Though the Greeks built temples for a variety of reasons, housing and serving the cult image of a god was one of the motivations for building a temple in the first place. John Pedley ( Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World ) writes that some temples “seem to have been purpose-built as houses for ancient venerable images with special powers, or for sheltering new cult images; both temples and images were costly offerings from the city to the deity concerned,” a kind of corporate sacrifice to the god.

Among the celebrated images were the Athena Parthenos that was in the fifth-century Parthenon, and the Zeus of Olympia, both by the sculptor Pheidias. Pedley writes, “These were gigantic statues, gigantic in scale and in cost – the Athena was about ten meters tall and used about a ton of gold – intended to strike awe into the visitor, and sending messages about skill and power and wealth. The materials, the ivory and gold, of which these statues were made spoke of the height of luxury, and of the great investment of wealth that had gone into them.” Earlier status had been made of wood, and even later some temples made wood figures: “Pausanias saw several, including an over-life-size Hermes in Arkadia, made of juniper.” In a temple on Crete, a “local community built a small one-room temple with an interior hearth and a low stone bench against the back wall. On this bench they placed a trio of bronze and wood figures that have been interpreted as cult statuettes.”

He offers a number of other specific examples of civic dedications of cult figures to the gods: “In the sixth century the Naxians dedicated a marble sphinx atop a tall marble column in the sanctuary at Delphi, and the Argives two kouroi; in the fifth the Messenians dedicated the marble Nike, the work of the sculptor Paionios, in the Sancutary of Zeus at Olympia. In the fourth, the Knidians dedicated the stunning Aphrodite . . . , a work of Praxiteles. This statue presented a fullscale female nude for the first time . . . She stands naked, caught in an apparently defense pose, and it is her commanding sexuality open stated, her nakedness, that caused such a stir. The original stood in an open shrine visible from every side. Now for the first time her beauty became accessible and tangible, a far cry from the austerity of classical Heras or Demeters.”