Transcript of 602. Greek Myths: Zeus, King of the Gods (Part 1)

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 therestishistory. Com and join the club. That is therestishistory. 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 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. Tom, we have some incredibly exciting news for our listeners in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, don't 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.

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 Center 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. Join the Rest is History Club at therestishistory. Com now if you want to snap your tickets up early.

Tickets will then be available to purchase for everyone else at therestishistory. Com from Thursday. That's the 25th of September, 2025, at 09: 00 AM.

For your chance to see us on stage, live in Belfast, Dublin, or Cork, simply head to therestishistory. Com to get your tickets. Rhia, when she was due to bear the youngest of her children, Great Zuse, traveled 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 numinus 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, Cronos 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 Zus, who is the God worshiped 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 Cronos' attempts to devour him.

Tom, that is absolutely textbook Greek mythology, isn't it? It's basically a massive family feud, horrendously violent, a lot of-Tricks. Deception and tricks, exactly. That's the side of the Greek myths that I think when you're a child reading them, you love theses and the Minator and the Perseus and whatnot. But quite soon you become aware of this dark undercurrent. And that's what I always associate with Greek mythology, this simmering violence and patrocyt and fratricyte and so on.

But I think to a degree, you get that in the children's histories of Greek myth as well. You have this sense that there are gods, that there are heroes, that there are all kinds of monsters, terrible things going on. That is part of the appeal, even when you're a child, I think, and absolutely when you're an adult. 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. As well as telling some 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.

Why don't we start with the story that you have chosen to open with? Zeus, Cronos, the Stone swallowing, the sense of father and son locked in this cosmic existential battle. 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 Seus and the Olympians, but also because the poem in which it features, which is called the Theogony or the The birth of the gods, is itself at the wellespring, not just of Greek poetry, but actually of European poetry. 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 eighth century BC. So maybe 730, 720, something like that. And its author was a man called Hesiaid, 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 Phenetians. We talked about that in the episode we did ages ago about the Phenetians. 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 reread, and they can pass down the generations.

That's how we get Homer's poems. I mean, they're the most famous of all of these poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Yes. So Homer is around the same time as Hesia. He, of course, famous Obviously, 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 Editius for 10 years back to his home in his second poem, The Odyssey. The Greeks saw these Two poets, Homer and Hesiaid, as the twin wellsprings of their literature. 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, Hesiaid was older than Homer. He essentially is where European poetry, European literature begins.

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 Hesiaid 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, Hesied is definitely the first writer in European history whom we can know for sure existed and no personal details about him. Presuming that the details he gives in his poems can be trusted, what we know about Hesied is that he is the son of a Greek who had traveled 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 Anatolya. So presuming that what Hesied tells us in his poems is trustworthy, and I think there's no real reason to doubt it, Hesia is the son of a Greek who had traveled from the far side of the Aegean from Greece. So Anatolyia, what's now Turkey, where Greeks had been settling since probably just after the time the Trojan War. Hesied's father had traveled back across the Aegean to Greece proper, and he had settled in a place called Biosha, which is just north of Athens.

Hesia and his brother Persies had inherited farmland below a mountain called Helicon, and things had not gone well at all. First of all, Heesie had had a massive bust up with his brother Persies. He accused Persies of cheating him, of his rightful share of the inheritance that was theirs from their father. Other. Also the local settlement, maybe calling it a town would be to dignify it. It's a place called Ascra. Heesie had said it's an absolute dump. To quote him, It's a miserable place, bad in winter, foul in summer, good at no time.

That West Bromwich.

It's the first holiday review ever recorded in European history. However, it's not all bad news for Heesied because Mount Helican, which rises up above Ascra, this is the home of Goddesses called the Muses. They are daughters of Zeus, the king of the gods, and they are the goddesses of song. They appear to him and take him under their wing. They do so while Hesiaid is up on the slopes of Mount Helicon, tending his sheep and his goats, and they give him a branch of springing bay, Hesia's own words, to serve him as a staff, and they tell him to sing of the family of the blessed immortals. This story is so important to Hesiaid that he chooses to open his poem, The Theogony, about the Coming of the Gods with this. Dominic, you may wonder why it's so important. I think the answer is, Homer's poems are about the end of the age of the heroes, these godlike figures, Achilles and Hector and Adysius, and so on. This is 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, as we said, is right at the beginning of the age of myth, and it's describing the coming of the gods.

