Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/833

Z E U Z E U 783 knowledge, science, and the arts of life. Without the gifts of Prometheus, carried to what Horace would have thought a profane pitch of perfection, we should not have reached modern industrialism and the horrors of modern war. In Hesiod Prometheus may stand for humanity vainly strug gling to be powerful and happy against that inflexible and ruthless law which is Zeus And what shall the end be ? How shall the ways of Zeus be justified to men, and man s rebellion be justified to Zeus? We no more know how vEschylus solved the problem mythically than we can dis cover the actual solution. The idea that another shall voluntarily take the place of Prometheus (^Esch., Prom, Vinct., 1026) naturally recalls the theory of the Atonement. To such mysteries does the Greek mind attain, and in such ultimate perplexities is the conception of Zeus, the Bon Dieu of the Homeric Olympian festivals, involved. At the opposite pole from the Hesiodic Zeus is the Zeus who practically means the unknown god, as Terpander sings, ZeO iravTuv dp%a, Travnov ayrirup, or, as the Orphic hymn (whatever its date) proclaims him, Zei)s Ke<f>ar), Zei)s /uecnra, AIDS 5 K travTO. T^TVKTCII. Thus Zeus becomes a shorthand symbol for the pantheistic deity. The Zeus of pure religion and of speculation is very different from the Zeus of ritual and of local myth. To ritual, and to the local myths treasured by priests, which often tried to explain the ritual, we owe the unbecoming anecdotes of Zeus as the god who, in the form of ant, snake, bull, eagle, and so forth, made love to the daughters of men. On this point reference may be made to the work of the present writer, Myths, Ritual, and Religion (ii. 189). The hypothesis there offered is that the Greeks in their early uncivilized state, dwelling in tribes and in scattered kraals or villages, retained traditions like the totemic and magical beliefs of Red Indians or Australians. When they became more united and more civilized, they did not drop wholly the faith that they were descended from animals, nor wholly forget such tales as the Indians tell of Manibozho and the Australians of Punjel, but they transferred the old anec dotes to Zeus. In place of saying, " We descend from a bull," they said, " We descend from Zeus, who for purposes of amorous disguise took the shape of a bull," or a swan, or an ant, as the case might be. Probably some foreign legends, Phoenician or African, were also borrowed and attached to Zeus. If this be a correct, as it seems a possible, hypothesis, then it will be well to be cautious in explaining the myths about Zeus as if they were all of elementary origin, and all expressed in images some natural process or series of natural phenomena. We must regard Zeus as an extremely difficult complex, in which elemental myths, myths of savage fancy, myths of perverted history, theories of early natural philosophy, and the ideas of panthe istic speculation are all confusedly mingled. He is the sum of the religious thought of Hellas, formed in the numberless ages between savagery and complete civilization. He received human sacrifices even after the Christian era ; yet long before it he all but corresponded to the Unknown Substance of Spencerian philosophy. (See Plato, Rep., viii. 565 D ; Suidas, s.v. " Laphy.stius.") A summary of the Zeus myths will be found in Dr William Smith s Dictionary of Classical Mythology. For a comparison between the character and attributes of Jupiter and Zeus, see the article JUPITER. Among modern works in which the character and legend of Zeus are discussed may be recommended Welcker a Gricchischc Gotterlrhre (Gottingen, 1857); Preller s Gricchischc Mytholocjie (Berlin, 1872); the Selected Essays of Mr Max Midler ; Le Sentiment Reliijicux en Grlce of M. Jules Girard (3d ed., Paris, 1887) ; and C. 0. Mailer s Introduction to a Scientific System of Mytlu-tlorjy (Eng. transl., London, 1844). The subject has not yet been reached (1888) in Rosscher s great Lexikon. The authorities named will introduce the 8. Alcmena, possibly another name for 7. 9. Helena at Croton. 10. Penelope. 11. Menelaus. 12. Athlete. 13. An Old Woman. 14. Boy with Grapes. 15. Grapes. 16. Monochromes. reader in turn to other authors, their researches and speculations. Heyne s Apollodorus (Gottingen, 1803) is also useful. (A. L. ) ZEUXIS, a Greek painter, who flourished about 420- 390 B.C., and described himself as a native of Heraclea, meaning probably the town in Magna Grsecia. To this neighbourhood seem to point the facts of his having painted a figure of Helena for a temple in Croton, of his presenting a picture of Alcmena to the people of Agri- gentum, and of his having been, in one account, a pupil of Damophilus of Himera in Sicily, the other statement being that he was a pupil of Neseus of Thasos. After wards he appears to have resided in Ephesus. His known works are 1. Zeus Surrounded by Deities. 2. Eros Crowned with Roses. 3. Marsyas Bound. 4. Pan. 5. Centaur Family. 6. Boreas or Triton. 7. Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents in Presence of his Parents, Alcmena and Amphitryon. 17. Plastic works in clay. In ancient records we are told that Zeuxis, following the initiative of Apollodorus, had introduced into the art of painting a method of representing his figures in light and shadow, as opposed to the older method of outline, with large flat masses of colour for draperies, and other details, such as had been practised by Polygnotus and others of the great fresco painters. The new method led to smaller compositions, and often to pictures consisting of only a single figure, on which it was the more easy for the painter to demonstrate the combined effect of the various means by which he obtained perfect roundness of form. The effect would appear strongly realistic, as com pared with the older method, and to this was probably due the origin of such stories as the contest in which Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so like reality that birds flew towards it, while Parrhasius painted a curtain which even Zeuxis mistook for real. The story reads in Pliny (N. II., xxxv. 65) as if Parrhasius had brought forward a picture with an apparent curtain hung in front to protect the colours from the light, and that Zeuxis had tried to pull the curtain aside. It is perhaps a variation of this story when we are told (Pliny, loc. cit.} that Zeuxis also painted a boy holding grapes, towards which birds flew, the artist remarking that if the boy had been as well painted as the grapes the birds would have kept at a dis tance. But, if the method of Zeuxis led him to real roundness of form, to natural colouring, and to pictures consisting of single figures or nearly so, it was likely to lead him also to search for striking attitudes or motives, which by the obviousness of their meaning should emulate the plain intelligibility of the larger compositions of older times. Lucian, in his Zeuxis, speaks of him as carrying this search to a novel and strange degree, as illustrated in the group of a Female Centaur with her Young. When the picture was exhibited, the spectators admired its in vention and overlooked the skill of the painter, to the vexation of Zeuxis. The pictures of Hercules Strangling the Serpents to the astonishment of his father and mother (7), Penelope (10), and Menelaus Weeping (.11) are quoted as instances in which strong motives naturally presented themselves to him. But, in spite of the tendency towards realism inherent in the new method of Zeuxis, he is said to have retained the largeness of form which had charac terized his predecessors. Of all his known works it would be expected that this quality would have appeared best in his famous picture of Helena, for this reason, that we cannot conceive any striking or effective incident for him

in her career. In addition to this, however, Quintilian