Zeus and Foreign Gods
Zeus was identified with the Roman god Jupiter and associated in the syncretic classical imagination (see interpretatio graeca) with various other deities, such as the Egyptian Ammon and the Etruscan Tinia. He, along with Dionysus, absorbed the role of the chief Phrygian god Sabazios in the syncretic deity known in Rome as Sabazius. The Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes erected a statue of Zeus Olympios in the Judean Temple in Jerusalem. Hellenizing Jews referred to this statue as Baal Shamen (in English, Lord of Heaven).
Some modern comparative mythologists align him with the Hindu Indra.
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Famous quotes containing the words zeus and, zeus, foreign and/or gods:
“The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks’ comment on married life.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The squabbles of philandering Zeus and shrewish Hera are the Greeks’ comment on married life.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)