The Rest Is History - 602. Greek Myths: Zeus, King of the Gods (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

What are the mythic origins of Zeus, King of the Olympians, and the other Greek gods? From what period did the earliest of the Greek myths derive? Who was Hesiod - alongside Homer, the greatest of the Greek poets, and the father of European literature - who first recorded Zeus’ story? When was the golden age of Greek myth? Who were the Titans, and why were they consigned to the fiery pit of Tartarus? Did different regions of Greece have different interpretations of the gods, and do these myths express something particular about ancient Greek culture? And, did people really believe in these famous stories of terrible gods, daring heroes, and great wars? Join Tom and Dominic as they plunge into the glorious, technicolour world of the Greek myths, starting with the tumultuous early life of Cronos, his son Zeus, the war between the gods and the Titans, and some of the most famous Greek heroes of all time - from Perseus to Hercules.  ______ Try Adobe Express for free now at https://www.adobe.com/uk/express/spotlight/designwithexpress?sdid=HM85WZZV&mv=display&mv2=ctv or by searching in the app store. LRB are offering six months access to their full archive for just £12, plus a free tote bag. Visit https://LRB.me/history Learn more at https://www.uber.com/onourway ______ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at therestishistory.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the rest is history.com and join the club. That is the rest is history.com. This episode is presented by Adobe Express, the quick and easy create-anything app. What does that mean? Well, say you need to make a presentation or a video. video or a social media post or a flyer to some, certainly to me, that sounds intimidating. But Tom, with Adobe Express's intuitive features like templates, generative AI and real-time

collaboration, it has never been easier. Adobe Express. Try it for free. Search Adobe Express in the app store. This episode is brought to you by SAP. With investors, customers and workers demanding more from your business, it's time to try SAP. Its AI-powered capabilities can help you streamline costs, connect with new suppliers and manage payroll even when your business is being pulled in different directions, to deliver a quality product at a fair price while paying your people what they're worth too, so your business can stay unfazed. Learn more at SAP.com slash uncertainty. So Tom, we have some incredibly exciting news for our listeners in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. we? We absolutely do, Dominic, because we are going to be in Belfast, in Dublin and in Cork next year

in April, and we will be talking about the tragic story of Titanic. So we will be on stage in Belfast at the Waterfront Hall on Friday the 17th of April. We'll be in Dublin at the Convention Centre on Saturday the 18th of April and in Cork at the Opera House on Monday, the 20th of April. Tickets are on sale now for our beloved members of the Rest is History Club. So join the Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com now if you want to snap your tickets up early. And tickets will then be available to purchase for everyone else at the restishistory.com from Thursday. That's the 25th of September 2025 at 9 a.m. So for your chance to see us on stage live in Belfast,

Dublin or Cork, simply head to the rest ishistory.com to get your tickets. Ria, when she was due to bear the youngest of her children, great Zeus, travelled to Crete. There she came carrying him through the swift dark night, and taking him in her arms, she hid him in a cave hard of access, down in the secret places of the numinous earth, in the Aegean mountain with its dense woods. Then she wrapped a large stone in swaddling clothes and delivered it to her husband Cronos, the son of heaven. Seizing it with his hands, Kronos put it away in his belly, the brute,

not realizing that thereafter not a stone, but his son remained, secure and invincible, who before long was to defeat him by physical strength and drive him from his high station himself to be king among the immortals. So Tom and ladies and gentlemen, that is a very famous story. It's the story of how Zeus, who is the god worshipped by the Greeks as the king of the heavens, the lord of heaven and earth, how he managed to survive when he was a newborn baby, and to evade his father, Kronos's attempts to devour him. And Tom, that is absolutely textbook Greek mythology, isn't it? It's basically a massive family feud, horrendously violent, a lot of kind of tricks and sort of deception and tricks, exactly.

That's the side of the Greek myths that I think when you're a, you know, when you're a child reading them, you love like Theseus and the Minotaur and the Perseus and whatnot. But quite soon you become aware of this dark undercurrent. And that's what I was associate with Greek mythology, this sort of simmering violence and sort of patricide and fratricide and so on. But I think to a degree you get that in the kind of children's histories of Greek myth as well. I mean, you have this sense that there are gods, that there are heroes, that there are all kinds of monsters, terrible things going on. And that is part of the appeal, even when you're a child, I think. And absolutely when you're an adult. And if that is your thing, then brilliant, because we've got loads of them, because we're going to be doing four episodes on the Greek myths.

Oh, fantastic. But, Dominic, we're not just going to be telling the stories of the Greek myths because this is a history podcast. And so, as well as telling some of the kind of the classic myths, we're going to be exploring where the myths come from, how they evolved. And I guess above all, what they might tell us about ancient Greece, this astonishing. civilization that gave birth to them. So why don't we start with the story that you have chosen to open with? Zeus, Kronos, the stone swallowing, the sort of sense of father and son locked in this sort of, you know, this sort of cosmic existential battle.

So this is, you know, it's not just textbook Greek mythology. This is the foundational Greek myth, isn't it? It is. It's doubly foundational, partly because it stands at the head of this great sweep of myths. This is about the coming of Zeus and the Olympians, but also because the poem in which it features, which is called the Theogony or the birth of the gods, is itself at the kind of the wellspring, not just of Greek poetry, but actually of European poetry. So it's fabulously ancient. It's written some three centuries before the Golden Age of Athens, so the Parthenon

and Pericles and all that. Way back in the 8th century. BC, so maybe 7.30, 7.20, something like that. And its author was a man called Hesiod. And he is doing something incredibly novel because he has a brand new invention that he can use. And that invention is the alphabet, which he has got from the Phoenicians. We talked about that in the episode we did ages ago about the Phoenicians. And you can see immediately why this would be a radical innovation because previously poems had been oral. But now for the first time, because you can write them down, they can be preserved and they can be read and they can be re-read and they can pass down the generations. And that's how we get Homer's poems. I mean, they're the most

famous of all of these. Yes. The Iliad and the Odyssey. Yes. So Homer is around the same time as Hesiod. He, of course, famously, people probably know. He's telling the story of the Trojan War, this great conflict fought between the Greeks and the Trojans, and then the return of Odysseus for 10 years back to his home in his second poem, The Odyssey. The Greeks saw these two poets, Homer and Hesiod, as the kind of the twin wellsprings of their literature. And it's unclear which of them was the first, but there were lots of Greeks back in the classical period, as there are scholars now who think that actually Hesiod was older than Homer. He essentially is where European poetry, European literature, begins.

