The idylls of Theocritus find, indeed, a parallel in the playful treatment of Satyrs and other subjects of a similar character; but these belong to what may be called mythological genre rather than to religious art.

The dramatic vigour and intensity which we find in the art of Pergamon cannot easily be traced to the influence of any similar development in literature, though its artificial and learned mythology is such as we find also in the work of Hellenistic poets.
(4) The philosophical aspect of religion had no very great influence upon art in Greece.

We might perhaps expect that, so far as the philosophers accepted the popular religion, they would tend to purify it and to give it a higher meaning, just as the more thoughtful of the poets doubtless assisted the idealising tendency of fifth-century art.
And it might well seem that, for example, Plato's theory of ideas supplies a more satisfactory basis for an idealist art than any other system, since it might be maintained that the true artist represents not the material object which he sees before him, but the ideal prototype of which it is but a faint and inadequate reflexion.

This theory is peculiarly applicable to statues of the gods, and we find it so applied by later philosophical and rhetorical writers; for instance, Cicero says that Phidias "when he was making the statue of Zeus or of Athena did not derive his image from some individual, but within his own mind there was a perfect ideal of beauty; and gazing on this and in contemplation of it, he guided the craft of his hand after its likeness."[4] The same notion underlies the saying quoted by Strabo, that Phidias was "either the only man that saw, or the only man that revealed to others the images of the gods."[5] But there is no trace or encouragement of any such feeling in the philosophic literature contemporary with the great age of Greek art.

Plato expressly states that the artist only makes "an imitation of an imitation"; and the higher ideas of divinity preached by philosophers did not so much tend to ennoble the popular conceptions as to substitute others for them.