This is a time when there aren't really any humans at all. 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 Adysius, a mortal. It's actually Zius himself. 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, Zius's own daughters. 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, scriptural divine texts, are they?

No. They're not prophets, they're not priests, they're not patrolling what can or can't be said about the gods. Different cities. Greece is a 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 cast of priests to do that. But what Hesied and Homer crucially provide the Greeks, all these 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, Hesied and Homer, who basically invent Greekness? The idea of the Greek 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 nations.

There is a sense, I mean, there is a Once I think of Greekness that pre-exists that. They speak the same language. They're essentially worshiping the same gods. But what Hichhied 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. To quote a very famous German scholar on this, Voltaire Burkert in his book, Greek Religion, Only an authority could create order amidst such a confusion of traditions. 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 Hesiaid and above all of Homa. The spiritual unity of the Greeks was founded and upheld by poetry, a poetry which could still draw on living oral tradition. That's descending perhaps from the age of the Trojan Wars, to produce a felicitus union of freedom and form, spontaneity, and discipline. I think this is the crucial thing about Greek myth, and it's why the Greek understanding 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 myths 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.

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 near Eastern religions or whatever? Is there a sense that this is a religion of the book or the story rather than of the practice?

Well, so the dues that you have to pay to the gods are very important, as we'll see, 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. Perhaps the best way to compare the relationship of Homer to Hesiod is the Iliad is like, I think, the Lord of the Rings, and Hesiod's Theogony is like the Silmarillion, so Tolkien's two great books. The Iliad, like the Lord of the Rings, we're zooming in close to a 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. 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. 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 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 Hesied or Homer is fiction.

Okay, so this is a crucial question. When Hesied writes his 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 Mount Olympus who are throwing Thunderbolts around, having affairs with each other, disguising themselves as showers of rain, or whatever it might be? I mean, the Greeks, 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? You know what I'm about to say is a Christian framing of a question because Christianity is founded on belief. Do you believe in Christ or whatever? I don't think the Greeks thought in those terms. 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. 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 Ragen 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 is the What's this modern parallel to how the Greeks viewed the gods? And of course, people will have different views on how the markets can be appeased. And there were similar 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.

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 stories about the market that involve the market behaving in an anthropomorphic way. In other words, I can completely see how a very intelligent Greek, philosopher or whatever, believes that the use is meaningful. But does he actually think that Zus 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 Zus. You have different cities that tell different stories about him for reasons that we'll come to. 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 Zus. Maybe some view these stories in the dimension of poetry, some view them in 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. That Seus, therefore, does possess a single coherent reality. That's why it is possible to give a biography of him. This is a biography that depends largely upon Hesia because it's Hesia 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. Different cities give different And what I want to do in this episode is to give that biography of Zius that the Greeks would have told if you'd said, sit us down and tell us who's Zus, where he comes from, what does he do, what's he all about.

Okay. So take us through Zus's life story then, Tom.

Okay. So we'll focus on the Theogony because this is the the most canonical account. And it begins not with Zius, but with his grandmother, GEA, who is the Earth, broad-breasted Earth, he calls her, secure seat forever of all the immortals who occupy the peak of snowy Olympus. It's all very Greek because GEA, the Earth, gives birth to Uranus, the sky or the heaven, which the Romans, he he he, called Uranus. Gea sleeps with Uranus and gives birth to 12 gods, six male, six female. These are not the Olympian gods. These are gods called Titans. The youngest of these, Hesia tells us, was Cronos, the Crooked schema, most fearsome of children. Cronos loathed his lusty father. The lusty father is Uranus. Lusty is the word because Uranos just can't help himself. He just keeps getting poor GEA pregnant, and she just gives birth to more and more children. Some of these are cyclops, the giants with one eye, like Polyphemus, who Adichis will meet in due course. These are people who can forge Thunderbolt, which are the the nuclear missiles of Greek mythology. Absolutely devastating and lethal. Gea also gives birth to a succession of monsters which have 100 arms and 50 heads.

Their own father, Hesia tells us, so that's Uranus, loathed them from the beginning. As soon as each of them was born, he hid them all away in a cavern of GEA and would not let them into the light. He took pleasure in the wicked work, did Uranos, while the huge GEA was tight-pressed inside and groaned. 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 GEA 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, Cronos. Cronos takes the sickle and slick He slices off Uranus's testicles.

Right. Custrates his own father, unmans his own father. Wow.

