gods in myth, and god in religion — the society of the gods like that of men in homer — borrowed elements in greek belief — zeus — his name — development of his legend — his bestial shapes explained — zeus in religion — apollo — artemis — dionysus — athene — aphrodite — hermes — demeter — their names, natures, rituals and legends — conclusions.
in the gods of greece, when represented in ideal art and in the best religious sentiment, as revealed by poets and philosophers, from homer to plato, from plato to porphyry, there is something truly human and truly divine. it cannot be doubted that the religion of apollo, athene, artemis and hermes was, in many respects, an adoration directed to the moral and physical qualities that are best and noblest. again, even in the oldest greek literature, in homer and in all that follows, the name of the chief god, zeus, might in many places be translated by our word “god”.1
it is god that takes from man half his virtue on the day of slavery; it is god that gives to each his lot in life, and ensures that as his day is so shall his strength be. this spiritual conception of deity, undifferentiated by shape or attributes, or even by name, declares itself in the homeric terms [greek] and in the [greek] of herodotus. these are spiritual forces or tendencies ruling the world, and these conceptions are present to the mind, even of homer, whose pictures of the gods are so essentially anthropomorphic; even of herodotus, in all things so cautiously reverent in his acceptation of the popular creeds and rituals. when socrates, therefore, was doomed to death for his theories of religion, he was not condemned so much for holding a pure belief in a spiritual divinity, as for bringing that opinion (itself no new thing) into the marketplace, and thereby shocking the popular religion, on which depended the rites that were believed to preserve the fortune of the state.
it is difficult or impossible quite to unravel the tangled threads of mythical legend, of sacerdotal ritual, of local religion, and of refined religious sentiment in greece. even in the earliest documents, the homeric poems, religious sentiment deserts, in moments of deep and serious thought, the brilliant assembly of the olympians, and takes refuge in that fatherhood of the divine “after which all men yearn”.2
yet, even in pausanias, in the second century of the christian era, and still more in plutarch and porphyry, there remains an awful acquiescence in such wild dogmas and sacred traditions as antiquity handed down. we can hardly determine whether even homer actually believed in his own turbulent cowardly ares, in his own amorous and capricious zeus. did homer, did any educated greek, turn in his thoughts, when pain, or sorrow, or fear fell on him, to a hope in the help of hermes or athene? he was ready to perform all their rites and offer all the sacrifices due, but it may be questioned whether, even in such a god-fearing man as nicias, this ritualism meant more than a desire to “fulfil all righteousness,” and to gratify a religious sentiment in the old traditional forms.
in examining greek myths, then, it must be remembered that, like all myths, they have far less concern with religion in its true guise — with the yearning after the divine which “is not far from any one of us,” after the god “in whom we live, and move, and have our being”— than with the religio, which is a tissue of old barbarous fears, misgivings, misapprehensions. the religion which retained most of the myths was that ancient superstition which is afraid of “changing the luck,” and which, therefore, keeps up acts of ritual that have lost their significance in their passage from a dark and dateless past. it was the local priesthoods of demes and remote rural places that maintained the old usages of the ancient tribes and kindreds — usages out of keeping with the mental condition of the splendid city state, or with the national sentiment of hellenism. but many of the old tales connected with, and explanatory of, these ritual practices, after “winning their way to the mythical,” as thucydides says, won their way into literature, and meet us in the odes of pindar, the plays of ?schylus and sophocles, the notes of commentators, and the apologetic efforts of plutarch and porphyry. it is with these antique stories that the mythologist is concerned. but even here he need not loose his reverence for the nobler aspects of the gods of greece. like the archaeologist and excavator, he must touch with careful hand these —
