Let us at least thank them for what they did.  One work was given them, and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks’ work was done not for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—­the dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense aesthetic sense, through the beautiful in man.  Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself.  Beauty might be physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral.  But in proportion as a thing was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty.  Goodness itself was a form—­though the highest form—­of beauty. [Greek] meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek] both the ugly and the bad.

Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the world.

Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods.  This is an historic fact.  Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece save those of deities.  But of what form?  We all know that the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous.  Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice.  Or the monstrosity, as with the hawk-headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols, the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the many-handed deities of Hindostan—­merely symbolised powers which could not, so the priest and the sculptor held, belong to mere humanity.  Now, of such monstrous forms of idols, the records in Greece are very few and very ancient—­relics of an older worship, and most probably of an older race.  From the earliest historic period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine could be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest human beauty.

In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured, dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work wonders on the European continent.  In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia, for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in remote times—­so the legend ran—­ an old black wooden image, a woman with a horse’s head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other.  And this image may have been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon—­that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the