Yes. So Uranus is actually the first unit.

In all history.

In all history. Cronos picks up the Severed testicles and he flings them away. As they fly, blood and semen drips out of them, and they land and give birth to the race of the giants. Then the Severed testicles, they land in the sea, Traditionally, very near Cyprus, it was said. This foam, apheros in Greek, is churned up. From the foam emerges the goddess Aphrodite, hence her name. Hesia tells us that her dimension is the whisperings of girls, smiles, deceptions, sweet pleasure, intimacy, and tenderness. That's one story about the birth of Aphrodite. There is another tradition that she's the daughter of Seus. That's an example of how various these traditions are. But this is the the most famous account. It's the one that you get in Botticelli's famous painting of Venus, a. K. A. Aphrodite, Rising from the Waves.

Cronos is the big man now. Cronos is top dog. He's king of the gods. In good Greek fashion, he marries his own sister doesn't he? Rhia. He also has shut up the cyclops. He's got rid of the cyclops. He's there in Tartarus. What's Tartarus? Hell.

It's a shadowy dimension beneath the Earth. He's married Ria. They, in turn, have six children. These are the Olympians You have three girls, Hestia, Demeter, and Hira. You have three boys, Hades, Poseidon, and Seus. Cronos, he has been alerted to a prophecy. Again, to quote Hesia, he'd learned from GEA and Starre Uranus that he was fated to be overthrown by his own child, just as Cronos had overthrown Uranus. He tries to escape his doom by devouring each one of his children as they're born, gulping them down. The last born of these six children is Zius. This is what prompts Raya to pull her stone in swaddling clothes trick. It wraps up a stone in swaddling clothes, gives it to Cronos, and he just gulps it down. Raya then takes Zius away and hides him. There are all kinds of traditions about where Zius is hidden. The most famous seem to have arisen in Crete. That seems to be the general consensus is that Zus was hidden on Crete. He It doesn't go into this, but there are all these stories about how Zus 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.

There's a supernatural goat, which is Amalthia, whose teats give him a mixture of milk and honey. That's very nice for the baby's use. He grows up a strapping young lad. Then he goes to manhood, and he is ready to go on the attack against Cronos. It's not exactly clear how he does this. Presumably, he gives Cronos an emetic, but Cronos vomits up the stone, vomits up as uses five siblings. Zus takes the stone, places it in Delphi, where the great Oracle will be, to be a thing of wonder for mortal men. With his siblings, he then launches a war against Cronos and his allies, the Titans. The first thing that Zus does after getting his siblings up out of Kronos' stomach is to go to Tartarus and open up the gates and to get out the cyclops. I mentioned how they're absolutely whiz at constructing weapons of mass destruction, aka the Thunderbolt, and this is what they do. They make Thunderbolt for Zus. There's this 10-year war that the Olympians fight against the Titans, and it's the Thunderbolt that prove decisive, because when Zus gets them, he can incinerate his enemies, and Cronos and the Titans are raised low, and it is now they who get imprisoned in Tartarus.

Again, to quote Hesiaid, There they languish in misty gloom, condemned by Zus, the cold gatherer in a place of decay at the end of the vast earth. The Titans forge great bronze doors that lock them in. The Hundred Arm Monsters, remember them? Yeah. They're still on the scene. They are appointed by Zus to serve as jailers, to stand outside the great Bronze gates. As Hesiaid puts it, the Titans have no way out. They are securely locked up.

Well, there's stuff like this in Norse mythology, isn't there? Different generations of gods fighting each other. And this idea of generational conflict is at the heart of so many of the world's great mythologies. Anyway, we can come on to dissecting the story and exploring where it comes from in the second half. Now, Zius 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 is told us not by Hesia, but by Homer. Poseidon, one, the gray sea, he becomes the God of the oceans. Hades, the murky darkness, he becomes the God of the dead. Zius, the broad heavens. And Zius then carries on the family tradition by marrying his sister Hira, and they rule as king and queen on Mount Olympus. As you say, there is now no defying Seus because he's stronger than all the other gods combined. The way that the Greeks illustrate Zus, both of them convey the sense of his power, his awesome might. The oldest representations of Zus show him striding forward, his front foot forward, holding a Thunderbolt in his upraised arm. 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 Cronos over through his own father, then Zius over through Cronos. It's not the expectation. It's like one of those recurring patterns that you have to do as a child. It's not the expectation that one of Zius'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 Zuse. But Zuse's power is such that he can checkmate the temptation poets might have to pull that trick on him. So in Hesia, Hesia does allude very directly to such a tradition. He says that the son of a goddess called Metis, goddess of intelligence, of wisdom, that any child born to Metis is destined to overthrow his father. Of course, this is potentially an absolutely mortal danger to Zus because he's been sleeping with her. Metas gets pregnant and Zus 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 Metas does change into a fly, and Zus reaches out, grabs the fly, and swallows her. And this proves a very smart move, because not only has he got rid of Metis and the baby in Metis' belly, but Metis, as we said, is the Goddess of Wisdom, and so her wisdom is now Zus's.

