Zeus宙斯

Origins

Youngest son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Warned that a child of his would overthrow him, Cronus swallowed each newborn whole. Rhea tricked him with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes and hid Zeus in a cave on Crete, where he was nursed on the milk of the goat Amalthea.

Sacred symbols

ThunderboltEagleOakThe aegis

Myths

The War of the Titans

Grown to manhood, Zeus made his father vomit up his brothers and sisters and led them in a ten-year war against the Titans. The Cyclopes forged his thunderbolt, the Hundred-Handers hurled boulders for him, and the Titans were cast down into Tartarus.

Dividing the world

After the war the three brothers drew lots: Zeus won the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the underworld. The earth and Mount Olympus were held in common.

Affairs beyond counting

He came to Leda as a swan, carried off Europa as a bull, and fell on Danaë in her bronze tower as a shower of gold. Heracles, Perseus and Helen were all his children — his love affairs generate half of Greek mythology.

Relationships with the other gods

• DesireHera

  Heaven's first couple

  Brother and sister, husband and wife. He won her pity as a rain-soaked cuckoo and was unfaithful ever after. Unable to touch her husband, Hera turned her anger on his lovers and their children, and once joined the other gods in tying him up. They have quarrelled for thousands of years and never actually parted.

• RivalryPoseidon

  The resentful elder brother

  The lots gave Zeus the sky and Poseidon the sea, but Poseidon never accepted his younger brother as king. He joined the plot to bind Zeus, and when it failed was sentenced to a year building walls for the king of Troy. In the Iliad he is still shouting: "We three brothers are equals!"

• FeudDemeter

  The daughter he gave away

  Brother and sister, and parents of Persephone. Zeus promised the girl to Hades without telling her mother. When Demeter learned the truth she left Olympus and let the harvest fail, until the king of the gods gave in — one of the very few times he was forced to.

• KinAthena

  Born from his head

  Athena sprang from his skull and was always his favourite, the only one allowed to carry his thunderbolt and his aegis. Ares complained bitterly that whatever this daughter did, Zeus let her do it.

• KinApollo

  A clash of father and son

  Apollo's son Asclepius became so great a healer that he raised the dead; fearing for the order of life and death, Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt. Apollo dared not touch his father, so he killed the Cyclopes who made the thunderbolts — and was sent to herd cattle for the mortal king Admetus for a year.

• KinArtemis

  Wishes made on his knee

  Three-year-old Artemis climbed onto her father's knee, reached for his beard and reeled off her wishes: to stay a maiden forever, more titles than her brother, a bow, a company of nymphs and all the mountains. Zeus laughed, granted every one, and threw in thirty cities.

• FeudAres

  The son he liked least

  When Ares ran home wounded from Troy to complain, Zeus let him have it: "Of all the gods on Olympus you are the most hateful to me — you care for nothing but strife, war and battle." Then he had him healed anyway, because he was still his son.

• KinHephaestus

  One blow owed, one fall suffered

  It was Hephaestus who split Zeus's aching head so Athena could be born. But in another tale he took his mother's side in a quarrel, and Zeus seized him by the foot and flung him out of heaven; he fell for a whole day before landing on the island of Lemnos.

• AllianceHermes

  His most useful messenger

  When the cattle theft came before Zeus, the baby in swaddling clothes lied so brazenly that Zeus burst out laughing. From then on Hermes was his herald and right hand: he killed Argus to free Io, carried the infant Dionysus to safety, and went with him in disguise to test the hearts of mortals.

• KinDionysus

  The child in his thigh

  As Semele burned, Zeus snatched the six-month child from the flames, sewed it into his own thigh and delivered it when its time came. Having given birth to this son himself, he later brought the half-mortal up to Olympus as one of the twelve.

• RivalryAphrodite

  A taste of her own medicine

  Aphrodite kept making the gods fall for mortals and then laughing at them — Zeus included. So he did the same to her, filling her with desire for the Trojan herdsman Anchises, to whom she bore Aeneas.