And they're both writing about the gods and myths, aren't they? Yeah. But not quite in the same way. Is that right? Right. So unlike Homer, lots of debates about Homer, did he ever exist? Was he a single person? We know that Hesiod absolutely exists.

And he gives us all kinds of personal details about himself in a way that Homer never does. So even if Homer is older than him, Hesiod is definitely the first writer in European history, whom we can know for sure existed and no kind of personal details about him. Presuming that the details he gives in his poems can be trusted, what we know about Hesiod is that he is the son of a Greek who had travelled from the opposite side of the Aegean to Greece proper, because Greeks had settled across the Aegean and they'd settled what's now the seaboard of Turkey, but Anatolia. So presuming that what Hesiod tells us in his poems is trustworthy, and I think there's no real reason to doubt it.

Hesiod is the son of a Greek who had traveled from the far side of the Aegean from Greece, so Anatolia, what's now Turkey, where Greeks had been settling since probably just after the time of the Trojan War. Heid's father had traveled back across the Aegean to Greece proper, and he had settled in a place called Beosha, which is just north of Athens. Hesiod and his brother Perseys had inherited farmland below a mountain called Helicon. and things had not gone well at all. So first of all, Hesiod had a massive bust up with his brother, Percy's. He accused Percy's of cheating him, of his rightful share of the inheritance that was theirs from their father.

And also, the kind of the local settlement, maybe calling it a town would be to dignify it. It's a place called Ascara. Hecad says it's an absolute dump. So to quote him, it's a miserable place, bad in winter, foul in summer, good at no time. West Promitch. Yeah. It's the first kind of holiday review ever recorded in European history. However, it's not all bad news for Hesiod, because Mount Helicon, which rises up above Ascara,

this is the home of goddesses called the Muses. And they are daughters of Zeus, the king of the gods, and they are the goddesses of song. And they appear to him and take him under their wing. And they do so while Hesiod is up on the slopes of Mount Helicon, tending his sheep and his goats. and they give him a branch of springing bay, Hesiod's own words, to serve him as a staff, and they tell him to sing of the family of the blessed immortals. And this story is so important to Hesiod that he chooses to open his poem, Theogony, about the coming of the gods, with this.

And so, Dominic, you may wonder why it's so important. And I think the answer is, Homer's poems are about the end of the age. of the heroes, you know, these kind of godlike figures, Achilles and Hector and Odysseus and so on. And this is the kind of the great death struggle which marks the end of this period of myth, if you want to put it like that. But Hesiod's poem is right, as we said, is right at the beginning of the age of myth. And it's describing the coming of the gods. And this is a time when there aren't really any humans at all. So the problem for Hesiod is how does he convey to people that he is licensed to do this, because actually the great hero of the

theogony isn't someone like Achilles or Odysseus, a mortal. It's actually Zeus himself. And so this, I think, is why Hesiod's readers need to believe that what Hesiod is writing about has come from a divine inspiration, namely the muses, Zeus's own daughters. And if people do not believe that the muses have inspired Hesiod, then Hesiod is worried that they simply won't believe what he has to tell them. But to be absolutely clear, though, both Hesiod and Homer are human poets, writing human poetry. These are not by any means scriptures, kind of scriptural divine texts, are they? No. So they're not prophets. They're not priests. They're not patrolling what can or can't be said about the gods. And different cities. So Greece is a kind of patchwork

of cities. It's not a single country. There are different cities with their own jurisdiction dotted all over the country. They can tell different stories about the gods. There's nothing to stop them doing that. No kind of cast of priests to do that. But what Hesiod and Homer crucially provide the Greeks, all these kind of scattered regions, these scattered cities, these scattered traditions, it gives them a certain sense of structure. Doesn't that mean that it's these two poets to some degree, Hesiod and Homer, who basically, invent greatness. The idea of the Greeks as one people or one civilization is because they all look to these myths and to these stories that have spread across the Greek world. Like 19th century

nationalist poets inventing, you know, inventing nations. I mean, there is a sense, I think, of Greekness that pre-exists that. They speak the same language. They're essentially worshiping the same gods. But what Hesiod and Homer are doing is providing a sense of structure that will indeed then be passed down after their lifetimes to subsequent generations of Greeks and, as you say, provide them with a sense of Greekness. So to quote a very famous German scholar on this, Volta Burkart in his book Greek religion, only an authority could create order amidst such a confusion of traditions. So these are all the different traditions that the different regions and cities are saying about the gods. The authority to whom the Greeks appealed was the poetry of

