501–6) he received the necessary equipment from three sons of the secondary
sky-god Ouranos. Their names, Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, represent the
thunder (βροντ ), the lightning (στεροπ ), and the shining bolt (qργ^
κεραυνο ́ ). They made these weapons for Zeus and gave them to him in
gratitude when he released them from the prison in which Ouranos had shut
them up –– perhaps another expression of the eruption of lightning from the
cloud in which it had been confined.
The three brothers reflect an analysis of the god’s fulmination into three
aspects: the thunder is what you hear, the lightning is what you see, and the
thunderbolt is what hits you. There is an interesting parallel in one of the
Latvian songs, where Pe ̄rkons is said to have nine sons:
trois frappaient du pied, trois grondaient,
trois étincelaient.^36Here too the three functions are separated and assigned to different brothers,
while a superior figure, Pe ̄rkons himself, takes the credit for the whole
production.
It was mentioned above that Perkunas rides behind a goat or goats, and that
the goat is really the snipe that presages a storm. One of Zeus’ commonest
epithets in Homer is α!γ(f)οχο, which must originally have meant ‘riding
on a goat’; the traditional interpretation as ‘aegis-bearing’ does violence to the
language. In one of the Orphic theogonies (fr. 236 (ii) Bernabé) Zeus rode
to heaven on a goat after his birth. The feminine αAξ presupposed in the
Homeric word is cognate with the masculine ozˇys that denotes Perkunas’ goat.
Perkunas’ and Perun’s special relationship with the oak tree is not foreign
to Zeus. His holy oak at Dodona was famous from Homer on (Od. 14. 327 f. =
- 296 f.), and he had another at Troy (Il. 5. 695, 7. 60). His partiality for oaks
is implied by a joke in Aristophanes (Av. 480, cf. schol.; Eust. in Hom. 594.
35). His habit of striking them with lightning is noted (Il. 14. 414, Ar. Nub.
402, Lucian Dial. 20. 16).
In the absence of an independent Jupiter mythology we need not dwell on
the Roman god except to note that he too is regularly associated with the
oak (quercus). ‘Quercus in tutela Iouis est’, writes Servius (on Virg. Ecl. 1. 17).
The ancient temple of Iuppiter Feretrius was sited by an oak on the Capitol
(Livy 1. 10. 5). Many understood the title Feretrius as being from ferire
‘strike’, though this is probably wrong. The god of lightning had a separate
shrine in the Campus Martius as Iuppiter Fulgur.^37
(^36) Mannhardt (1875), 317; LD 33704 = Jonval no. 437; von Schroeder (1914–16), ii. 628 f.
(^37) C. Thulin, RE x. 1130 f. For Jupiter and the oak cf. also Virg. G. 3. 332, Aen. 3. 680 f.;
Ov. Met. 1. 106; Phaedr. 3. 17. 2; Plut. Coriol. 3, Quaest. Rom. 286a; F. Olck, RE v. 2051 f.
248 6. Storm and Stream