One of the chief glories of the art of ancient Greece left to the modern world. Athena was the goddess and protectress of Athens, and her statue stood at the height of the Acropolis, dominating the city.
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THE SUPREME MONUMENT OF ANCIENT GREECE LEFT TO THE MODERN WORLD
The Venus of Milo, one of the noblest examples of Greek art, and one of the most famous statues extant. Found at Milo, in Crete, about 100 B.C., and now in the Louvre, Paris.
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Influence of Egypt and Mesopotamia
For influences of the Mesopotamian civilisation we have to look in the main to the early civilisations of Syria and Asia Minor; but evidence is not wholly wanting on Ægean sites. A Babylonian cylinder came to light at Cnossus; the fashion of dress, especially female, as shown in Ægean frescoes and gems, is very like the Babylonian, from whatever primitive garments it had been developed; and in other respects also the intaglio class of Ægean art products shows at least as much Mesopotamian as Egyptian influence. It has borrowed the decoration of both cylinders and scarabs; but it proves its essential independence all the time by never adopting the forms of either of those characteristic alien vehicles of glyptic art.
Religious Ideas of Early Times
Lastly, in the most important of all aspects of early civilisation—the religious—we now know that the Ægean approximated very closely to the old civilisations to south and east of it. The main idea of its cult was that which seems to have been the oldest and the most dominant in such cults—namely, the worship of the reproductive force of Nature. This idea was embodied, as soon as divinities were imagined in human shape, in feminine form, the desired relation of divinity to humanity being expressed by the addition of a son-consort. How far other features of this cult, common to the south-eastern lands—such as the descent of the son to the human race, his periodical death at the hands of the latter, and his joyful resurrection—were present, we do not yet know. It would probably be false to ascribe the presence of this cult idea in Ægean civilisation to any foreign influence, for it seems to be a necessary expression of the religious sense of many peoples, and is as likely to have been as indigenous in the case of Rhea and Zeus (to give the Divine pair their possible Ægean names) as in those of Isis and Osiris, or Ashtaroth and Tammuz-Adon. But we may note first that here was a vital bond of affinity between the Ægean folk and their mainland neighbours on east and south, and second, that long before historic Hellenic times, the former had arrived at that essential condition of progressive civilisation, an anthropomorphic conception of divinity.