Hesiod and above all of Homer. The spiritual unity of the Greeks was founded and upheld by poetry a poetry which could still draw on living oral tradition. So that's descending perhaps from the age of the Trojan Wars, to produce a felicitous union of freedom and form, spontaneity and discipline. And I think this is the crucial thing about Greek myth. And it's why the Greek understanding of the dimension of the gods and the supernatural has the peculiar character that it does, namely that it's incredibly readable. The stories that you get with Greek myth,

are so good. It's because it is a very, very intensely literary culture, much more so than, say, you get in Babylon or Egypt. So do you think Greek myth or Greek religion is therefore more of a literary than a ritualistic thing compared with other religions of the same time period or the same kind of, you know, near-eastern religions or whatever? Is there a sense that this is a religion of the book or the story rather than of the kind of practice? Well, so the Jews that you have to pay to the gods are very important, as we'll see, the kind of the festivals and the sacrifices and so on. But the fact that the gods exist as characters in stories, I think, is overwhelmingly important and makes it very, very distinctive. And perhaps the best way to compare

the relationship of Homer to Hesiod is the I think the Lord of the Rings. And Hesiod's theogony is like the Silmarillion. So Tolkien's two great books. So the Iliad, like the Lord of the Rings, we're zooming in close to a kind of epic adventure of war and so on. But the other one, the theogony, is pulling back the camera to give us the very deep backstory. And the kind of the vitality of Tolkien's world, which has been so influential in the modern day, is due to the pairing of those. The fact that when you read Lord of the Rings, you have a sense of a massively deep backstory. And I think it's very similar for the Greeks

that when you're reading the Iliad or the Odyssey, you do have a sense that this exists in the context of the beginning of things, of the origins of the gods, of kind of stories that people can, it can be assumed that they know. But of course, there is this crucial difference with Tolkien

that Tolkien is writing fiction. The Greeks do not think that what you're reading in Hesiod or Homer is fiction. Okay, so this is a crucial question. So when Hesiod writes to stuff, this is an act of literary craftsmanship. But does he believe it? And do the readers believe...

I mean, it's the question that always puzzles you even when you're a child when you read the Greek myths. Do people who hear these stories genuinely believe that there are people up on there on Mount Olympus who are like throwing thunderbolts around, having affairs with each other, disguising themselves as showers of rain, or whatever it might be?

Do people... I mean, the Greeks are not... They're not idiots. Do they really believe this? This is a question that we will be exploring over the course of these four episodes. For most Greeks, most of the time, saying, do they believe in the gods? And you know what I'm about to see is a Christian framing of a question. Because Christianity is founded on belief.

Do you believe in Christ or whatever? Yeah. I don't think the Greeks thought in those terms. And there's a brilliant framing of their relationship to the gods by a scholar of ancient Athens called Greg Anderson. Their sense of the gods is like, say, our sense of the economy or the market. Do we believe in the economy? Do we believe in the market? I mean, on one level we do, but we don't stop to think about it.

We just take for granted their existence, even though we can't see the market. We sense its presence everywhere. And I guess the market is a really good comparison, to say, to an Olympian god, because we know that the market can bring us good things, but we also know that it has to be appeased or it will destroy us. So what was it? The James Carville, the Rajan Cajun, said that if he could be reincarnated, he'd like to come back as the bond market, because everyone's terrified of the bond market. I think that that is the closest modern parallel to how the Greeks viewed the gods. And of course, you know, people will have different views on how the markets can be appeased. And there were similar kind of a range of opinions back in Greece about the best way of appeasing the gods.

I mean, the question of whether you believe in the gods, I think for most Greeks never arises. Just I don't want to delay you for too long in getting on with the story. However, that raises a different question, though, which is, so people might believe in the market, but they don't tell intricate stories about the market that involve the market behaving in an anthropomorphic way. So in other words, I can completely see how a very intelligent Greek, you know, philosopher or whatever, believes that Zeus is meaningful. But does he actually think that Zeus transformed into a bull and slept with a woman or whatever, or a shower of rain or whatever it might be? Does he believe in the details of the stories? Well, you have different poets who are telling different stories about Zeus. You have different cities that tell different stories about him for reasons that will come to.

And sometimes these are discordant, but they're not so discordant that they unsettle the conviction of most Greeks that there is indeed a God called Zeus. And maybe some view these stories in the dimension of poetry, some view them in kind of all kinds of ways. But I think most of them do think that the stories that are told by the poets reveal the truth about the God who is father of gods and men. And that Zeus therefore does possess a kind of single coherent reality. And that's why it is possible to give a kind of biography of him. And this is a biography that depends largely upon Hesiod because it's Hesiod who gives us the details about who his parents were, how he came to overthrow his father and to become the Lord of the heavens, the father of gods and men. And some of the

details in this story can be contested. You know, different cities give different accounts. And what I want to do in this episode is to give that kind of biography of Zeus that the Greeks would have told if you'd said, you know, sit us down and tell us who Zeus is, where he comes from, what does he do? What's he all about? Okay. So take us through Zeus's life story then, Tom. Okay. So we'll focus on the Theogony, because this is the kind of the most canonical account. And it begins not with Zeus, but with his grandmother, Gaia, who is the earth, broad-breasted earth, he said calls her, secures heat forever of all the immortals. who occupy the peak of snowy Olympus. And it's all very Greek because Gaia, the earth, gives birth to Uranus, the sky or the heaven, which the Romans, he he called Uranus. Gaia sleeps with Uranus and gives birth to 12 gods, six male, six female. These are not the Olympian gods.

These are gods called Titans. And the youngest of these, Hesia tells us, was Kronos, the crooked schemer, most fearsome of children. And Kronos loathed his lusty father. So the lusty father is Aranos. And lusty is the word, because Aranus just can't help himself. He just keeps getting poor Gaia pregnant. And she just gives birth to more and more children. So some of these are Cyclops, the giants with one eye, like Polyphemus, who Odysseus will meet in due course.

