Indeed, in a single place you might worship a variety of Zeuses, distinguished by their
epithets– so Zeus ‘‘Meilichios,’’ Zeus the dangerous but hopefully ‘‘gentle,’’ is a
different business from Zeus ‘‘Olympios,’’ the Zeus who is king of the gods on
Mount Olympus. Each Olympian god is particularized by epithets, which are a bit of
a compromise: they maintain a single identity (of Zeus), but diffract it into a rich
spectrum of locations, functions, and traditions.
The second dimension is that of mythology. Myths might be local and might present
for instance a supposedreasonfor a current religious practice, when they are described
as ‘‘aetiological.’’ This would not be an actual, historical reason, because myths are no
more true than gods are real. They are a way of thinking about the world around us and
the people in it. It is in the nature of the worship of the Greek gods to generate myths,
and it is in the nature of poets, the entertainers of Greek culture, to collect them and
synthesize them into a compromise set of stories that develop shared ideas of what the
gods are like and how they behave. The principal Greek myths are widely known in
ancient Greece and find their place in epics, lyric poetry, drama, and all manner of
cultural production. They are everywhere in Greek art too.
The third dimension is that of thought about gods and the divine, ‘‘theology.’’ But
Greece did not have official theologians: what it had was poets, philosophers, and
anyone else who was prepared to think. Here finally we may worry about how the
universe is run and speculate on the justice or the goodness of the gods. It is at this
point that personal gods have their weakest grip and abstraction sets in most easily.
So, to take the major cult site of Zeus in the Peloponnese, the huge temple of Zeus
at Olympia (built for cult, decorated with myth) provokes reflection on his power
(theology). The ceremonies and celebrations enact that power with grandeur and
significance, and in so doing focus something of Greek identity onto this site. This
happens explicitly once every four years and implicitly, through memory and monu-
ments, at all times in between, as this is always the place that carries the history of the
ritual and its apparently limitless future. The huge altar of ashes grows with this year’s
offerings; and the animals sacrificed in large number to the god, awesomely struck
down and wailed over, give their lifeblood not to us but (back) to the god. This is the
‘‘same’’ Zeus whom Homer celebrates in theIliad, mighty, remote, never actually
walking the earth, distributing human happiness and misery, deciding the end of
everything, including us. But he also behaves in ways that are harder to understand:
he is said to have flung the god Hephaestus from heaven to land on Lemnos where
the worship of the god of fire can take place; he argues with his wife (for why else
should their marriage need to be renewed annually?); he is seduced by her on Mount
Ida, in a scene presented rather daringly or wickedly by the poet. At Olympia we will
also look forward to the traditional ritual song celebrating his thunderbolt, and we
will think, as we look to the sky in prayer, about that great being whose justice is so
hard to grasp, as Aeschylus showed us in his last plays – theAgamemnonand the
Prometheus Bound(if it is by him). And as we look at the temple’s sculptures, we see a
mythology surrounding Zeus – a pediment showing the chariot race of Pelops for the
hand of Hippodameia, a pediment displaying Zeus’s son Apollo bringing order to
Centaurs and Lapiths, and the metopes displaying the work of another of his sons,
Heracles, founder of the Olympic Games, namely his twelve labors to civilize the
world and overcome the adversity that Zeus’s wife Hera had put in his path. Zeus
himself once again is mysteriously absent from these scenes, but we may reflect upon
42 Ken Dowden