strange clouded fragments of the ancient glory,
late lingerers of the company divine;
for even in ruin of their marble limbs
they breathe of that far world wherefrom they came,
of liquid light and harmonies serene,
lost halls of heaven and far olympian air.3
“homer and hesiod named the gods for the greeks;” so herodotus thought, and constructed the divine genealogies. though the gods were infinitely older than homer, though a few of them probably date from before the separation of the indo-aryan and hellenic stocks, it is certain that homer and hesiod stereotyped, to some extent, the opinions about the deities which were current in their time.4
hesiod codified certain priestly and delphian theories about their origin and genealogies. homer minutely described their politics and society. his description, however, must inevitably have tended to develop a later scepticism. while men lived in city states under heroic kings, acknowledging more or less the common sway of one king at argos or mycen?, it was natural that the gods (whether in the dark backward of time greece knew a moral creative being or not) should be conceived as dwelling in a similar society, with zeus for their agamemnon, a ruler supreme but not absolute, not safe from attempts at resistance and rebellion. but when greek politics and society developed into a crowd of republics, with nothing answering to a certain imperial sway, then men must have perceived that the old divine order was a mere survival from the time when human society was similarly ordained. thus xenophanes very early proclaimed that men had made the gods in their own likeness, as a horse, could he draw, would design his deity in equine semblance. but the detection by xenophanes of the anthropomorphic tendency in religion could not account for the instinct which made greeks, like other peoples, as aristotle noticed, figure their gods not only in human shape, but in the guise of the lower animals. for that zoomorphic element in myth an explanation, as before, will be sought in the early mental condition which takes no great distinction between man and the beasts. the same method will explain, in many cases, the other peculiarly un-hellenic elements in greek divine myth. yet here, too, allowance must be made for the actual borrowing of rites and legends from contiguous peoples.
the greeks were an assimilative race. the alphabet of their art they obtained, as they obtained their written alphabet, from the kingdoms of the east.5 like the romans, they readily recognised their own gods, even under the barbarous and brutal disguises of egyptian popular religion; and, while recognising their god under an alien shape, they may have taken over legends alien to their own national character.6 again, we must allow, as in india, for myths which are really late, the inventions, perhaps, of priests or oracle-mongers. but in making these deductions, we must remember that the later myths would be moulded, in many cases, on the ancient models. these ancient models, there is reason to suppose, were often themselves of the irrational and savage character which has so frequently been illustrated from the traditions of the lower races.
the elder dynasties of greek gods, uranus and cronos, with their adventures and their fall, have already been examined.7
uranus may have been an ancient sky-god, like the samoyed num, deposed by cronus, originally, perhaps, one of the deputy-gods, active where their chief is otiose, whom we find in barbaric theology. but this is mere guess-work. we may now turn to the deity who was the acknowledged sovereign of the greek olympus during all the classical period from the date of homer and hesiod to the establishment of christianity. we have to consider the legend of zeus.
it is necessary first to remind the reader that all the legends in the epic poems date after the time when an official and national olympus had been arranged. probably many tribal gods, who had originally no connection with gods of other tribes, had, by homer’s age, thus accepted places and relationships in the olympic family. even rude low-born pelasgian deities may have been adopted into the highest circles, and fitted out with a divine pedigree in perfect order.
to return to zeus, his birth (whether as the eldest or the youngest of the children of cronus) has already been studied; now we have to deal with his exploits and his character.
