ZEUS, the Greek counterpart of the Roman god, Jupiter (q.v. for the etymology of the name). It is probable that Zeus had already been conceived as a personal and pre-eminent god by the ancestors of the leading Hellenic tribes before they entered the peninsula, which became their historic home. In the first place, his pre-eminence is obviously pre-Homeric ; for Homer attests for us the supremacy of Zeus in his day, say 95o B.C.; and appre ciating how slow was the process of religious change in the earlier period, we shall believe that the god had won this position long be fore the Homeric age. In the next place, we cannot trace the origin of his worship back to any special stock or particular locality ; his unquestionable association with Olympus and Thes saly is only what we should expect, seeing that many at least of the Greeks must have entered Greece that way.
To appreciate the Homeric Zeus, 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 (see GREEK In fact, 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. Yet traces of a pre-deistic and animistic period survived here and there ; for instance, in Arcadia we find the thunder itself called Zeus (ZEUS Kepavp6s) in a Mantinean inscription, and the stone near Gythium in Laconia, on which Orestes sat and was cured of his madness, evidently a thunder-stone, was named itself ZEin Karr&ras, which must be interpreted as "Zeus that fell from heaven" (Pausan iii. 22. I.); we here observe that the personal god does not yet seem to have emerged from the divine thing or divine phenomenon.
The day is now past when scholars could discover in the ritual of Zeus Lukaios (see LYCAON), or the Dipolia, the cult of a wolf —or ox-totem--somehow blended with Zeus ; but certainly a characteristic of his earliest ritual was human sacrifice. We find
it again in the story of the house of Athamas and in the worship of Zeus Laphustios ("Zeus the Glutton"), of Thessaly (Herod. vii. 197), and other examples are recorded. The cruel rite had ceased in the Arcadian worship before Pliny wrote, but seems to have continued in Cyprus until 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 Frazer, that the victim is usually a divine man, a priest-king incarnating the god, may be well applied to the Athamantid sacrifice and to that of King Lycaon; for he derives his name from the divinity himself, and according to one version (Clemens, Protrept p. 31 P.) he offers his own child; and the legend presents one almost unique feature, which is only found elsewhere in legendary Dionysiac sacrifice, the human flesh is eaten, and the sacrifice is a cannibalistic-sacrament, of which the old Mexican religion offers conspicuous example. Yet it is in this religion of Zeus that we see most clearly the achievement of progressive morality; Zeus himself punishes and abolishes the savage practice.
We can now consider the special attributes of the anthro pomorphic god. His character and power as a deity of the sky, who ruled the phenomena of the air, so clearly expressed in Homer, explains the greater part of his cult and cult-titles. More personal than Ouranos and Helios—with whom he has only slight associa tions—he was worshipped and invoked as the deity of the bright day (Amarios), who sends the rain, the wind and dew (Ombrios, Huetios, Ourios), and such a primitive adjective as diipetes applied to things "that fall from heaven," attests the primeval significance of the name of Zeus. But the thunder was his most striking manifestation, and no doubt he was primevally a thunder god, (Keraunios, Astrapaios). Much of his ritual was weather magic ; the priest of Zeus Lukaios in time of drought, was wont to ascend Mt. Lycaeum and dip an oak-bough in a sacred fountain, and by this sympathetic means produce mist (Pausan. viii. 38, 3).