The Olympians, then, have a home, associated in part with a mountain in northern
Greece, but where did they actually come from? There are some clues but few
answers. Zeus himself has the same name (allowing for the drifting apart of speech,
first into dialects, then into separate languages) as the Germanic *Tiwaz (as in our
word Tuesday) or the Sanskrit (Indian) Dya ̄uh:, or the Latin (Roman) Jupiter/Jove.
So he goes back to before Greeks were Greeks, to an Indo-European god of the sky
and of light thousands of years earlier. His son might possibly once have been
Dionysus, in a language quite close to Greek (Dios-synos, ‘‘Zeus’s son,’’ with the
sandntransposed?). Semele too, his mother, might just have been ‘‘she of the earth,’’
i.e. an earth goddess, in a neighboring language (comparison has been made with
zemlya, the Russian for ‘‘earth,’’ though its–l-is secondary; but the–l- may be the
adjectival ending, as in the Greek wordchthamalos, ‘‘of the ground,’’ which may be
the corresponding word in Greek itself).
Demeter, originally Da ̄ma ̄te ̄r, looks as though she should be the earth or corn
‘‘mother,’’ but theDa ̄-is hard to manage. Poseidon, originally Poteida ̄o ̄n, appears to
be the ‘‘husband of Da ̄,’’ and indeed his worship is associated with that of Demeter in
Arcadia. Elsewhere in the Peloponnese, ‘‘Hera’’ looks like a title, a feminine equiva-
lent of ‘‘hero,’’ perhaps in origin a term like ‘‘Potnia,’’ ‘‘Powerful,’’ used in historic
times to invoke goddesses such as Hera, Aphrodite, Demeter, Athene and so on, but
sufficient on its own to name the goddess, as it had been long ago in the Bronze Age
Linear B script of the Greek palace society.
Unless Apollo’s name comes from theapella, a term used in several states to denote
a gathering of the male warrior citizens, we do not know where it comes from, but
some of his functions – particularly those of plague and arrows – look like the
functions of a Phoenician god Resheph. Some of his other associations, with proph-
ecy, altered consciousness, and purification may belong in the same part of the world
(West 1997:55).
Aphrodite, delightfully portrayed by Hesiod as emerging from the ‘‘foam’’ (aphros)
issuing from the severed sexual organs of Uranus (Sky) as they floated in the sea, may
actually be the way Greeks got their mouths round some form of the Phoenician
goddess Astarte, and her descent from Uranus explains her cult as Aphrodite Urania,
in fact a version of Astarte’s cult title ‘‘Queen of Heaven’’ (West 1997:56–7). Her
epithet ‘‘Kythereia’’ may have nothing to do with her cult on the island of Kythera
but in fact relate to a god of craftsmen, Kothar in Ugaritic (an early language of
Phoenicia), explaining her strange marriage to Hephaestus (Odyssey8.266–366),
though her epithet Kypris (‘‘of Cyprus’’) does indeed refer to that island where
Phoenician and Greek culture met.
Others are much harder. Atha ̄na ̄, as Athene originally was, looks by its structure
(a-tha ̄-na ̄) non-Greek. Artemis and Hermes it is hard to believe anything about –
though it is strange that revered wayside heaps of stones were calledhermaia.
Insofar as we can say anything about the origins of the gods, what this all reinforces
is a sense of how Greek gods were gathered from different sources at different times
and underwent periodic renewal in the light of new religious encounters. This
produces the remarkably varied and yet unified amalgam displayed by Greeks gods.
We will look at two of them here.
48 Ken Dowden