about the meaning of the name of zeus the philologists seem more than commonly harmonious. they regard the greek zeus as the equivalent of the sanskrit dyaus, “the bright one,” a term for the sky.8
he was especially worshipped on hill-tops (like the aztec rain-god); for example, on ithome, parnes, cithgeron, and the lycaean hill of arcadia. on the arcadian mountain, a centre of the strangest and oldest rites, the priest of zeus acted as what the african races call a “rainmaker”. there was on the hill the sacred well of the nymph hagno, one of the nurses of the child zeus. in time of drought the priest of zeus offered sacrifice and prayer to the water according to ritual law, and it would be interesting to know what it was that he sacrificed. he then gently stirred the well with a bough from the oak, the holy tree of the god, and when the water was stirred, a cloud arose like mist, which attracted other clouds and caused rain. as the priest on a mountain practically occupied a meteorological observatory, he probably did not perform these rites till he knew that a “depression” might be expected from one quarter or another.9
wonderful feats of rain-prophecy are done by australian seers, according to mrs. langloh parker and others. as soon as we meet zeus in homer, we find that he is looked on, not as the sky, but as the deity who “dwells in the heights of air,” and who exercises supreme sway over all things, including storm and wind and cloud. he casts the lightning forth [greek] he thunders on high [greek], he has dark clouds for his covering [greek] all these imposing aspects he is religiously regarded by people who approach him in prayer. these aspects would be readily explained by the theory that zeus, after having been the personal sky, came to be thought a powerful being who dwelt in the sky, if we did not find such beings worshipped where the sky is not yet adored, as in australia. much the same occurred if, as m. maspero points out, in egypt the animals were worshipped first, and then later the gods supposed to be present in the animals. so the sky, a personal sky, was first adored, later a god dwelling in the sky. but it is less easy to show how this important change in opinion took place, if it really occurred. a philological theory of the causes which produced the change is set forth by mr. keary in his book primitive belief. in his opinion the sky was first worshipped as a vast non-personal phenomenon, “the bright thing”(dyaus). but, to adopt the language of mr. max müller, who appears to hold the same views, “dyaus ceased to be an expressive predicate; it became a traditional name”;10 it “lost its radical meaning”. thus where a man had originally said, “it thunders,” or rather “he thunders,” he came to say, “dyaus” (that is, the sky) “thunders”.
next dyaus, or rather the greek form zeus, almost lost its meaning of the sky, and the true sense being partially obscured, became a name supposed to indicate a person. lastly the expression became “zeus thunders,” zeus being regarded as a person, because the old meaning of his name, “the sky,” was forgotten, or almost forgotten. the nomen (name) has become a numen (god). as mr. keary puts it, “the god stands out as clear and thinkable in virtue of this name as any living friend can be”. the whole doctrine resolves itself into this, a phenomenon originally (according to the theory) considered impersonal, came to be looked on as personal, because a word survived in colloquial expressions after it had lost, or all but lost, its original meaning. as a result, ‘all the changes and processes of the impersonal sky came to be spoken of as personal actions performed by a personal being, zeus. the record of these atmospheric processes on this theory is the legend of zeus. whatever is irrational and abominable in the conduct of the god is explained as originally a simple statement of meteorological phenomena. “zeus weds his mother;” that must mean the rain descends on the earth, from which it previously arose in vapour. “zeus weds his daughter,” that is, the rain falls on the crop, which grew up from the rainy embrace of sky and earth.
here then we have the philological theory of the personality and conduct of zeus. to ourselves and those who have followed us the system will appear to reverse the known conditions of the working of the human mind among early peoples. on the philological theory, man first regards phenomena in our modern way as impersonal; he then gives them personality as the result of a disease of language, of a forgetfulness of the sense of words. thus mr. keary writes: “the idea of personality as apart from matter must have been growing more distinct when men could attribute personality to such an abstract phenomenon as the sky “. where is the distinctness in a conception which produces such confusion? we have seen that as the idea of personality becomes more distinct the range of its application becomes narrower, not wider. the savage, it has been thought, attributes personality to everything without exception. as the idea of personality grows more distinct it necessarily becomes less extensive, till we withdraw it from all but intelligent human beings. thus we must look for some other explanation of the personality of zeus, supposing his name to mean the sky. this explanation we find in a survival of the savage mental habit of regarding all phenomena, even the most abstract, as persons. our theory will receive confirmation from the character of the personality of zeus in his myth. not only is he a person, but in myth, as distinct from religion, he is a very savage person, with all the powers of the medicine-man and all the passions of the barbarian. why should this be so on the philological theory? when we examine the legend of zeus, we shall see which explanation best meets the difficulties of the problem. but the reader must again be reminded that the zeus of myth, in homer and elsewhere, is a very different being from the zeus of religion of achilles’s prayer, from the zeus whom the athenians implored to rain on their fields, and from the zeus who was the supreme being of the tragedians, of the philosophers, and of later greece.
