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)
“Zeus is the air, Zeus the earth, Zeus all things and what transcends them all.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)
“Friends, both the imaginary ones you build for yourself out of phrases taken from a living writer, or real ones from college, and relatives, despite all the waste of ceremony and fakery and the fact that out of an hour of conversation you may have only five minutes in which the old entente reappears, are the only real means for foreign ideas to enter your brain.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)
“If you keep your mouth shut, even the gods can do nothing to you.”
—Chinese proverb.