Hesia spells out what this means for Zus. Now that Metis 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 Zus's forehead. He has a splitting headache. He gets split open with an ax, and out, Athena leaps. She's a girl, not a boy, so she won't be able to inherit the throne of the heavens. But she's one of the most distinctive and potent of all the Olympians, and it is said, Zus's favorite child.

But I guess there's a difference, isn't it, between Seus and Cronos? Not just that Seus is more powerful and he's never going to be overthrown. Seus is terrifying and formidable and absolutely awe-inspiring, but also he is a benevolent father, is that right? He's the incarnation of justice and wisdom and all these kinds of things.

Well, yes. He's now got Metus in his stomach, and so Metus can advise him. So yes. Both Hesia and Homer do insist on this, that when Zus determines the affairs of gods and men, he's doing so not as a tyrant, not like Cronos, but as a father, his father's use. He oversees justice, he organizes the Cosmos wisely. This is fundamental to the way that that both these great poets, Hesiod and Homer, portrays use. There's a sense, perhaps a echo there of the biblical God. So Hesiod, when he opens another of his poems, not the Theogony, another one, he does so 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 Hesiod talking about Zeeus, Easily he makes the crooked straight and withers the proud. Zeeus who thunders on high, who dwells in the highest mansions. O hearken as thou seest and hearest and make judgments with righteousness. I mean, that wouldn't be out of place. No, not at all. In a 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 so you get 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 so you 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. He'd quote it, Seus, 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. These were lines that were said to have inspired the most famous of all Greek sculptors, Phidias, who was working in the fifth 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 Zews 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 Zus skeptical listeners may well object to this point and point out, you've already referred to his phalandering. Actually, by It's a stupid comparison, but I'll make it anyway. By today's standards, he's positively Weinsteinian in his attitude towards younger women. He's a massive predator. He's a rapist, actually, isn't he?

Yes.

So there's a huge list. I mean, to give us a sense, Tom, his own sister, Demita, he sleeps with.

That gives birth to Persephone.

Right. His aunt. I mean, I think that's...

Yeah. So his aunt is the goddess memory. She gives birth to the Muses who appear to be heeceared on Mount Helicon. He sleeps with his own cousin, Lito. Lito, in due course, 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. Maya's son is Hermes, the messenger of the gods, again, one of the Olympians. So lots of me-to-ing with other gods and with his own family. But that's not even to mention all the many mortal women he gets pregnant. And so understandably, poor Hira, she's defined by her marriage to Zius, 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 Zius 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 Zuz? How can Seus 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 Seus and his cult and where they came from and what they tell us about the world of the ancient Greeks. 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 deepaywalled two absolutely superb essays. So One of them is by Marina Warner, and that's all about Helen of Troy's Shape-Shifting legend. The other is Mary Beard, and she is writing about how classical stories have been used to frame and to restrain 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. Tom, you know what? It has the nerve to leave the edges frayed.

Read both pieces now at the LRB website. 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. Lrb. Me/history.

That is lrb. Me/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.

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.

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 brings you up short against what is distinctive and strange about Greek myth. I think that's a 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, Egyptian or Babylonian or Indian gods. The way in which the strangeness of the Greek gods is precisely that they are so human, or perhaps you could say hyperhuman. They are very, very strange when you compare them to the gods of other pantheons. That's what Colasso is referring to, the animal heads. You immediately think of the Egyptian gods. 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 so human that they become superhuman. They play the role of heroes.

Well, I was about to say, super heroes. It might sound a very trivial comparison, but the point about comic books, super-heras, is that they're both far greater than us, and they are very human. The 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 and ambivalences. But the achievement of the poets, Hesiot, Homer, and then the other great poets that we'll be looking at over the course of this series, they synthesize them and they do it to such potent effect that Zeus and the Other Olympians, 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 Seus, and how are they reconciled? Heesid in the Theogony explains the origins of Seus 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. In it, he demonstrated that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, these languages all shared a common linguistic route. You can see this very clearly when you look at the name of Zus.