the early career, la jeunesse orageuse, of zeus has been studied already. the child of cronus and rhea, countless places asserted their claim to be the scene of his birth, though the cretan claim was most popular.11
in crete too was the grave of zeus: a scandal to pious heathendom. the euhemerists made this tomb a proof that zeus was a deified man. preller takes it for an allegory of winter and the death of the god of storm, who in winter is especially active. zeus narrowly escaped being swallowed by his father, and, after expelling and mediatising that deity, he changed his own wife, metis, into a fly, swallowed her, and was delivered out of his own head of athene, of whom his wife had been pregnant. he now became ruler of the world, with his brother poseidon for viceroy, so to speak, of the waters, and his brother hades for lord of the world of the dead. like the earlier years of louis xiv., the earlier centuries of the existence of zeus were given up to a series of amours, by which he, like charles ii., became the father of many noble families. his legitimate wife was his sister hera, whom he seduced before wedlock “without the knowledge of their dear parents,” says homer,12 who neglects the myth that one of the “dear parents” ate his own progeny, “like him who makes his generation messes to gorge his appetite”. hera was a jealous wife, and with good cause.13 the christian fathers calculated that he sowed his wild oats and persecuted mortal women with his affections through seventeen generations of men. his amours with his mother and daughters, with deo and persephone, are the great scandals of clemens alexandrinus and arnobius.14 zeus seldom made love in propria persona, in all his meteorological pomp. when he thus gratified semele she was burned to a cinder.15
the amour with danae, when zeus became a shower of gold, might be interpreted as a myth of the yellow sunshine. the amours of zeus under the disguise of various animal forms were much more usual, and are familiar to all.16 as cronus when in love metamorphosed himself into a stallion, as prajapati pursued his own daughter in the shape of a roebuck, so zeus became a serpent, a bull, a swan, an eagle, a dove,17 and, to woo the daughter of cletor, an ant. similar disguises are adopted by the sorcerers among the algonkins for similar purposes. when pund-jel, in the australian myth of the pleiades, was in love with a native girl, he changed himself into one of those grubs in the bark of trees which the blacks think edible, and succeeded as well as zeus did when he became an ant.18
it is not improbable that the metamorphosis of zeus into an ant is the result of a volks-etymologie which derived “myrmidons” from [greek], an ant. even in that case the conversion of the ant into an avatar of zeus would be an example of the process of gravitation or attraction, whereby a great mythical name and personality attracts to itself floating fables.19 the remark of clemens on this last extraordinary intrigue is suggestive. the thessalians, he says, are reputed to worship ants because zeus took the semblance of an ant when he made the daughter of cletor mother of myrmidon. where people worship any animal from whom they claim descent (in this case through myrmidon, the ancestor of the famed myrmidons), we have an example of stiraight forward totemism. to account for the adoration of the animal on the hypothesis that it was the incarnation of a god, is the device which has been observed in egyptian as in samoan religion, and in that of aboriginal indian tribes, whose animal gods become saints “when the brahmans get a turn at them”.20
the most natural way of explaining such tales about the amours and animal metamorphoses of so great a god, is to suggest that zeus inherited,21 as it were, legends of a lower character long current among separate families and in different localities. in the same way, where a stone had been worshipped, the stone was, in at least one instance, dubbed with the name of zeus.22
the tradition of descent from this or that beast or plant has been shown to be most widely prevalent. on the general establishment of a higher faith in a national deity, these traditions, it is presumed, would not wholly disappear, but would be absorbed into the local legend of the god. the various beasts would become sacred to him, as the sheep was sacred to hera in samos, according to mandrobulus,23 and images of the animals would congregate in his temple. the amours of zeus, then, are probably traceable to the common habit of deriving noble descents from a god, and in the genealogical narrative older totemistic and other local myths found a place.24 apart from his intrigues, the youth of zeus was like that of some masquerading and wandering king, such as james v. in scotland. though plato, in the republic, is unwilling that the young should be taught how the gods go about disguised as strangers, this was their conduct in the myths. thus we read of
lycaon and his fifty sons, whom zeus
in their own house spied on, and unawares
watching at hand, from his disguise arose,
and overset the table where they sat
around their impious feast, and slew them all.25
clemens of alexandria26 contrasts the “human festival” of zeus among the ethiopians with the inhuman banquet offered to him by lycaon in arcadia.27
the permanence of arcadian human sacrifice has already been alluded to, and it is confirmed by the superstition that whoever tasted the human portion in the mess sacrificed to zeus became a were-wolf, resuming his original shape if for ten years he abstained from the flesh of men.28
a very quaint story of the domestic troubles of zeus was current in plataea, where it was related at the festival named d?dala. it was said that hera, indignant at the amours of her lord, retired to eubo?. zeus, wishing to be reconciled to her, sought the advice of cith?ron, at that time king of plat?a. by his counsel the god celebrated a sham marriage with a wooden image, dressed up to personate plataea, daughter of asopus. hera flew to the scene and tore the bridal veil, when, discovering the trick, she laughed, and was reconciled to her husband.29 probably this legend was told to explain some incident of ritual or custom in the feast of the d?dala, and it is certainly a more innocent myth than most that were commemorated in local mystery-plays.