These are people who can forge thunderbolts, which are the kind of the nuclear missiles of Greek mythology, absolutely devastating and lethal. Gaia also gives birth to a succession of monsters, which have 100 arms and 50 heads. And their own father, Hesiod tells us, so that's Oranos, loath them from the beginning. As soon as each of them was born, he hid them all away in a cavern of Gaia and would not let them into the light. And he took pleasure in the wicked work, did Oranos, while the huge Gaia was tired. pressed inside and groaned. So, I mean, not pleasant. I mean, I guess imagine if you've given birth having the baby shoved back inside you and then a whole load more of cyclops and monsters with 100 arms. I mean, that's not nice at all. And so Gaia isn't keen on what's

happening. And she manufactures this stone called adamant and then she makes a sickle out of it. And she gives it to her son, Kronos. And Kronos takes the sickle and slick. He slices off uranus's testicles. Right, castrates his own father, unmanes his own father. Wow. Yes. So uranos is actually the first unit. In all history. In all history. And Cronos picks up the severed testicles and he flings them away and as they fly, blood and semen drips out of them and they land and give birth to the race of the giants. And then the severed testicles, they land in the sea, traditionally very near Cyprus, it was said. And this foam, Afros in Greek, is churned up. And from the foam emerges the goddess Aphrodite. So hence her name. And Hesiod tells us that

her dimension is the whisperings of girls, smiles, deceptions, sweet pleasure, intimacy, and tenderness. Yeah. So that's one story about the birth of Aphrodite. There is another tradition that she's the daughter of Zeus. So that's an example of how kind of various these traditions are, but this is the kind of the most famous account. It's the one that you get in Botticelli's famous painting of Venus, aka Aphrodite, rising from the waves. So Kronos is the big man now. Kronos is top dog. He's king of the gods. In good Greek fashion, he marries his own sister, doesn't he, Ria? Yeah. And he also shut up the cyclops. He's got rid of the Cyclopsies. They're in Tartarus. What's Tartarus kind of hell? It's a kind of shadowy dimension beneath

the earth. Right. So he's married Rhea. They in turn have six children. And these are the Olympians. So you have three girls, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. And you have three boys, Hades, Poseidon, and Seuss. And Kronos, he has been alerted to a prophecy. So again, to quote Hesiod, he'd learned from Gaia and Stari Uranos that he was fated to be overthrown by his own child, just as Kronos had overthrown Aranos. And so he tries to escape his doom by devouring each one of his children as they're born, kind of gulped them down. And the last born of these six children is Zeus. And this is what prompts Rea to pull her stone in swaddling clothes trick. So it wraps up a stone in swaddling clothes, gives it to Pronos and he just gulps it down.

Rhea then takes Zeus away and hides him. And there are all kinds of traditions about where Zeus is hidden. The most famous seem to have arisen in Crete. That seems to be the kind of general consensus is that Zeus was hidden on Crete. Hesiod doesn't go into this, but there are all these kind of stories about how Zeus gets hidden in a cave under a mountain, and there's a band of young warriors who dance around him,

beating their spears on the shields to prevent the baby's uses, crying from being heard. And there's a supernatural goat, which is a Malthier whose teats give him a mixture of milk and honey. So that's very nice for the baby's use. And so he grows up a strapping young lad.

Then he goes to man. hood and he is ready to go on the attack against Kronos. It's not exactly clear how he does this. Presumably he gives Kronos an emetic, but Kronos vomits up. The stone vomits up. Zeus's five siblings. Zeus takes the stone, places it in Delphi, where the great oracle will be, to be a thing of wonder for mortal men.

And with his siblings, he then launches a war against Kronos and his allies, the Titans. And the first thing that Zeus does after getting his siblings up out of Kronos's stomach is to go to Tartarus and open up the gates and to get out the Cyclops. And I mentioned how they're absolutely whiz at constructing weapons of mass destruction, aka the Thunderbolts. And this is what they do. They make Thunderbolts for Zeus. And there's this 10-year war that the Olympians fight against the Titans. And it's the Thunderbolts that prove decisive. Because when Zeus gets it's them, he can incinerate his enemies, and Kronos and the Titans are raised low, and it is now they who get imprisoned in Tartarus.

And again, to quote Hesiod, there they languish in misty gloom, condemned by Zeus, the cold gatherer in a place of decay at the end of the vast earth, and the Titans forge great bronze doors that lock them in, the 100-armed monsters, remember them, they're still on the scene. They are appointed by Zeus to serve as jailers, to stand-out. outside the great bronze gates. And as Hesiod puts it, the titans have no way out. They are securely locked up. Wow.

There's stuff like this in Norse mythology, isn't there? Sort of different generations of gods fighting each other. And this idea of generational conflict is at the heart of so many of the kind of world's great mythologies. Anyway, we can come on to dissecting the story and exploring where it comes from in the second half. Now, Zeus is top dog. He is.

He and his brothers rule the cosmos. And they divide it up between them. don't they? And they do that by a lot. They do. And the result of this is told us not by Hesia, but by Homer. Poseidon won the Grey Sea. He becomes the god of the oceans. Hades, the murky darkness, he becomes the god of the dead. Zeus, the broad heavens. And Zeus then carries on the family tradition by marrying his sister, Heera,

and they rule as king and queen on Mount Olympus. And as you say, there is now no defying Zeus because he's stronger than all the other gods combined. The way that the Greeks illustrates Zeus, both of them convey the sense of his power, his awesome might. So the oldest representations of Zeus show him striding forwards, front foot forward,

holding a thunderbolt in his upraised arm. And the other representation of him, he's sat enthroned with a scepter and an eagle by his side. But isn't the implication of these stories? So you've got Kronos

overthrew his own father. Then Zeus overthrew Kronos. Yeah. Is not the expectation. It's like one of those sort of recurring patterns that you have to do as a child. It's not the expectation that one of Zeus's children will overthrow him in turn. And that's how the cycle, that is how the world turns. Absolutely.

