with the non-divine. Partial order is imposed on the chaotic world by a demiurge or
creator-god, who is good, with reference to that which is immutable. He fashions
within his creation the divine and eternal principle of soul, shared to a greater or lesser
extent by all that moves, and which is capable of perceiving the immutable. But this
sort of construction is quite misleading. First, we are not licensed to read Plato’s
dialogues as each shedding light on a different aspect of a coherent and fixed
underlying Platonic system of thought. Secondly, such a reading is an unsophisticated
and reductive one, comparable to taking Stephen Hawking’s references to God to
testify to a personal belief on his part, when it is clear from their context that they are
metaphorical or allegorical, or that they are graceful appropriations of the language
both of the particular scholars with whom he engages and of the broader tradition
within which he writes. Similarly, Plato’s remarks about a creator-god and souls
should be regarded as myth, allegory, and appropriation, all with the purpose of
persuasion. Careful consideration of Plato’s rational theology shows that the role
of the divine is in fact taken by ‘‘the good.’’ However, Plato’s leading characters,
Socrates and others, often assert the social necessity of traditional varieties of religious
belief in human society. Plato declined to distinguish between his rational enterprise
and such social necessity in order to speak to a dual readership, on the one hand an
audience that was educated but without philosophical training, and on the other the
skilled specialists of the Academy. Plato’s failure to advertise this distinction led to his
religious thought being simplistically misunderstood by Peripatetics and Stoics before
being taken up into the theology of the early church.
T. H. Carpenter(Chapter 26) shows how material images formed part of the
‘‘complex interweaving of economic, artistic, and political motivations that shaped
Athenians’ responses to their gods.’’ Neither ‘‘art’’ nor ‘‘religion’’ are concepts the
ancient Greeks would easily have recognized, and the concept of ‘‘religious art’’ even
less so. As for the multifarious Athenian deployment of material imagery in religious
contexts, the Great Panathenaea festival offers a valuable case study. The archaizing
amphoras given as prizes are now valued at around half a million dollars each,
although at the time of their production they were worth less than the oil they
contained. At the heart of the festival was the dedication of a newpeplosto the
ancient and revered but to us obscure Athene Polias statue, and into this
the women of Athens wove every year the story of the Gigantomachy. Indeed,
it seems that this story, one of profound metaphorical significance for Athens,
was preserved and celebrated rather more in material images than it was in literary
narrative. It is striking that no cult was associated with Pericles’ magnificent
new temple and Athene-image, the Parthenon and the Parthenos: these were adorn-
ments for and celebrations of the city, not the goddess. As for the Athenians’
representation of their religious practices in material images, extant artifacts may be
able to tell us much, but they have to be handled with care. Whilst some vases may
indeed be readable as useful documents of traditional Athenian ritual practice, the
ritual imagery on others may blur misleadingly into mythological narrative, or it
may be realigned in accordance with the ritual practices the painter imagined to
prevail in the lands to which he hoped to export his vase. White-groundle ̄kythoi,
produced only for the home funerary market, evidently carried imagery intended to
speak to the Athenians themselves, and the images they chose to carry were gently
reassuring ones.
16 Daniel Ogden