it was not only when he was en bonne fortune that zeus adopted the guise of a bird or beast. in the very ancient temple of hera near mycenae there was a great statue of the goddess, of gold and ivory, the work of polycletus, and therefore comparatively modern. in one hand the goddess held a pomegranate, in the other a sceptre, on which was perched a cuckoo, like the latin woodpecker picus on his wooden post. about the pomegranate there was a myth which pausanias declines to tell, but he does record the myth of the cuckoo. “they say that when zeus loved the yet virgin hera, he changed himself into a cuckoo, which she pursued and caught to be her playmate.” pausanias admits that he did not believe this legend. probably it was invented to account for the companionship of the cuckoo, which, like the cow, was one of the sacred animals of hera. myths of this class are probably later than the period in which we presume the divine relationships of gods and animals to have passed out of the totemistic into the samoan condition of belief. the more general explanation is, that the cuckoo, as a symbol of the vernal season, represents the heaven in its wooing of the earth. on the whole, as we have tried to show, the symbolic element in myth is late, and was meant to be explanatory of rites and usages whose original significance was forgotten. it would be unfair to assume that a god was disrespectfully viewed by his earliest worshippers because ?tiological, genealogical, and other myths, crystallised into his legend.
an extremely wild legend of zeus was current among the galat?, where pausanias expressly calls it a “local myth,” differing from the lydian variant. zeus in his sleep became, by the earth, father of attes, va being both male and female in his nature. agdistis was the local name of this enigmatic character, whom the gods feared and mutilated. from the blood grew up, as in so many myths, an almond tree. the daughter of sangarius, nana, placed some of the fruit in her bosom, and thereby became pregnant, like the girl in the kalewala by the berry, or the mother of huitzilopochtli, in mexico, by the floating feather. the same set of ideas recurs in grimm’s m?rchen machandelhoom,30 if we may suppose that in an older form the juniper tree and its berries aided the miraculous birth.31 it is customary to see in these wild myths a reflection of the phrygian religious tradition, which leads up to the birth of atys, who again is identified with adonis as a hero of the spring and the reviving year. but the story has been introduced in this place as an example of the manner in which floating myths from all sources gravitate towards one great name and personality, like that of zeus. it would probably be erroneous to interpret these and many other myths in the vast legend of zeus, as if they had originally and intentionally described the phenomena of the heavens. they are, more probably, mere accretions round the figure of zeus conceived as a personal god, a “magnified non-natural man”.32
another example of local accretion is the fable that zeus, after carrying off ganymede to be his cupbearer, made atonement to the royal family of troy by the present of a vine of gold fashioned by hephaestus.33 the whole of the myth of callisto, again, whom zeus loved, and who bore areas, and later was changed into a bear, and again into a star, is clearly of local arcadian origin. if the arcadians, in very remote times, traced their descent from a she-bear, and if they also, like other races, recognised a bear in the constellation, they would naturally mix up those fables later with the legend of the all-powerful zeus.34
so far we have studied some of the details in the legend of zeus which did not conspicuously win their way into the national literature. the object has been to notice a few of the myths which appear the most ancient, and the most truly native and original. these are the traditions preserved in mystery-plays, tribal genealogies, and temple legends, the traditions surviving from the far off period of the village greeks. it has already been argued, in conformity with the opinion of c. o. müller, that these myths are most antique and thoroughly local. “any attempt to explain these myths in order, such, for instance, as we now find them in the collection of apollodorus, as a system of thought and knowledge, must prove a fruitless task.” equally useless is it to account for them all as stories originally told to describe, consciously or unconsciously, or to explain any atmospheric and meteorological phenomena. zeus is the bright sky; granted, but the men who told how he became an ant, or a cuckoo, or celebrated a sham wedding with a wooden image, or offered troy a golden vine, “the work of hephaestus,” like other articles of jewellery, were not thinking of the bright sky when they repeated the story. they were merely strengthening some ancient family or tribal tradition by attaching it to the name of a great, powerful, personal being, an immortal. this being, not the elemental force that was zeus, not the power “making for righteousness” that is zeus, not the pure spiritual ruler of the world, the zeus of philosophy, is the hero of the myths that have been investigated.
