back to any special stock or particular locality; we cannot find a single community that did not possess his worship or that preserved any legend that suggests a late date for its introduction.
Doubtless, it has very ancient and close associations with Thessaly; for most of the leading tribes must have entered Hellas by this route, and remembered the mountain Olympus that dominates this region as the earliest home of his cult, and took with them to their most distant settlements the cult-title Ὀλύμπιος. Also, some of the prehistoric stocks in Thessaly, like the Achaean Aeacidae, may have regarded him as specially their ancestor. But to maintain therefore that he originated in Thessaly as the special deity of a single tribe, who were able to impose him upon the whole of Hellas, is against the analogies offered by the study of the special cults of Greek polytheism. But if we assume that he was the aboriginal Hellenic High God, we must be quite ready to admit that the separate communities were always liable to cherish other divinities with a more ardent and closer devotion, whether divinities that they brought with them or divinities that they found powerfully established in the conquered lands, Athena or Hera, for instance, in Attica or Argolis, or Poseidon in the Minyan settlements. This in fact is a frequent fate of a “High God” in polytheistic systems; he is vaguely praised and reverenced, but lower divine powers are nearer to the people's love or fear.
The Cretan legend of his birth and origin, which gave rise to the Cretan cult of Zeus Κρηταγενής,[1] “Zeus born in Crete,” may appear evidence against the theory just set forth. But it is not likely that any birth-legend belongs to the earliest stratum of the Zeus-religion. The Aryan Hellenes found in many of the conquered lands the predominant cult of a mother-goddess, to whom they gradually had to affiliate their own High God: and in Crete they found her cult associated with the figure of a male divinity who was believed to be born and to die at certain periods; probably he was an early form of Dionysus, but owing to his prominence in the island the Hellenic settlers may have called him Zeus; and this would explain the markedly Dionysiac character of the later Zeus-religion in Crete.
We can now consider the question how the god was imagined in the popular belief of the earliest and later periods. Homer is our earliest literary witness; and the portrait that he presents of Zeus is too well known to need minute description. To appreciate it, we must distinguish the lower mythologic aspect of him, in which he appears as an amorous and capricious deity lacking often in dignity and real power, and the higher religious aspect, in which he is conceived as the All-Father, the Father of Gods and men in a spiritual or moral sense, as a God omnipotent in heaven and earth, the sea and the realms below, as a God of righteousness and justice and mercy, who regards the sanctity of the oath and hears the voice of the suppliant and sinner, and in whom the pious and the lowly trust. In fact the later Greek religion did not advance much above the high-water mark of the Homeric, although the poets and philosophers deepened certain of its nobler traits. But Homer we now know to be a relatively late witness in this matter. How much of his sketch is really primitive, and what can we learn or guess concerning the millennium that preceded him? His God is pronouncedly individual and personal, and probably Zeus had reached this stage of character at the dawn of Hellenic history. Yet traces of a pre-deistic and animistic period survived here and there; for instance, in Arcadia we find the thunder itself called Zeus (Ζεὺς Κεραυνóς) in a Mantinean inscription,[2] and the stone near Gythium in Laconia on which Orestes sat and was cured of his madness, evidently a thunder-stone, was named itself Ζεὺς Καππώτας, which must be interpreted as “Zeus that fell from heaven”;[3] we here observe that the personal God does not yet seem to have emerged from the divine thing or divine phenomenon. Yet the Arcadians, like the other Greeks, had probably long before Homer risen above this stage of thought; for Greek religion was so strongly conservative that it preserved side by side the deposits of different ages of thought sundered perhaps by thousands of years.
Again the Homeric Zeus is fully anthropomorphic; but in many domains of Greek religion we discover the traces of theriomorphism, when the deity was regarded as often incarnate in the form of an animal or the animal might itself be worshipped in its own right. We seem to find it latent in the Arcadian worship of Zeus Λυκαῖος and the legend of King Lycaon. The latter offers a cannibal-meal to the disguised God, who turns him into a wolf for his sins; and the later Arcadian ritual in honour of this God betrays a hint of lycanthropy; some one who partook of the sacrifice or who swam across a certain lake was supposed to be transformed into a wolf for a certain time.[4] Robertson Smith[5] was the first to propose that we have here the traces of an ancient totemistic sacrifice of a wolf-clan, who offered the “theanthropic” animal “the man-wolf” to the wolf-God. The totemistic theory in its application to Greek religion cannot be here discussed; but we may note that there is no hint in the story that the wolf was offered to Zeus and that the name Λυκαῖος could not originally have designated the “wolf”-God: for from the stem λυκο- we should get the adjective λυκειος, not λυκαιος; the latter is better derived from a word such as λυκη = “light,” and may allude to the God of the clear sky; in fact the wolf, which was a necessary animal in the ritual and legend of Apollo Λύκειος, may have strayed casually into association with Zeus Λυκαῖος, attracted by a false etymology. Another ritual, fascinating for the glimpse it affords of very old-world thought, is that of the Diipolia, the yearly sacrifice to Zeus Polieus on the Acropolis at Athens.[6] In this an ox was slaughtered with ceremonies unique in Greece; the priest who slew him fled and remained in exile for a period, and the axe that was used was tried, condemned and flung into the sea; the hide of the slain ox was stuffed with hay, and this effigy of the ox was yoked to the plough and feigned to be alive. Again Robertson Smith saw here the “theanthropic” animal, the Ox-God-man, eaten sacramentally by an ox-tribe, and so sacred that his death is a murder that must be atoned for in other ways and by a feigned resurrection. We recognize indeed the sacramental meal and the sanctity of the ox; but the animal may have acquired this sanctity temporarily through contact with the altar; we need not suppose an ox-clan—the priest was merely βούτης “the herdsman”—nor assume the permanent sanctity of the ox, nor the belief that the deity was permanently incarnate in the ox: the main parts of the ceremony can be explained as cattle-magic intended to appease the rest of the oxen or to prevent them suffering sympathetically through the death of one. We may indeed with Mr Andrew Lang explain the many myths of the bestial transformations of Zeus on the theory that the God was the tribal ancestor and assumed the shape of the animal-totem in order to engender the tribal patriarch;[7] but on the actual cults of Zeus theriomorphism has left less trace than on those of many other Hellenic deities. The animal offered to him may become temporarily sacred; and its skin would have magic properties: this explains his use of the aegis, the goatskin, as a battle-charm; but of a Goat-Zeus, a Ram-Zeus, or a Wolf-Zeus, there is no real trace.
The peculiar characteristic of his earliest ritual was the human sacrifice; besides the legend of King Lycaon, we find it in the story of the house of Athamas and in the worship of Zeus Λαφύστιος of Thessaly,[8] and other examples are recorded. The cruel rite had ceased in the Arcadian worship before Pliny wrote, but seems to have continued in Cyprus till the reign of Hadrian. It was found in the worship of many other divinities of Hellas in early times, and no single explanation can be given that would apply to them all. A hypothesis favoured by Dr Frazer, that the victim is usually a divine man, a priest-king
- ↑ Corp. Inscr. Graec. 2554.
- ↑ Bull. Corr. Hell., 1878, p. 515.
- ↑ Pausan. iii. 22, 1.
- ↑ Pliny, Nat. Hist. viii. 82; Pausan. viii. 2, § 3 and § 6.
- ↑ Article on “Sacrifice” in Ency. Brit., 9th ed.
- ↑ Cf. Porphyry, ii. 29, 30 (from Theophrastus) and Pausan. i. 24, 4.
- ↑ Myth, Ritual and Religion, ii. 176.
- ↑ Herod. vii. 197.
