Zeus

Music Music So spake he, and all they consented thereto, and bade send the stranger on his way, in that he had spoken aright.

Then the mighty Alcinous spake to the henchmen, Pantanois, mix the bowl and serve out the wine to all in the hall, that we may pray to Father Zeus and send the stranger on his way to his own country.

So spake he, and Pantanois mixed the honey-hearted wine and served it to all in turn.

And they poured forth before the blessed gods that keep wide heaven, even there as they sat.

Heracles, receive this woman, now these halls within.

Edmetus, nay, I beseech by Zeus that did beget thee.

Heracles, yet shalt thou err if thou do not this thing.

Edmetus, yet shall mine heart be grief-stung if I do it.

The progress of Greek religion falls naturally into three stages, all of them historically important.

First, there is the primitive Eutheia, or age of ignorance, before Zeus came to trouble men's minds, a stage to which our anthropologists and explorers have found parallels in every part of the world.

Dr. Preuss applies to it the charming word Urdumheit, or primal stupidity.

In some ways characteristically Greek, in others it is so typical of similar stages of thought elsewhere that one is tempted to regard it as the normal beginning of all religion, or almost as the normal raw material out of which religion is made.

But even if we go back to the 5th century BC we shall find the ruling conceptions far nobler indeed but still anthropomorphic.

We find firmly established the Olympian patriarchal family.

Zeus the father of gods and men, his wife Hera, his son Apollo, his daughter Athena, his brothers Poseidon and Hades and the rest.

We probably think of each feature more or less as like a statue.

of this sort are the stories of ganymede the young asiatic taken up to heaven by the ruler of the sky and displacing the maiden hebe and of hylas the minion of heracles whose beauty brought him to his death narcissus and hyacinthus are persons of the same type while the heroes of this kind of literature jason heracles and theseus reserve all their fine and chivalrous feelings for men and regard women as a kind of booty to be won if possible by fraud if fraud is ineffective by the judicious use of force jason deserts medea in favour of a younger and richer woman heracles leaves his wife to roam abroad capturing by force any woman that pleases him theseus spends his life in betraying women and in his old age marries phaedra the young sister of ariadne but their exploits do not at all detract from the heroic character of the three worthies for it is now recognised that women are vile creatures who deserve vile treatment and so we have a second class of tale invented to illustrate the innate viciousness of the female sex there is the story of pacify and the minotaur mira and adonis leda and the swan europa and the bull and so on and so on the same frame of mind that invented these tales ascribed to sappho all kinds of unnatural vice degraded helen into a wanton and penelope into a shrew and made it seem only logical that women being the creatures they were should be kept prisoners in a harem and confined to child-bearing that indispensable function being indeed the main reason for their being allowed to exist at all The tales of Pacify, Leda, and Europa, however, though useful enough in their way, are a little crude, and we have a more artistic method employed in the passages which about this time were incorporated into the Iliad by Ionian poets, with the idea of degrading the whole conception of the two divinities who represent womanly love, Hera and Aphrodite.

Hera, the goddess of married life, the wife in her divine aspect, is represented by these decadents as an interfering termagant, spying upon her husband and seeking always to thwart him in the enjoyment of his legitimate lusts and caprices aphrodite the goddess of unrestrained physical passion becomes a calculating courtesan the method pursued is that same kind of false realism which has supplied our comic stage with the well-worn themes of the old maid and the mother-in-law and it need hardly be said that it harmonizes very badly with the romantic splendor of the epic lays the heroic hexameter gives for our ears an air of nobility even to this stuff but in its essence it is colloquial style of a rather tawdry sort and one or two passages will illustrate its character for example the last hundred lines of book one of the iliad an episode altogether out of harmony with the rest of the book Thetis has come to ask Zeus to avenge her son.

Hera knows of her visit, and this is the language she uses to her husband.

"'You crafty one, you know it's true.

She wants to borrow the magic cestus of Aphrodite in order to reconcile Oceanus and Mother Tethys, a pair whose matrimonial affairs have been going so badly that they are now occupying separate rooms.

if i could only get them together she says they would ever afterwards call me their friend Whether Aphrodite believes the story or not is best left unsaid, but she at once consents.

It is not possible or proper to refuse you, for you sleep in the arms of the mighty Zeus, and she hands her the cestus with all its magic powers.

In it are love and desire and sweet dalliance and alluring words, which rob even the wise of their wits.

Baldur is smashing heads.

And they see Zeus up on afar.

And Odin says, I'm going to take down that guy.

And flies up to meet him.

You've got links to all of that in the show notes.

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Gaia, the earth, wide and endless.

a foundation solid enough to hold everything that would ever be built upon it tartarus a deep and terrible pit beneath the world so far down that a bronze anvil dropped from the surface would fall for nine full days and nights before ever striking its floor and eros the force that draws all things together the same pull that binds gods and mortals alike toward one another even now from chaos also came erebus the darkness that lies beneath the earth and night black-robed and silent who needed no partner at all to bring forth day and the shining air simply by her own existence beside him Among night's own children, born without any father at all, were three sisters known as the Fates, or the Moire, though Hesiod himself, in a separate part of the very same poem, calls them instead daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Themis.

A small inconsistency the old poets never bothered to resolve between themselves.

Clotho spun the thread of every life at its beginning.

From the sky, God's blood, spilled across the earth, came new and terrible beings, spirits of vengeance and giants of tremendous size, born from that single act of violence, and from the sea foam that gathered where the wound struck the water.

Aphrodite herself would one day rise, fully formed, stepping onto the shore of Cyprus as though she had always existed, needing no childhood at all.

Later, storytellers, Homer among them, would instead call her a daughter of Zeus, born through an entirely different lineage.

But it is this older, stranger birth from the sea itself that the earliest poets remembered first and told most often.

Finally, the river nymph Erethusa reveals that she saw Proserpina sitting as the sorrowful queen of the underworld.

Ceres appeals to Jupiter, or Zeus, king of the gods, who agrees Proserpina may return on the strict condition that she hasn't consumed any food in the dead realm.

But Pluto, not to be outmaneuvered, offers her a sweet pomegranate.

Proserpina eats six seeds, legally binding her to the underworld.

shattered by her daughter's disappearance cedes wanders the earth with burning torches withholding her blessings from the soil crops rot seeds wither and a catastrophic famine threatens humanity with extinction Finally, the river nymph Erethusa reveals that she saw Proserpina sitting as the sorrowful queen of the underworld.

Ceres appeals to Jupiter, or Zeus, king of the gods, who agrees Proserpina may return on the strict condition that she hasn't consumed any food in the dead realm.

But Pluto, not to be outmaneuvered, offers her a sweet pomegranate.

Proserpina eats six seeds, legally binding her to the underworld.