in the tales that actually won their way into national literature, beginning with homer, there is observable the singular tendency to combine, in one figure, the highest religious ideas with the fables of a capricious, and often unjust and lustful supernatural being. taking the myths first, their contrast with the religious conception of zeus will be the more remarkable.
zeus is the king of all gods and father of some, but he cannot keep his subjects and family always in order. in the first book of the iliad, achilles reminds his mother, the sea-nymph thetis, how she once “rescued the son of cronus, lord of the storm-clouds, from shameful wreck, when all other olympians would have bound him, even hera, and poseidon, and pallas athene “. thetis brought the hundred-handed briareus to the help of the outnumbered and over-mastered zeus. then zeus, according to the scholiast, hung hera out of heaven in chains, and gave apollo and poseidon for slaves to laomedon, king of troy. so lively was the recollection of this coup d’etat in olympus, that hephaestus implores hera (his mother in homer) not to anger zeus, “lest i behold thee, that art so dear, chastised before mine eyes, and then shall i not be able to save thee for all my sorrow”.35 he then reminds hera how zeus once tossed him out of heaven (as the master of life tossed ataentsic in the iroquois myth), and how he fell in lemnos, “and little life was left in me”. the passage is often interpreted as if the fall of hephaestus, the fire-god, were a myth of lightning; but in homer assuredly the incident has become thoroughly personal, and is told with much humour. the offence of hera was the raising of a magic storm (which she could do as well as any lapland witch) and the wrecking of heracles on cos. for this she was chained and hung out of heaven, as on the occasion already described.36
the constant bickerings between hera and zeus in the iliad are merely the reflection in the upper olympian world of the wars and jealousies of men below. ilios is at war with argos and mycenae, therefore the chief protecting gods of each city take part in the strife. this conception is connected with the heroic genealogies. noble and royal families, as in most countries, feigned a descent from the gods. it followed that zeus was a partisan of his “children,” that is, of the royal houses in the towns where he was the most favoured deity. thus hera when she sided with mycen? had a double cause of anger, and there is an easy answer to the question, quo numine l?so? she had her own townsmen’s quarrel to abet, and she had her jealousy to incite her the more; for to become father of the human families zeus must have been faithless to her. indeed, in a passage (possibly interpolated) of the fourteenth iliad he acts as his own leporello, and recites the list of his conquests. the perseid?, the heraclid?, the pirithoid?, with dionysus, apollo and artemis spring from the amours there recounted.37 moved by such passions, hera urges on the ruin of troy, and zeus accuses her of a cannibal hatred. “perchance wert thou to enter within the gates and long walls, and devour priam raw, and priam’s sons, and all the trojans, then mightest thou assuage thine anger.”38 that great stumbling-block of greek piety, the battle in which the gods take part,39 was explained as a physical allegory by the neo-platonists.40 it is in reality only a refraction of the wars of men, a battle produced among the heavenly folk by men’s battles, as the earthly imitations of rain in the vedic ritual beget rain from the firmament. the favouritism which zeus throughout shows to athene41 is explained by that rude and ancient myth of her birth from his brain after he had swallowed her pregnant mother.42