There is clearly a sense, I guess, among the poets that this would, if you like, be poetic justice for Zeus. But Zeus's power is such that he can checkmate the temptation poets might have to kind of pull that trick on him. So in Hesiod, Hesiod does allude very directly to such a tradition, and he says that the son of a goddess called METIS, goddess of kind of intelligence of wisdom, that any child born to Metus is destined to overthrow his father. And of course, this is potentially an absolutely mortal danger to Zeus, because he's been sleeping with her. Metus gets pregnant, and Zeus is thrown into a massive panic. And so according to a late tradition, what he does is to say, oh, darling, would you show me how proficient you are at changing your form? Perhaps you would like to change into a fly. And so Meters does change into a fly and Zeus reaches out, grabs the fly and swallows her.

And this proves a very smart move because not only has he got rid of Metus and the baby in Metus's belly, but Metus, as we said, is the goddess of wisdom. And so her wisdom is now Zeus's. And Hesiod spells out what this means for Zeus. Now that Metus was in his belly, the goddess could advise him of what was good and bad. And also he doesn't lose his child because this child turns out to be the goddess who will give her name to Athens, Athena. And she famously bursts out, fully formed, clad in armor from Zeus's fore. forehead. He has a splitting headache. It gets split open with an axe and out Athena leaps. And she's a girl, not a boy, so she won't be able to inherit the throne of the heavens.

But she's, you know, one of the most distinctive and potent of all the Olympians. And it is said Zeus's favorite child. But I guess there's a difference, isn't it, between Zeus and Kronos? Not just that Zeus is more powerful and he's never going to be overthrown. Zeus is terrifying and formidable and absolutely, you know, sort of awe-inspiring. But also he is a benevolent father, is that right? And he's sort of a, he's the incarnation of justice and of wisdom and all these kinds of things. Well, yes. So he's got, he's now got Metus in his stomach. Right. And so Meters can advise him. So yes. And both Hesia and Homer do insist on this, that when, when Zeus kind of determines the affairs of gods and men, he's doing so not as a tyrant, not like

Kronos. But as a father, he's father's use. He oversees justice. He organizes the cosmos wisely. This is kind of fundamental to the way that both these great poets, Hesiod and Homer, portrays use. And there's a sense, perhaps a kind of echo there of the biblical God. So Hesiod, when he opens another his poems, not the Theogony, another one, he does say with a prayer that lots of scholars have said seems to echo the Psalms that you get in the Bible. So to quote it, this is, he should talking about Zeus, easily he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud, Zeus who thunders on high, who dwells in the highest mansions. Oh, hearken as thou seest and hearest and make judgments straight with righteousness. I mean, that wouldn't be out of place. No, not at all.

In a kind of song of praise to the biblical God. And likewise, in Homer, there's a famous scene when Achilles and Hector are fighting at the end of the Iliad. And Zeus gets these golden scales and holds them up and he weighs the fate of the two heroes in the balance and hector's scale dips so it is ordained that he must die and zeus mourns this but he of course acts in accordance with what is right because it is his duty to uphold that he can do this because he only has to make a decision and immediately it is enacted and there's another very famous passage in the iliad where homer describes this so to quote it zeus the son of cronos bowed his craggy dark brows and the deathless locks came pouring down from the thunderhead of the great immortal king, and giant shockwaves spread through

all Olympus. And these were lines that were said to have inspired the most famous of all Greek sculptors, Fidias, who was working in the 5th century BC, who made the great sculpture of Athena that stood in the Parthenon, but he also made one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the statue of Zeus at Olympia. That passage from Homer is what inspired him when he came to try and portray. the majesty and splendor of Zeus. But more Zeus, skeptical listeners, may well object to this point.

And so point out, you've already referred to his philandering. And actually by, you know, it's a stupid comparison, but I'll make it anyway. By today's standards, you know,

he's positively kind of Weinsteinian in his attitude towards younger women. He's a massive predator. Yes. And he's a rapist, actually, isn't he? Yes. So there's a huge,

list. Yes. I mean, to give us a sense to him, his own sister, Demeter, he sleeps with. It gives birth to Persephone. Right. His aunt, I mean, I think it's a, that's. Yeah. So, yeah, so his aunt is, is the goddess of memory. She gives birth to the muses who appear to Hesiod on Mount Helicon. He sleeps with his own cousin, Leto, and the Leto in due cause gives birth to twins, Apollo and Artemis, who again will join the ranks of the gods on Olympus, and he sleeps with his second cousin, Maya, and Maya's son is Hermes, the messenger of the gods, again, one of the Olympians. So lots of kind of me-toeing with other gods and with his own family. Yeah. But that's not even to mention all the many mortal women he gets pregnant. And so, understandably, poor Hera, I mean, she's defined by her marriage disuse, of course,

she's the queen of the heavens, but she's also defined by her entirely understandable jealousy and resentment of the fact that Zeus is endlessly going off and sleeping with other women and her persecution of all these women who she sees as her rivals. And so you're absolutely right to fix on this as an issue, the God of the Bible. He's not behaving like this. No, definitely not. So what's going on with Zeus? How can Zeus be both glorious and great and supreme and just and all of that, and an adulterer and a rapist. Well, I think we should address that question

in the second half of this podcast. And not only that, but let's have a little look at the deep history of Zeus and his cult and where they came from and what they tell us about the world of the ancient Greeks. So we'll see you then. This episode is brought to you by the London Review of Books. Now, Tom, as you well know,

some sources suggest that Helen of Troy never actually set foot in Troy Helen's role in myth is constantly shifting. Sometimes she's a goddess, sometimes she's a scapegoat, sometimes she's a phantom. Now on this subject, the LRB, the London Review of Books, has just depaywalled two absolutely superb essays. So one of them is by Marina Warner, and that's one about Helen of Troy's shape-shifting legend. And the other is Mary Beard, and she is writing about how classical stories have been used to frame and to reshaping. strain female power.

