Zeus (Jupiter)

Zeus, in the Roman world known as Jupiter, is presented as the highest and most powerful of the immortals, the one to whom all owed obedience. It was by his will that good and evil were distributed among the men whom Prometheus had created out of mud, but even Zeus was subject to Fate. Armed with thunder and lightning ("the Thunderer" or "the Archer"), Zeus was able to unleash storms by striking his shield and, at least up until the classical era, many natural phenomena were attributed to his direct intervention. The oak tree was sacred to him, and it was through the rustling of its leafy branches that he revealed his presence at the oracular sanctuary of Dodona. Another of his oracles was at the grove in Olympia called Altis. His seat was the peak of Mount Olympus.

Son of the Titan Cronus and Rhea, Zeus belonged, like all the Olympians, to the second generation of gods. Cronus, warned by an oracle that one of his children would depose him, devoured them one by one as they came into the world, but Rhea, after having fed him Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, asked Uranus and Gaea to help her to save the life of the unborn child, Zeus. The ancient gods took Rhea to Lictos on the island of Crete, where she gave birth to the divine infant in a cave on Mount Ida. After the birth of Zeus, Rhea deceived Cronus by presenting him with a huge stone wrapped in cloth, which he swallowed, believing he had gotten rid of another possible rival. The nymph (or goat) Amalthea raised the future king of the gods, nursing him on honey provided by the nymph Melissa.

As predicted by the oracle, when Zeus reached manhood he desired to seize the power held by Cronus. On the advice of Gaea or Metis, he convinced his father to take a drug that made him vomit the children he had swallowed and the stone that had taken Zeus' place. This was later placed by Zeus himself at Delphi, where it became an object of veneration as the omphalos, the navel or center of the earth and the universe. With the support of his revived brothers and sisters, Zeus overthrew Cronus and then fought the Titans. After the victory they drew lots to divide their power. Zeus received the sky, while his brothers Poseidon and Hades were assigned the sea and the underworld respectively; the earth remained a common domain. After putting down the revolt of the Giants, who had attacked Olympus (Gigantomachia), Zeus faced his last trial before establishing absolute mastery of the world, a terrible struggle with the monster Typhoeus or Typhon.

A providential god, conscious of his responsibilities, Zeus did not allow himself to be carried away by his own whims as did the other gods of Olympus, except in matters of love. From his unions were born gods and goddesses who took their seats in the great assembly of the Olympians; his affairs with mortal women generated other gods or races of heroes (see genealogical table).
The first of Zeus' wives was Metis, followed by Themis. The latter marriage had an obvious symbolic value as it generated eternal Order and Law. One tradition states that Zeus fathered Aphrodite to Dione. There were other divine unions with Hermione, Demeter, Mnemosyne and Leto. It was at this point that came Zeus' "sacred marriage" with his sister Hera, his official wife.

Zeus also had fleeting relationships with innumerable mortal women. The most famous of the children born from these unions, apart from Heracles and Dionysus who were accepted among the Olympians, were the heroes Tantalus and Perseus. There was no region of the Hellenic world that did not boast an eponym from among the children of Zeus: the Lacedaemonians claimed descent from the god and the nymph Taygete; the Argives recognized Argus as their ancestor; the Cretans boasted of originating from the children of Europa. The great protagonists of the legends and many of the heroes were connected with him: Agamemnon and Menelaus, for instance, were said to be descended from Tantalus, and Achilles from Aeacus.

The master of the world often chose his lovers on a whim, taking them by subterfuge in different aspects or forms, and left his victims exposed to the revenge of his jealous and outraged wife Hera. This is what happened to the tender Io, to Callisto, and to Europa. It was also the fate of Semele, though she bore him the divine Dionysus. On other occasions, poets and mythographers have tried see Zeus' desire to beget children on mortal women as a providential act: Leda, whom he united with in the form of a swan, had to give birth to Helen in order to provoke a bloody war that would reduce the excessive population of Greece and Asia; the trick he played on Alcmene led to the birth of Heracles, the hero destined to rid the world of monsters.

Last Edited On: 08/13/99

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