but zeus cannot allow the wars of the gods to go on unreproved, and43 he asserts his power, and threatens to cast the offenders into tartarus, “as far beneath hades as heaven is high above earth”. here the supremacy of zeus is attested, and he proposes to prove it by the sport called “the tug of war”. he says, “fasten ye a chain of gold from heaven, and all ye gods lay hold thereof, and all goddesses, yet could ye not drag from heaven to earth zeus, the supreme counsellor, not though ye strove sore. but if once i were minded to drag with all my heart, then i could hang gods and earth and sea to a pinnacle of olympus.”44 the supremacy claimed here on the score of strength, “by so much i am beyond gods and men,” is elsewhere based on primogeniture,45 though in hesiod zeus is the youngest of the sons of cronos. but there is, as usual in myth, no consistent view, and zeus cannot be called omnipotent. not only is he subject to fate, but his son heracles would have perished when he went to seek the hound of hell but for the aid of athene.46 gratitude for his relief does not prevent zeus from threatening athene as well as hera with tartarus, when they would thwart him in the interest of the ach?ans. hera is therefore obliged to subdue him by the aid of love and sleep, in that famous and beautiful passage,47 which is so frankly anthropomorphic, and was such a scandal to religious minds.48
in homeric religion, as considered apart from myth, in the religious thoughts of men at solemn moments of need, or dread, or prayer, zeus holds a far other place. all power over mortals is in his hands, and is acknowledged with almost the fatalism of islam. “so meseems it pleaseth mighty zeus, who hath laid low the head of many a city, yea, and shall lay low, for his is the highest power.”49 it is zeus who gives sorrows to men,50 and he has, in a mythical picture, two jars by him full of evil and good, which he deals to his children on earth. in prayer51 he is addressed as zeus, most glorious, most great, veiled in the storm-cloud, that dwelleth in the heaven. he gives his sanction to the oath:52
“thou sun, that seest all, father zeus, that rulest from ida, most glorious, most great, and things, and nearest all things, and ye rivers, and thou earth, and ye that in the underworld punish men forsworn, whosoever sweareth falsely, be ye witnesses, and watch over the faithful oath”. again it is said: “even if the olympian bring not forth the fulfilment” (of the oath) “at once, yet doth he fulfil at the last, and men make dear amends, even with their own heads, and their wives and little ones”.53 again, “father zeus will be no helper of liars “.54
as to the religious sentiment towards zeus of a truly devout man in that remote age, homer has left us no doubt. in eum?us the swineherd of odysseus, a man of noble birth stolen into slavery when a child, homer has left a picture of true religion and undefiled. eum?us attributes everything that occurs to the will of the gods, with the resignation of a child of islam or a scot of the solemn league and covenant.55 “from zeus are all strangers and beggars,” he says, and believes that hospitality and charity are well pleasing in the sight of the olympian. when he flourishes, “it is god that increaseth this work of mine whereat i abide”. he neither says “zeus” nor “the gods,” but in this passage simply “god”. “verily the blessed gods love not froward deeds, but they reverence justice and the righteous acts of men;” yet it is “zeus that granteth a prey to the sea-robbers”. it is the gods that rear telemachus like a young sapling, yet is it the gods who “mar his wits within him” when he sets forth on a perilous adventure. it is to zeus cronion that the swineherd chiefly prays,56 but he does not exclude the others from his supplication.57
being a man of scrupulous piety, when he slays a swine for supper, he only sets aside a seventh portion “for hermes and the nymphs” who haunt the lonely uplands.58 yet his offering has no magical intent of constraining the immortals. “one thing god will give, and another withhold, even as he will, for with him all things are possible.”59
such is a homeric ideal of piety, and it would only gain force from contrast with the blasphemy of aias, “who said that in the god’s despite he had escaped the great deep of the sea “.60
the epics sufficiently prove that a noble religion may coexist with a wild and lawless mythology. that ancient sentiment of the human heart which makes men listen to a human voice in the thunder and yearn for immortal friends and helpers, lives its life little disturbed by the other impulse which inspires men when they come to tell stories and romances about the same transcendent beings.
