The sky-father
Weather, kingship and the order of the world
Zeus is the oldest god the Greeks had. His name is the same word as the Latin Jupiter and the Vedic Dyaus: the bright sky, and the father who lives in it. Long before he had a story, he was the weather. The Greeks did not say “it rains”; they said “Zeus rains”. Thunder was his voice and the lightning his weapon, and the eagle, the highest-flying bird, was his messenger.
From the sky he watches everything, and so he came to guard the things that need a witness: the oath sworn in his name (Zeus Horkios), the stranger at the door (Zeus Xenios), the suppliant at the altar (Zeus Hikesios), the household and its courtyard (Zeus Herkeios). Kings held their sceptres from him. Homer's fixed phrase for him is “father of gods and men”, and his daughters by Themis are the Seasons and the Fates: good order and the portion each of us is given.
He spoke, and the son of Cronus nodded with his dark brows; the ambrosial locks fell forward from the king's immortal head, and he shook great Olympus.
His rise
Cronus, the Titans and the thunderbolt
Hesiod's Theogony tells the succession as a family history. Uranus, the sky, was unmanned by his son Cronus; Cronus, warned that his own son would do the same, swallowed his children as they were born. Rhea saved the last one, Zeus, on Crete and gave her husband a stone instead. Grown, Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge his brothers and sisters and led them into a ten-year war against the Titans.
He won it by freeing the prisoners of the older generation. The Cyclopes, released from Tartarus, gave him the thunder, the lightning and the thunderbolt; the three Hundred-Handers fought beside him. When the Titans were chained beneath the earth, Gaia sent up one last monster, Typhon, with a hundred snake heads; Zeus burned him with the bolt and buried him. Then the gods asked Zeus to be their king, and he divided the honours.
What makes the story end with him is Metis. Told that his wise first wife would bear a son greater than his father, he swallowed her, and AthenaGod: Athena. Born armed from the head of Zeus, the goddess of wisdom who gave Athens her name was born from his head instead. The cycle of sons overthrowing fathers stops here: Zeus keeps the cunning inside himself, and nobody comes after.
His loves and his children
What the stories are really about
No god has more lovers or more children, and the list is not a scandal sheet: it is the map of Greece. Hesiod's seven wives are the order of the world itself. Metis is wisdom; Themis bears the Seasons and the Fates; Eurynome the Graces; Mnemosyne, memory, the nine Muses; Leto the archer twins Apollo and Artemis; Demeter the girl Persephone; and Hera, the last and lasting, the household of Olympus.
The mortal women found the cities and the heroes. Europa, carried across the sea on a bull's back, is the mother of Minos and of Crete's royal house. Danaë, reached as a shower of gold, is the mother of Perseus and of the kings of Argos and Mycenae. Leda's egg gives Sparta Helen and the Dioscuri. Alcmene, visited by Zeus in the shape of her own husband, bears HeraclesHero: Heracles. The strongest of the heroes, who became a god. Every city that mattered could trace its first king to the sky.
The drama comes from Hera. Her jealousy drives Io around the world as a heifer, hunts Leto from island to island before Delos will take her in, burns Semele when she asks to see her lover in his glory, and pursues Heracles through all twelve labours. Zeus is master of everything except his own house, and the Greeks liked him that way.
His worship
Olympia, Dodona and the oath
Zeus was worshipped everywhere, usually on high places and under the open sky, but two sanctuaries were his above all. At Olympia, in the western Peloponnese, the games held every four years in his honour were the calendar of the Greek world; tradition dates the first to 776 BC. His great altar there was a mound of the ashes of centuries of sacrifice. The temple built beside it in the fifth century BC held the seated Zeus of Phidias, gold and ivory, ≈ 12 metres high, counted among the Seven Wonders.
At Dodona, in the mountains of Epirus, stood the oldest oracle in Greece. Zeus answered there through the rustling of a sacred oak, interpreted by priests who slept on the ground and never washed their feet, so as to stay in touch with the earth.
Zeus, lord, Dodonaean, Pelasgian, who dwell far off and rule over wintry Dodona, and around you live the Selloi, your interpreters, with unwashed feet, who sleep on the ground…
Most of all he was the god of the oath. At Olympia, before the statue of Zeus Horkios, athletes and their fathers swore over the cut pieces of a boar that they would break no rule of the games. An oath by Zeus put the swearer under the eye that sees everything, and a broken one under the hand that holds the thunderbolt.
