Zeus

Where's he from, where he's (hopefully) going

A long time ago when I used to lecture to undergraduates, I’d ask them on the first day what was the first word that came to mind when they heard the phrase “Greek Mythology.”

As if on cue, they’d chorus “Zeus!”

The top god of the pantheon has not lost popularity. Where I live, a business called ZeusLending.com sponsors highway cleanup near me and their sign shows a bearded, square-jawed man with a lightning bolt over his left ear.

Somehow the marketers of that company knew that Zeus sells, baby.

On the other hand, there’s the poetry book by the talented Lannie Stabile (@LannieStabile), Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus.

Stabile takes a different approach to the god. This is from the amazon.com blurb for the book:

In this poetry collection, Lannie Stabile explores the patriarchal culture that firstly leads men to call their dogs Zeus, and secondly leads us all to accept that as kind-of okay — ignoring the fact that all-powerful Zeus, symbol of masculinity and thunder god, famously used his dominion to manipulate, abduct, and prey on countless women, human and deity alike.

Interspersing Greek mythology with personal tales, weaving between adult and childhood narratives, Stabile masterfully brings together modern and ancient stories that will resonate deeply with the impact of a lightning strike.

Stabile reminds us that is never a neutral thing to talk about Zeus, even though the name and the subject seem to be as neutral a thing as it could be.

Or I should say that the name and the subject have been made out to be neutral.

So today I want to say a few non-neutral things about Zeus, touching tangentially on what Stabile points out, but with a sense of history. I want to talk about what led to a divinity named Zeus gaining a foothold in Greece and Greek culture. This, in turn, will  provide a few answers about why some men name their dog Zeus.

So where did Zeus come from? Gather around the campfire and find out, my children.

Back before Greek Mythology was Greek Mythology, a band of people who spoke an early form of Greek popped up in Greece, and they gave offerings to a god named Di-wo.

If that sounds vague, you’re not wrong. That’s about all we can say for sure about the origins of Zeus in Greece.

Some scholars think we can go back farther. Greek is an Indo-European language, which means that it is related to a large family of other languages ranging from Irish to Russian to Gujarati and a lot in between. Many scholars have theorized that at one point thousands of years ago all these people who speak all these different languages were just one people who spoke one language, Proto-Indo-European, and that that people at some point in prehistory broke as if from a huddle of football players and spread out through Europe and Asia, changing and evolving along with their languages.

And maybe, just maybe, they also had an original mythology, too.

That’s where Zeus first comes to life. The name Zeus matches well with the Sanskrit god Dyaus (“heaven”), and based on a fair amount of other evidence, scholars have concluded that those original Indo-Europeans must have worshipped a kind of Heaven-Father.

The name Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus, in fact means Zeus-Father (Ju = Dios, piter = pater, father).

But the origin story doesn’t stop there.

We have no idea what the Greeks thought about their god Di-wo—he probably had a wife (her name was Mrs. Zeus, Di-wi-a), but we do not know whether he was unfaithful to that wife, what status he had among the divinities of that time, whether he had a lightning bolt that he struck people with—there is almost no information about this early Zeus, not even pictures.

It is only about 500 years later, when the Greeks began to interact with more sophisticated mythological cultures to the east and south that Zeus begins to take on an actual personality.

The poet Hesiod gives Zeus his exalted status as king of the gods by writing a poem in which Zeus comes to power through a violent coup d’état. Zeus overthrows his father Cronus and Cronus’ siblings, the Titans, by acquiring and using his Death-Star-like weapon, the lightning bolt, a creation of some giants named the Cyclopes.

Side note: to cement his status as top dog, Zeus also uses his lightning bolt to defeat a nearly unbeatable monster called Typhoeus. 

Is this an Indo-European survival as well?

Well, no. Scholars have discovered a number of versions of this story involving a number of different non-Indo-European gods from places like Anatolia (modern Turkey), Syria, Lebanon, and Mesopotamia. These myths are popularly called “Kingship in Heaven,” a polite way of saying that in the olden days, there was a horrific series of internecine rivalries and violence that ended with one “father” as the undisputed ruler.

To cement the borrowing, there is also a story about the sky god defeating a fearsome monster, the most familiar of which is Tiamat.

Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, took it from there, building Zeus’s personality into the divine version of the Greek patriarch, who did have power of life and death over his household and license to have more than one sexual partner. 

In the Iliad, Zeus can be like an indulgent father, soothing his daughter Artemis in Book 21 after a run-in with her stepmother Hera, or an abusive husband in Book 15, threatening Hera after she deceived him.

So, to me, Zeus isn’t purely a Greek god, whatever that means. The name is Greek, for sure, but the personality seems largely to be borrowed and then developed.

Which is kind of the point.

I think the most enduring concepts or ideas are the one on which people have collaborated. You start out with something small and then add to it. A little bit like the best kind of sand castle. You start by mounding up a nondescript hill of granules, and then people all come around it with pails and shovels and molds and one person says “Here’s where the horsemen come in with messages” or “Here’s the second moat” or “This tower is where the princess has her telescope” and pretty soon you’ve got something that everyone walking by wants to squash.

And that’s part of the reason why men name their dogs Zeus. I don’t know how many cultures are patriarchal in this world. A lot, I presume. So, staying with the metaphor, a sand castle is sort of irresistible as a collaborative enterprise, and so is the idea of patriarchy. It’s irresistible partly because it gives humans—for good or ill—a sense of stability. Any system of power where power is shared, such as democracy, is unstable simply because people disagree. And if they disagree, there can be conflict and things can fall apart.

With patriarchy, you give one person power and it can get ugly, but you have the impression that it’s more stable (it often isn’t—as the Succession Myth proves).

But if a man names his dog Zeus, then maybe he thinks, I’m tapping in to a source of power in a life where I often fear that I don’t have it.

I’d be the first to say that sharing power and privilege is not easy. But it’s the wave of the future, and someday we will have, I predict, a hit TV show where Zeus is the supportive husband of the president of the United States.

It will be an excellent spin on a classic character.