Note 100.1 — Chapter IV · THE THIRD PERIOD, 500-338 B.C.
Reading edition
The gentle and tranquillising spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries speaks in the famous Eleusinian relief showing the mother and the maid giving his mission to Triptolemos. The Pheidian Athena Parthenos was a more deeply conceived ideal than the Athena of the poets, for it showed her as the Madonna of the Athenian people, with a softer touch of maternal gentleness in the face. The Zeus Olympios of Pheidias transcended the portrait of the High God as given by Homer or even by Æschylus; for the chryselephantine statue impressed the later Greeks as the ideal of the benign and friendly deity, the divine patron of a Hellas united and at peace with itself; an image that appeared “to add something to the traditional religion,”100.1 embodying, as Dio Chrysostom says, a conception of the God so convincing and complete that “having once seen it one could not imagine him otherwise.”101.1