Together they show that myth is the flickering shadow of history. It's a tool reshaped, redacted and rewritten to suit whoever holds the pen. That's what the London Review of Books does best. Serious history, literary depth. And Tom, you know what? It has the nerve to leave the edges frayed. So read both pieces now at the LRB website. and if you enjoy them, then you can subscribe to access their full archive.

LRB are offering six months for just £12. It's unbelievable value, plus even better value, a free tote bag. Visit lrb.m.m.m. slash history. That is lrb.m.m.m.m. slash history. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most? We all need that sometimes. And Uber knows it. Uber isn't just a ride or a meal delivered. It's showing up no matter what. Like for your long distance friends, bringing soup when they're sick, sending flowers when they're down.

When it really matters, whatever it is, you show up. Where there's a will, we're on our way. Uber on our way. Download the app today. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, leased a 2026 XE90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo fall experience event. Conditions apply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. The 12 gods of Olympus agreed to appear as entirely human.

It was the first time a group of divinities had renounced abstraction and animal heads. No more the unrepresentable behind the flower or the swastika. No more the monstrous creature, the stone fallen from heaven, the whirlpool. Now, the gods took on a cool, polished skin or an unreal warmth and a body where you could see the ripple of muscles, the long veins. The change brought with it a new exhilaration and a new terror. So that was Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. I'm reading it as though I know what it's about. I've actually never read it, Tom. It's a fantastically odd book, brilliant book, brilliantly original. It gives you the Greek myths, but in a way that you've never

read them before. And again and again, it kind of brings you up short against what is distinctive and strange about Greek myth. And I think that's a kind of perfect example because we read about the Greek gods as children. It can be easy to forget how strange they are when compared to the gods of other cultures, you know, Egyptian or Babylonian or Indian gods. And the way in which the strangeness of the Greek gods is precisely that they are kind of. of so human or perhaps you could say kind of hyperhuman. And they are very, very strange when you compare them to the gods of other pantheons. You know, I mean, that's what Colasse is referring to, the animal heads and immediately think of the Egyptian gods. And I guess that in turn, that's one of

the reasons why children find the stories of the Greek gods so appealing. And it's why they endure as literary characters. They're kind of so human that they become superhuman. You know, They play the role of superheroes. Well, I was about to say superheroes. It might sound as a very trivial comparison. But the point about, you know, comic book superheroes is that they're both far greater than us and they are very human. And the sort of petty, trivial, slightly demeaning qualities with which the gods are imbued, that's what makes them appealing to a child reader, right? They're jealous and they're venal and they lie and cheat and all of those kinds of things.

Which is to say that in the portrayal of the Greek gods, there are all kinds of contradictions and complexities and ambivalences. But the achievement of the poets, Eziat, Homer, and then the other great poets that will be looking out over the course of this series, they kind of synthesize them and they do it to such potent effect that Zeus and the other Olympians, you know, as we keep saying, continue to fascinate to this day, far more than any other group of gods. I would say, from any comparable pantheon. Yeah, definitely. But Dominic, you were asking before the break, where do these contradictions come from, say, in the character of Zeus, and how are they reconciled? He said in the Theogony explains the origins of Zeus

in terms of his descent from the earth and from the heavens. But scholars, since the end of the 18th century, have known better, specifically since 1786, because that was the year when a British scholar in Calcutta, a guy called Sir William Jones, gave a lecture in Calcutta. And in it, he demonstrated the Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. These languages all shared a common linguistic route. And you can see this very clearly when you look at the name of Zeus.

So the full name of Zeus is Zeus, Pater, Father Zeus. And... If you think of the name of the king of the gods in Rome, Jupiter, it's clearly the same name. And in Sanskrit, I gather, it's Diospata. So it's a kind of emblematic illustration of the way in which those three ancient languages clearly had a common root. And today, the consensus among scholars would be that Zeus originated actually in what is now Ukraine as the sky god of a people that philologists call Indo-Europeans. and that already by the time that Homer and Hesiod are sitting down to write about Zeus, he's maybe two, three millennia old.

Tom, can I ask a layman's question? Actually, you might not be able to answer this. How can people possibly know where Zuse came from? How have they been able to trace that back to Ukraine? It's a very complicated question, and I think would require an entire episode, and it would be fun to do that episode. It involved a lot of linguistics. Right.

People thought maybe that the Indo-Europeans came from Anatolia or further towards India. It's based on philological and archaeological evidence. And maybe we could do an episode on that because it is very, very interesting. That's a very good answer because it's someone saying, it's just satisfying, but also evasive. It's not evasive, but if we're going to get on with this, I haven't got time to get into how people have identified the homeland of the Indo-European. I know you know it, but you just don't want to waste time telling me. Go on, continue with your story. Exactly so.

But I think you can assume that the Greeks are Indo-European speakers, that they are coming into Greece from the north, and that therefore this is why the Greeks everywhere acknowledge Zeus as the king of the gods, because their ancestors have been doing so long before they ever came to Greece and came to identify themselves as distinct communities of Greeks. So that's something that all the Greeks shared long before they became Greek, if you see what I mean. And the Greekness, so when we think of the Greekness, you're thinking of, you know, the Greek islands, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, stereotypical images of Greece. And yet, Greekness is slightly more, it's a more slippery and a more nuanced kind of concept in this period, isn't it? Because even the Greek myth, the Greekist of stories, have the stamp of other cultures, don't they? And that reflects the background of the two poets who are writing them, who are both. Yeah. I guess on the, would you say they're on the periphery of the Greek world?

