The imagination of the poets could not, as we have already noticed, have had so deep and wide an influence unless it had been based upon popular beliefs and conceptions.
But it fills these conceptions with real and vivid character, so that the gods of Homer are as clearly presented to us as any personalities of history or fiction.

They are, indeed, endowed not only with the form, but with the passions, and some even of the weaknesses of mankind; and for this reason the philosophers often rejected as unworthy the tales that the poets told of the gods.

But even an artist such as Phidias expressly stated that it was the Zeus of Homer who inspired his greatest work, quoting the well-known passage in the Iliad in which the god grants the prayer of Thetis:-- "He said; and his black eyebrows bent; above his deathless head Th' ambrosian curls flowed; great heaven shook." Descriptive passages such as this are not, indeed, common, because, as Lessing clearly pointed out, the poet depends more upon action and its effect than on mere enumerative description.

Even here it is the action of the nod, and the shaking of heaven that follows it, that emphasises the impression, rather than the mere mention of eyebrows or hair.

In many other cases the distinctive epithet has its value for all later art--the cow-eyed Hera, the grey-eyed Athena, the swift messenger Hermes; but, above all, it is the action and character of the various gods that is so clearly realised by the poet that his successors cannot, if they wish, escape from his spell.
The influence of the various Greek poets is not, indeed, for the most part, to be traced in contemporary Greek art.