And as with the external world, so with the world within. The powers of
nature were not the only ones felt by man to be different from and alien
to himself; there were others, equally strange, dwelling in his own
heart, which, though in a sense they were part of him, yet he felt to be
not himself, which came upon him and possessed him without his choice
and against his will. With these too he felt the need to make himself at
home, and these too, to satisfy his need, he shaped into creatures like
himself. To the whole range of his inner experience he gave definition
and life, presenting it to himself in a series of spiritual forms. In
Aphrodite, mother of Eros, he incarnated the passion of love, placing in
her broidered girdle "love and desire of loving converse that steals the
wits even of the wise"; in Ares he embodied the lust of war; in Athene,
wisdom; in Apollo, music and the arts. The pangs of guilt took shape in
the conception of avenging Furies; and the very prayers of the
worshipper sped from him in human form, wrinkled and blear-eyed, with
halting pace, in the rear of punishment. Thus the very self of man he
set outside himself; the powers, so intimate, and yet so strange, that
swayed him from within he made familiar by making them distinct;
converted their shapeless terror into the beauty of visible form; and by
merely presenting them thus to himself in a guise that was immediately
understood, set aside, if he could not answer, the haunting question of
their origin and end.
Here then is at least a partial reply to our question as to the effect
of a belief in the gods on the feeling of the Greek. To repeat the
phrase once more, it made him at home in the world. The mysterious
powers that controlled him it converted into beings like himself; and so
gave him heart and breathing-space, shut in, as it were, from the abyss
by this shining host of fair and familiar forms, to turn to the
interests and claims of the passing hour an attention undistracted by
doubt and fear.