as to the actual original form of the faith in zeus, we can only make guesses. to some it will appear that zeus was originally the clear bright expanse which was taken for an image or symbol of the infinite. others will regard zeus as the bright sky, but the bright sky conceived of in savage fashion, as a being with human parts and passions, a being with all the magical accomplishments of metamorphosis, rain-making and the rest, with which the medicine-man is credited. a third set of mythologists, remembering how gods and medicine-men have often interchangeable names, and how, for example, the australian biraark, who is thought to command the west wind, is himself styled “west wind,” will derive zeus from the ghost of some ancestral sorcerer named “sky”. this euhemerism seems an exceedingly inadequate explanation of the origin of zeus. in his moral aspect zeus again inherits the quality of that supernatural and moral watcher of man’s deeds who is recognised (as we have seen) even by the most backward races, and who, for all we can tell, is older than any beast-god or god of the natural elements. thus, whatever zeus was in his earliest origin, he had become, by the time we can study him in ritual, poem or sacred chapter, a complex of qualities and attributes, spiritual, moral, elemental, animal and human.
it is curious that, on our theory, the mythical zeus must have morally degenerated at a certain period as the zeus of religion more and more approached the rank of a pure and almost supreme deity. on our hypothesis, it was while greece was reaching a general national consciousness, and becoming more than an aggregate of small local tribes, that zeus attracted the worst elements of his myth. in deposing or relegating to a lower rank a crowd of totems and fetishes and ancestral ghosts, he inherited the legends of their exploits. these were attached to him still more by the love of genealogies derived from the gods. for each such pedigree an amour was inevitably invented, and, where totems had existed, the god in this amour borrowed the old bestial form. for example, if a thessalian stock had believed in descent from an ant, and wished to trace their pedigree to zeus, they had merely to say, “zeus was that ant”. once more, as zeus became supreme among the other deities of men in the patriarchal family condition, those gods were grouped round him as members of his family, his father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, mistresses and children. here was a noble field in which the mythical fancy might run riot; hence came stories of usurpations, rebellions, conjugal skirmishes and jealousies, a whole world of incidents in which humour had free play. nor would foreign influences be wanting. a wandering greek, recognising his zeus in a deity of phoenicia or babylon, might bring home some alien myth which would take its place in the general legend, with other myths imported along with foreign objects of art, silver bowls and inlaid swords. thus in all probability grew the legend of the zeus of myth, certainly a deplorable legend, while all the time the greek intellect was purifying itself and approaching the poetical, moral and philosophical conception of the zeus of religion. at last, in the minds of the philosophically religious, zeus became pure deity, and the details of the legend were explained away by this or that system of allegory; while in the minds of the sceptical, zeus yielded his throne to the “vortex” of the aristophanic comedy. thus zeus may have begun as a kindly supreme being; then ?tiological and totemistic myths may have accrued to his legend, and, finally, philosophic and pious thought introduced a rational conception of his nature. but myth lived on, ritual lived on, and human victims were slain on the altars of zeus till christianity was the established religion. “solet it be,” says pausanias, “as it hath been from the beginning.”
the gods who fill the court of zeus and surround his throne are so numerous that a complete account of each would exceed the limits of our space. the legend of zeus is typical, on the whole, of the manner in which the several mythical chapters grew about the figures of each of the deities. some of these were originally, it is probable, natural forces or elemental phenomena, conceived of at first as personal beings; while, later, the personal earth or sun shaded off into the informing genius of the sun or earth, and still later was almost freed from all connection with the primal elemental phenomenon or force. in these processes of evolution it seems to have happened occasionally that the god shed, like a shell or chrysalis, his original form, which continued to exist, however, as a deity of older family and inferior power. by such processes, at least, it would not be difficult to explain the obvious fact that several gods have “under-studies” of their parts in the divine comedy. it may be well to begin a review of the gods by examining those who were, or may be supposed to have been, originally forces or phenomena of nature.
