La piel bajo el mármol

All men and women, by virtue of their humanity, are image-makers; in some these are vivid and clear, in others shimmering, lifeless. The Greeks were the supreme iconists, the greatest image-makers the world has ever seen, and thus their powerful mythology lives on today. The genius of Rome, however, did not lie in iconism, for there they did not worship gods, but powers, numina. But the fact that the Romans were not iconists should not give us the idea that they were a less religious people than the Greeks. The opposite is probably more true. A vague entity inspires greater fear and reverence than a known one. As Lucan wrote of the imageless cult of the Gauls: "How much it increases the sense of terror not to know the gods one fears". Jane Ellen Harrison, a legendary figure in classical studies, offers us in this suggestive essay a lucid and passionate journey through the most outstanding figures of the Greco-Latin pantheon.