This question is not unanswerable; we need only consider the history of the island and its political connections.
The island of Milo was too small a place to have a temple that could afford a statue of such extraordinary value, and we must assume that it was carried thither on a ship. Athens is the only place that we can think of which might have been its original home.
The early centuries of the Christian era were troublesome times. Lawlessness prevailed and a general decadence had set in, which was due to the many civil wars in both Greece and Italy. The establishment of the Roman empire checked the progress of degeneration but only in external appearance. In reality a moral and social deterioration continued to take an ever stronger hold upon the people. The old religion broke down and the new faith was by no means so ideal in the beginning as it is frequently represented by writers of ecclesiastical history.
Our notions concerning the vicious character of
ancient paganism are entirely wrong. Even the worship of Aphrodite and of the Phenician Astarte was by no means degraded by that gross sensualism of which the fathers of the church frequently accuse it. Wherever we meet with original expressions of the pagan faith we find deep reverence and childlike piety. In many respects the worship of Istar in Babylonia and Astarte in Phenicia, of Isis in Egypt, of Athene, Aphrodite and Hera in Greece, of the Roman Juno, and Venus, the special protectress of the imperial family, was noble in all main features, and did not differ greatly from the cult of the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. We shall discuss this phase in a subsequent chapter and here reproduce an ancient platter which is ascribed by archeologists to the fourth century B. C., and shows a noble and serene Venus who is fully draped and flying on a swan.
When Christianity spread over the Roman empire, the city of Athens was the last stronghold of paganism, but even there the mass of the population had become Christian. There was a time in the development of Christianity when it was hostile not only to ancient pagan mythology but also to pagan science and to pagan art. This was the age in which almost all the statues of the Greek gods were either destroyed, or maltreated and shattered so that not one has come down to us unmutilated.