The full name of Zus is Zus Pata, Father Zus. If you think of the the name of the king of the gods in Rome, Jupiter, it's clearly the same name. In Sanskrit, I gather it's Dios, Pata. It's an emblematic illustration of the way in which those three ancient languages clearly had a common root. Today, the consensus among scholars would be that Zus originated actually in what is now Ukraine as the sky god of a people that philologists called Indoeuropéans, and that already by the time that Homer and Hesia are sitting down to write about Zyus, 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 this use 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. It'd be fun to do that episode. It involved a lot of linguistics. People thought maybe that the India-Europeans came from Anatolia or further towards India. It's based on philological and archeological evidence. Maybe we could do an episode on that because it is very interesting.

That's a very good answer because it's someone saying this is 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 Indio-European.

I know you know it, but you just don't want to waste time telling me.

Go on, continue with your story. Exactly Certainly so. But I think you can assume that the Greeks are endo-european speakers, that they are coming into Greece from the north, and that therefore this is why the Greeks everywhere acknowledge Jesus 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. 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 the Greek islands, blah, blah, blah, blah, Even the Greek myth, the Greekest of stories, have the stamp of other cultures, don't they?

That reflects the background of the two poets who are writing them, who are both, I guess, on the... Would you say they're on the periphery of the Greek world? 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 Hesia, as we heard, he's the son of a man who had moved from Anatolia to Greece. 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 in-Kuwait, Indoeuropian tradition, but from the great civilizations of Babylon, of Babylon, of Mesopotamia. 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 Babylonian notion that the Greek poets seem to have absorbed. The division of the seas, the underworld, and the sky between three gods, that's also very much a 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 Babylon.

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. What we would recognize today as the beginnings of classical civilization, archaic Greek civilization, is emerging 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. 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 Hesia gives is that Zus deliberately encourages the Trojan War. 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 Edipus. Thebes, of course, is in Béotia, where he'd lived, and we will be coming to this war and who Edipus was in our next episode. But you have the Theban war and the Trojan war. This does seem to come from this Babylonian tradition that you'd had different ages of humanity, that the gods target it, these different generations of humans for extermination. Again, it seems to be 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 Zews 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.

The notion of heroes is something that seems distinctively Greek. It's not part of the ancestral, endo-European tradition. It doesn't seem to come from Babylon. This, perhaps, who or what the heroes are, perhaps this is the key to explaining why Zews is the God that he is. Because the definition of a hero effectively is that they are men who are fathered by or descended from immortals, and specifically, in particular, Jesus, and that they are therefore midway between mortals and immortals. They are founders of cities, they are fighters of monsters. And Hesia's take is that Zus, by populating the world with heroes, by descending from Olympus and fathering these heroes on mortal women, had achieved a cosmic order, a 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, they share in the worship of Seus, and so they want to claim a particular intimacy with him. The obvious way to do this is to associate themselves with heroes who had been directly fathered by Seus. This, I think, is what explains the endless catalog of rapes that are attributed to Seus. You could look at, say, Mainland Seus, countries in the north, cities in the middle of Greece, cities in the south. They all have these stories. In the north, you have the Mastodonians, the people that Alexander the Great will come from. They claimed a line of descent from a hero called Masodon, whose father was Seus. The citizens of Megara, in the middle of Greece, just around from Athens, they claimed descent from a son of Seus called Megaros. The Arcadians in the Peloponnese, the Southern bit of Greece, they claimed descent from a son of Seus called Arcas. And even the name of Greece, the Greeks didn't call themselves Greeks.

They called themselves Helines, they lived in a land called Helas. But we called them Greeks because there was a guy called Grichos, who lived in a Pyros, what's now Northern Greece and Albania. Grichos had been the father of these people called the Grichoi, and the Romans picked up on this, and that's why we call the Greeks, Greeks. But who remembers Grichos? 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 each need 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.

