience, arrive at his beautiful portraits of the Olympians?