If from the Greek conceptions of Zeus we separate all those chap.
which, springing from the idea of his relations to men as a Father,
grew up into a moral and religious faith, the rest may all be traced
to mythical phrases which describe the varying appearances of the traditions,
heavens and the manifold influence of the atmosphere on the earth
and its fruits. Of the countless names thus employed the most
transparent would remain as attributes, while the greater number
would be localised either as places or as persons. Hence would
spring up distinctions between the Zeus of Arkadia, Dodona, Olympos
and Crete, distinctions arising wholly from a forgetfulness of the
original meaning of words, but fixed irrevocably by the real or
apparent identity of the mythical epithets with any mythical names
which had become geographical.^ The sun as Endymion plunges
into Latmos, the land of sleep ; but the presence of the Latmian hill
was a conclusive answer to any who might dare to call in question
the veracity of the local legend. The old mythical speech had its
Phaiakian or cloudland geography. It had its Arkadia and Delos,
the birthplace of the light, its Phoinikia and Ortygia, the purple land
of the quail and the dawn, its bright Lykian regions with its golden
stream of Xanthos, its Ida or earth on which rest the rays of the
newly risen sun, its Graian or Hesperian lands where the light dies
out in the evening. Carrying with them the treasures of their
common inheritance, the Aryan tribes could not fail to give to the
hills and streams of their new homes the names which had once
described only the morning, the heaven, or the sun. The lord of
day sinks to sleep in the glowing west : and the tomb of Endymion
could therefore be only in Elis, on the western, not on the eastern,
shore of the Peloponnesos. The god of the blue ether is throned
in light : so also must the seat of the anthropomorphised Zeus be on
some hill whose name, like the Delos of Apollon and the Athens
of his virgin sister, expresses the one idea of splendour ; and thus
he was made to dwell on the summit of the Arkadian Lykaios and
the Olympian heights of Mysia and Thessaly, As the veil of night
is slowly withdrawn, the clear heaven is first seen in the east, and
thus Zeus must be born in Lyktos or in Dikte , but the Cretan who
could point to a Diktaian cave in his own land clung tenaciously
to the notion that the child who was there nourished by Amaltheia
was not the Zeus of Arkadia and Olympos.
The story of his birth and exploits is to be gathered not so much The birth from the Iliad and Odyssey as from the Hesiodic or Orphic theogonies; but unless we find manifest contradictions between the
' See Cook i. ch. x.
