Zeus

Zeus is the youngest of the six children of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. His father had dethroned his own, and a prophecy warned him that one of his children would do the same to him, so he swallowed each newborn as soon as Rhea handed it over. With the sixth she disobeyed: she gave birth in secret in Crete and put into his hands a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Cronus swallowed without looking.

The child grew up in a cave on Mount Ida. The goat Amaltheia suckled him and nymphs raised him, while the Kouretes danced around clashing shields and spears so that the crying would not rise to heaven. Hesiod's Theogony dwells on that noise longer than seems necessary, and rightly so: everything else depends on it, because if Cronus hears, there are no Olympians.

Grown, Zeus forced his father to give back what he had swallowed. Out came the stone first and then his five siblings, in the reverse of the order they went in. Hence a paradox the Greeks never resolved and which is better not hidden: Hesiod makes him **the last born**, yet in the Iliad it is Zeus himself who declares he is **elder in birth** than Poseidon, and Iris reminds the sea god that the Erinyes always attend the elder brother. The two supreme authorities on the matter contradict each other. The explanation offered since antiquity is that the disgorging counts as a second birth, and in it Zeus came first.

The Titanomachy lasted ten years and was not won by strength but by an alliance. Zeus went down to Tartarus and freed the Cyclopes, who in gratitude forged him the thunderbolt, and the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires, who threw three hundred rocks at once. With them on his side the scale tipped, and the defeated Titans were shut into the same Tartarus their jailers had come out of, under those giants' watch.

What came next is almost always told wrong, and it is worth fixing, because it is the scene that defines the Greek order. Zeus **did not take the sky for being eldest, nor did he assign it to himself**: the three brothers **drew lots**. It is Poseidon who says so in the Iliad, and he says it precisely to deny Zeus the right to give him orders: we are three, all was divided in three, we shook the lots and the grey sea fell to me, the murky dark to Hades and the broad sky to Zeus. Earth and Olympus were left common to all three.

The detail is not small. A cosmos shared out by lot is a cosmos where supreme authority rests on an accepted chance and not on a natural right, and from that comes all the later tension among the brothers: Poseidon obeys grudgingly and with reservations, and in that very scene he says as much. Zeus rules, but he rules over equals who drew a worse lot.

He is depicted as a mature bearded man, standing or enthroned, with the thunderbolt in his hand. The eagle and the oak attend him, and from that oak comes his oldest oracle: at Dodona they read neither entrails nor smoke, but the sound of the leaves. At Olympia he had the greatest sanctuary and the games that bear his name. He is also the aigiochos, «the aegis-bearer»; it should be noted that the aegis with the Medusa head usually credited to him belongs in the Iliad to Athena, though the weapon is originally his and he lends it to her.

His jurisdiction is more specific than the title king of the gods suggests. Zeus Horkios punishes the perjurer and Zeus Xenios protects the guest and the suppliant: he is the guarantor of the pact between strangers, which in a world without a state is the institution that holds up everything else. That is why the worst story told of him, that of Lycaon, is not about a military challenge but about a host who served human flesh to his guest.

And there is something he cannot do, contrary to what is often said: **he does not know everything**. In the Iliad, Hera adorns herself, borrows Aphrodite's girdle and seduces him on Mount Ida to put him to sleep while the Greeks gain ground, and the plan works. Earlier, at Mecone, Prometheus offered him two portions and Zeus chose the one that was bone wrapped in fat. An omniscient god falls for neither. His power is not to know everything, but that his decision, once taken, is not revoked.