Is that, is that right? Yeah, so Homer is said to have lived on the island of Chios, which is just off the coast of Anatolia. And he said, as we heard, he's the son of a man who had moved from Anatolia to Greece. And it is, I would say, the consensus now among scholars that this does much to explain elements in their poetry that seems to derive ultimately not from this kind of inchoate Indo-European tradition, but from the great civilizations of Babylon, of Babylonia. of Mesopotamia. So one of these is the succession of one generation of gods by another, and to quote Martin West, complete with stories of crude and bizarre acts of violence of gods castrating, swallowing and generally clobbering each other. This is a kind of Babylonian notion that the Greek poets seem to have kind of absorbed. The division of

the seas, the underworld and the sky between three gods, that's also very much a kind of Babylonian tradition and also the idea that the preeminent gods of a pantheon are 12 in number. So these are all very foundational notions that the Greeks have of their pantheon. And yet they do seem to have come from Babylonia. Right. And it reflects, I think, a particular moment in Greek history where they're recovering from the collapse that people have always called the dark ages in the wake of the Trojan War. And what we would recognize today is the beginnings of classical civilization, archaic Greek civilization is emerging. And they are open to influences from the broader world, of which these traditions that are coming from the Babylonians would be one, but also, of course, the alphabet

coming from the Phoenicians would be another. Yeah, of course. And is it not the case to push that even further, that a couple of the most famous, most celebrated Greek stories of all time, one of which is the Trojan War, that these are influenced by Babylonian traditions as well and are less Greek than we might imagine. I think not the story of the Trojan War itself. That's a whole like the option of the Europeans. That's another massive question whether the Trojan War was historical. But the sense of the Trojan War as having been deliberately stirred up by the gods, that does ultimately seem again to come from Mesopotamia. The claim that that Hesiod gives is that Zeus deliberately encourages the Trojan War, and also another war

that had happened a couple of generations before that, which is war before seven gated Thebes as rivals fought over the flocks of Oedipus. So Thebes, of course, is in Beosha, where he'd lived, and we will be coming to this war and who Oedipus was in our next episode. But you have the Theban War and the Trojan War, and this does seem to come from. this Babylonian tradition that you'd had different ages of humanity, that the gods target these kind of different generations of humans for extermination. And again, it seems to be a kind of an orientalizing influence, as scholars have put it. But there is something that is distinctively Greek about these stories. And that is the notion that what Zeus is doing when he fosters the

Theban War and then the Trojan War is to wipe out a specific class of human being. And that is namely heroes. And the notion of heroes is something that seems distinctively Greek. It's not part of the ancestral Indo-European tradition. It doesn't seem to come from Babylonia. This perhaps, you know, who or what the heroes are, perhaps this is the key to explaining wise use is the kind of God that he is. Because the definition of a hero effectively is that they are men who were fathered by or descended from immortals and specifically and particularly Zeus and that they are therefore midway between mortals and immortals. They are founders of cities. They are fighters of monsters. And Hesiod's take is that Zeus, by populating the world with heroes,

by descending from Olympus and fathering these heroes on mortal women, had achieved a kind of cosmic order, a kind of balance in the way of things. But he couldn't allow it to last for too long. for reasons that are never entirely explained. And this is why he then decides to launch the Theban and Trojan wars. So let's dig into this a little bit, Tom. Where does this come from? Why would people come up with the idea of heroes? Does it express something distinctive about Greek civilization, do you think?

I think it does, and I think it expresses the sheer variety and number of independent cities that you have in the Greek world. They're all part of the Greek world, but they're all distinctive and independent. All these cities essentially, you know, they share in the worship of Zeus. and so they want to claim a kind of particular intimacy with him. And the obvious way to do this is to associate themselves with heroes who had been directly fathered by Zeus. And this, I think, is what explains the endless catalogue of rapes that are attributed to Zeus.

So you could look at, say, mainland Zeus, countries in the north, cities in the middle of Greece, cities in the south, they all have these stories. So in the north, you have the Macedonians, the people that Alexander the Great will come from. They claimed a line of descent from a hero called Macedon, whose father was Zeus. The citizens of Megara in the middle of Greece, just ran from Athens. They claim descent from a son of Zeus called Megaros. The Arcadians in the Peloponnese, the kind of the southern bit of Greece, they claim descent from a son of Zeus called Arcas. And even the name of Greece, the Greeks didn't call themselves Greeks.

themselves Helens. They lived in a land called Hellas. But we called Greeks because there was a guy called Grycos, who lived in a Pyros, kind of what's now northern Greece and Albania. And Grycos had been the father of these people called the Grykoi and the Romans picked up on this and that's why we called the Greeks, Greeks. But I mean, who remembers Grycos? I mean, he's a completely anonymous hero. So really what the point of heroes is they're reflecting the fragmentation of the Greek political landscape and the fact there are so many competing cities and they're They each needs a father figure, but they don't want to claim a god, because the gods are universal, so they basically invent a tear down that will give them legitimacy.

Yeah, and I think Zeus specifically is universal. Right. So Athena, for instance, is obviously the patrons specifically of Athens, and there are other cities that claim various Olympians as their particular patron, but Zeus is for the entire Greek world. So I think that's one explanation for who the heroes are. I think also they reflect traditions that are really. really very ancient. And these traditions tend to be focused on the northern Peloponnese around