I think Zews specifically is universal. So Ithena, for instance, is obviously the patron, specifically of Athens. And there are other cities that claim various Olympians as their particular patron, but Zews 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 very ancient. And these traditions tend to be focused on the Northern Peloponies, around Argos, around Miocene. So heroes who are associated with those cities seem to be drawing on really venerable traditions. These are the heroes who are universally popular, universally known. Poets write about them. They appear on pots or whatever. The obvious examples of these are the heroes of Homer, so Agamemnon and Menelaus. Agamemnon is the king of Mycena. Menelaus is the king of Sparta. But you also have heroes from that region who go back several generations before the Trojan War. 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. The two most formidable of these are both sons of Seus. 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 currenties. So Perseus, my son's favorite Greek hero, by the way.

Mine as well. I always liked Perseus. Oh, really?

Yeah, he loved Perseus. So he killed Medusa the Gorgon, famous Obviously, she had terrible hair.

Well, not originally, though. Really? She had beautiful hair, and then it gets turned into coiling, kissing snakes.

Yeah, of course. It's punishment, isn't it? And then she turns people to stone because she's so ugly.

Well, originally she was ugly. But by the fifth century, that story has slightly changed. So she's described as fair-cheaked 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 helped 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. He's a famous hero, but he's not as famous as Heracles, who is the greatest of all monster killers. Heracles, for complicated reasons that we won't go into, although it would be great to do an episode on Heracles at at some point. But he has to do these 12 labors, and a lot of these labors involve the killing of monsters.

There's the Nemean lion, which have been raised by Hira, has an invulnerable hide, 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 armor. So you can always recognize Heracles because he has the skin of a lion draped over his head and his shoulders. Then there's the Hydra, one of our favorite metaphors on the rest of history. Every time you cut a head off, another one grows back. And so Heracles defeats it by taking a blazing torch and searing the flesh. There's the Eramanthian boar, which he captures in a snowdrift. There's the Stimphalian birds, which have terrible metal feathers, bronze beaks, devour men, and Heracles defeats them. He gets a rattle, and the noise of the rattle scares the Stimphalian birds off, and then he shoots them with his arrows. There's a Cretan Bull, which is the father of the Minator. 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.

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 Hesia, he actually had 50 heads. Again, there's all kinds of potential there for elaboration.

Obviously, Perseus and Heracles have a lot in common. They're fulfilling similar roles to some degree, aren't they? One of the things they really have in common is they're both the children of Zus. In both cases, you've got Zus and you've got a mortal mother, and Zus has come to the mother, in both cases, disguised. So he visited Perseus' mother, Danai, disguised implausibly, I think, as a shower of gold.

Oh, you think that's implausible?

Yeah. And he's come to Heracles' mother, Alchimony, disguised as her husband, Amphitryon, because Amphitryon is off at the battlefield and Zus is dressed up as him and whatever. Now, what's going on there? What's all that about?

Well, by fathering With these two heroes, Zus is helping to cleanse the world of Monsters. A lot of the Monsters we've described emerged from a context that reaches back to a period before the Olympians. So there's a sense that Zus is cleaning up the neighborhood by fathering these heroes. With Heracles, particularly, he doesn't just cleanse the world of Monsters. He will end up coming to the rescue of the gods. There's a prophecy that the giants who were born when Uranus's testicles were flung across the world and the blood and semen splashed and the giants grew up. They have not gone from the sea, and they're lurking around. It's been foretold that they will attack Olympus and that only Heracles will be able to save the gods from defeat. That's another reason the Greeks come to explain why Zeus had fathered Heracles on Alchimanie. Even here hero who had particularly persecuted Heracles. She was particularly resentful of the fact that he was Jesus'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 Hiera, who gives him Hibi, her daughter, by Zus to be Heracles' wife. The literal meaning of Heracles is the glory of Hiera. I guess you could say that Zus is doing what has to be done to defend his throne.

There's no sense, do you think, among the Greeks, that Zus 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 fifth century, that in the classical period, the fifth century BC, will be explored by some of the most celebrated poets and writers in Athens. The question essentially is, can the cruelty of the gods and a sense of them being just, is it possible to reconcile them? This question undoubtedly evolves from the age of Hesiaid up to the golden age of Athens in the fifth century BC. 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 traveling to the city of Thebes, which was the home of King Eedipus, and a family that, even by the standards of Greek myth, was quite sensationally dysfunctional.

People will be 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 therestishistory. Com. Because not only do you get eternal life and all of that, and you get Thunderbolt, 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 Restish history and it never, ever ends.

Imagine that. Wow. Imagine that. The Elysian feels.

Yeah. All right. Brilliant. So on that bombshell, Talemi Agutara.

Goodbye.