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 (2 Maccabees 6:2). 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)
“And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men too, when they, at their birth, have grey hair on their temples.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)
“Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,
From the star-flanked fields of space,
Thunders on the foreign town
With a sand-bagged garrison....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Down from the waist they are centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding,
Stench, consumption.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)