Argos, around Mycini. So heroes who associated with those cities seem to be drawing on kind of really venerable traditions. And these are the heroes who are kind of universally popular, universally known. Right. Poets write about them. They appear on pots or whatever. And the obvious examples of these are the heroes of Homer. So Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon is the king of Mycini. Menelaus is the king of Sparta. But you also have heroes from that region who go back several generations before the Trojan War. And these figures are some of the most famous of all Greek heroes. They are monster slayers because they live in an age when the world is teeming with monsters. And the

two most formidable of these are both sons of Zeus. So the first is Perseus, who comes to rule as the king of Argos, and then there is his great-grandson, the strongest man who ever lived, and this is Heracles. Anybody who's read the green myths as a child or even who hasn't will be aware of these two currenters. So Perseus, my son's favorite Greek hero, by the way. Mine as well. I always liked Perseus. Really? Yeah, he loved Perseus. So he killed Medusa the Gorgon famously. She was a, you know, had terrible hair. Well, not originally though. Really? She had beautiful hair and then it gets turned into kind of coiling, hissing snakes. Yeah, of course. It's kind of punishment, isn't it? And then she turns people to stone because she's so

ugly. Well, originally she was ugly. But by the 5th century, that story has slightly changed. So she's described as fair-cheeked Medusa. And there's this idea that she's simultaneously terribly beautiful and terribly ugly and it's the horror of her hair that offsets the beauty of her face and Perseus famously he gets help by Athena he gets help by Hermes

who gives him his wing sandals he goes off he cuts off the head of Medusa by looking into a mirror as he does so he then gets the head puts it in a sack goes off he rescues Andromeda a princess from a sea monster

turns a sea monster into stone ends up king of Argos and gives the Medusa's head to Athena who puts it on her shield to strike terror into all that she fights. So he's a famous hero, but he's not as famous as Heracles, who is the greatest of all monster killers. And Heracles, for complicated reasons, that we won't go into, although it would be great to do an episode on Heracles at some point. But he has to do these 12 labours, and a lot of these labours involve the killing of monsters. So there's the Nemean lion which have been raised by by hera has an invulnerable hide

you know can't be cut by arrows or swords or whatever so Heracles throttles it and then skins it using its own claws and he from that point on wears it as a kind of armour so you can always recognise Heracles because he has the skin of a lion draped over his head and his shoulders and then there's the Hydra one of our favourite metaphors on the rest of history every time you cut a head off another one grows

back, and so Heracles defeats it by taking us a blazing torch and searing the flesh. There's the Ehromanthian boar, which he captures in a snowdrift. There's the Stimphalian birds, which have terrible metal feathers, kind of bronze beaks, devour men. And Heracles defeats them. He gets a rattle, and the noise of the rattle scares the snifalian birds off, and then he shoots them with his arrows. There's a cretan bull, which is the father of the minor tour. There's the mares of Diomedes, which again eat flesh like the Stimphalian birds.

There's Gerion, who has cattle in the far west. We talked about him in the episode on Hannibal, how Heracles steals the cattle from Gerion and drives them back through Spain and Gaul and down through Italy. And then there's Cerberus, who like Gerion, conventionally is portrayed with three heads. He's the dog that guards the entrance to the underworld and has snakes. for his tail. But according to Hesiod, he actually had 50 heads. So again, there's kind of all kinds of potential there for elaboration. So obviously Perseus and Heracles have a lot in common. They're fulfilling similar roles to some degree, aren't they? And one of the things they really

have in common is they're both the children of Zeus. So in both cases, you've got Zeus and you've got a mortal mother. And Zeus has come to the mother in both cases disguised. So he visited Percy's his mother, Danai, disguised implausibly, I think, as a shower of gold. Oh, you think that's implausible? Yeah. And his car, Heracles's mother, alchemone, disguised as her husband, Amphitrion, because Amphitron is off at the battlefield and Zeus is dressed up as him and whatever. Now, what's going on there? What's all that about?

Well, by fathering these two heroes, Zeus is helping to cleanse the world of monsters. A lot of the monsters we've described emerged from a kind of context that reaches back to a period before the Olympians. So there's a sense that Zeus is cleaning up the neighborhood by fathering these heroes. Okay. With Heracles, particularly, he doesn't just cleanse the world of monsters. He also, he will end up coming to the rescue of the gods. There's a prophecy that the giants who were born when Uranus' is. testicles were flung across the world and the blood and seamen splashed and the giants grew up.

They have not gone from the scene. They're lurking around. And it's been foretold that they will attack Olympus and that only Heracles will be able to save the gods from defeat. And so that's another reason the Greeks come to explain why Zeus had fathered Heracles on Alkmeni. Even Heera, who had particularly persecuted Heracles. Heracles. She was particularly resentful of the fact that he was Zeus's son by another woman. She ends up being reconciled with Heracles in the end because Heracles uniquely among mortal heroes ends up becoming a god himself. His mortal body is consumed by a pyre, flames burn away the flesh, but he ascends in a chariot up to Olympus where he is welcomed by Heera, who gives him Hebe, her daughter, by Zeus to be Heracles' wife. The literal meaning of Heracles is the glory of Heera. So I guess you could say that, you know, Zeus is doing what has to be done to defend his throne.

And there's no sense, do you think, among the Greeks, that Zeus has behaved badly in disguising himself and sleeping with these women? Well, this becomes the huge question for some of the greatest poets who write in the classical period, the golden age of Greece in the 5th century, that in the classical period, the 5th century BC, will be explored by some of the most celebrated poets and writers in Athens. And the question essentially is, can the cruelty of the gods and a sense of them being just, is it possible to reconcile them? And, you know, this question undoubtedly evolves from the age of Hesiod, up to the age of

the golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC. And so that's why, Dominic, I think in our next episode, that's what we should focus on. Yes, what a great idea. In that episode, we will be travelling to the city of Thebes, which was the home of King Edipus, and a family that even by the standards of Greek myth was quite safe. sensationally dysfunctional. So people will be able to hear that episode on Thursday. But actually, do you know what?

If you can't wait, if you absolutely can't wait, the way to hear it is to ascend to our very own Mount Olympus, to join our beloved pantheon, our chat community, and to join the ranks of the immortals at the rest is history.com. Because not only do you get eternal life and all of that and you get Thunderbolts, but you get a whole range of benefits, don't you, Tom? You absolutely do. It's literally like becoming an immortal.

Better, actually. It's better. It's like listening to the rest of history and it never, ever ends. Imagine that. Imagine that. The Elysian feels. Yeah. All right.

Brilliant. So on that bombshell, Talemi Agoutara. Goodbye.