The Glory That Was Greece, the Grandeur That Was Rome

IN HIS 1940 book The Survival of the Pagan Gods, the French historian Jean Seznec showed how the gods of ancient Greece and Rome were not forgotten with the rise of Christianity but lived on in the popular mind, albeit no longer as deities but as allegorical figures or simply the protagonists of enjoyable stories. The scholars and scribblers of the Middle Ages preserved, along with much else about Classical antiquity, myths that had been told by Homer, Virgil, and Ovid, in the process giving them new, “moralized” meanings more in keeping with the Christian faith.

The visual appearance of the gods, however, seems to have been largely forgotten; the medieval artists who illustrated the myths