Both wrought in gold, with golden garments on,
Stately and large in form, and over all
Conspicuous in bright armor, as became
The gods; the rest were of an humbler size.—Bryant.
Judging from the explanations they feel called upon to give of the great helmet of Minerva, Homer’s commentators, old as well as new, seem not always sufficiently to have borne in mind this wonderful size of the gods. (See the notes on the above-quoted passage in the edition of Clarke and Ernesti.) But we lose much in majesty by thinking of the Homeric deities as of ordinary size, as we are accustomed to see them on canvas in the company of mortals. Although painting is unable to represent these superhuman dimensions, sculpture to a certain extent may, and I am convinced that the old masters borrowed from Homer their conception of the gods in general as well as the colossal size which they not infrequently gave them. (Herodot. lib. ii. p. 130, edit. Wessel.) Further remarks upon the use of the colossal, its excellent effect in sculpture and its want of effect in painting, I reserve for another place.
Note 33, p. [82].
Homer, I acknowledge, sometimes veils his deities in a cloud, but only when they are not to be seen by other deities. In the fourteenth book of the Iliad, for instance, where Juno and Sleep, ἠέρα ἐσσαμένω, betake themselves to Mount Ida, the crafty goddess’s chief care was not to be discovered by Venus, whose girdle she had borrowed under pretence of a very different journey. In the same book the love-drunken Jupiter is obliged to surround himself and his spouse with a golden cloud to overcome her chaste reluctance.
πῶς κ’ ἔοι, εἴ τις νῶϊ θεῶν αἰειγενετάων
εὕδοντ’ ἀθρήσειε....
She did not fear to be seen by men, but by the gods. And although Homer makes Jupiter say a few lines further on,—