As with most mythology, there is a tale which offers an alternative version of these events: in Argonautica ( iv. 760 ) Zeus ' sister and wife Hera alludes to Thetis ' chaste resistance to the advances of Zeus, that Thetis was so loyal to Hera's marriage bond that she coolly rejected him.

A female dragon named Delphyne ( δελφύς: womb ), who is obviously connected with Delphi and Apollo Delphinios, and a male serpent Typhon ( τύφειν: smoke ), the adversary of Zeus in the Titanomachy, who the narrators confused with Python.

When Zeus struck down Apollo's son Asclepius with a lightning bolt for resurrecting Hippolytus from the dead ( transgressing Themis by stealing Hades's subjects ), Apollo in revenge killed the Cyclopes, who had fashioned the bolt for Zeus.

Zeus intervened and, claiming to have seen the events, sided with Apollo.

Aquarius is also sometimes identified with Ganymede, a youth in Greek mythology who was taken to Mount Olympus by Zeus to act as cup-carrier to the gods.

Ajax at first gets the better of the encounter, wounding Hector with his spear and knocking him down with a large stone, but Hector fights on until the heralds, acting at the direction of Zeus, call a draw: the action ends without a winner and with the two combatants exchanging gifts, Ajax giving Hector a purple sash and Hector giving Ajax a sharp sword.

Extending one night into three, Zeus slept with Alcmene ( his great-granddaughter ) ( thereby conceiving Heracles ) and recounted Amphitryon's victories against the Teleboans.

When Amphitryon finally returned to Thebes, Alcmene told him that he had come the night before and slept with her ; he learned from Tiresias what Zeus had done.

After the death of Amphitryon, Alcmene married Rhadamanthys, son of Zeus, and lived with him in exile at Ocaleae in Boeotia.

No poet has ever presented evil in such stark and tragic terms yet he had an exalted view of Zeus, whom he celebrated with a grand simplicity reminiscent of David's Psalms, and a faith in progress or the healing power of time.

Hera was angry with Zeus, her husband, because he had impregnated Leto.

72 accounts for the island's archaic name Ortygia by asserting that Zeus transformed Leto into a quail ( ortux ) in order to prevent Hera from finding out his infidelity, and Kenneth McLeish suggested further that in quail form Leto would have given birth with as few birth-pains as a mother quail suffers when it lays an egg.

A poem of Callimachus to the goddess " who amuses herself on mountains with archery " imagines some charming vignettes: according to Callimachus, at three years old, Artemis, while sitting on the knee of her father, Zeus, asked him to grant her six wishes: to remain always a virgin ; to have many names to set her apart from her brother Apollo ; to be the Phaesporia or Light Bringer ; to have a bow and arrow and a knee-length tunic so that she could hunt ; to have sixty " daughters of Okeanos ", all nine years of age, to be her choir ; and for twenty Amnisides Nymphs as handmaidens to watch her dogs and bow while she rested.

Charybdis was very loyal to her father in his endless feud with Zeus ; it was she who rode the hungry tides after Poseidon had stirred up a storm, and led them onto the beaches, gobbling up whole villages, submerging fields, drowning forests, claiming them for the sea.

These mountains lavished Crete with valleys, such as Amari valley, fertile plateaus, such as Lasithi plateau, Omalos and Nidha ; caves, such as Diktaion and Idaion ( the birthplace of the ancient Greek god Zeus ); and a number of gorges.

Either Artemis " slew Kallisto with a shot of her silver bow ," perhaps urged by the wrath of Juno ( Hera ) or later Arcas, the eponym of Arcadia, nearly killed his bear-mother, when she had wandered into the forbidden precinct of Zeus.

In order to reconcile Aristotelian with Platonian philosophy, Plotinus metaphorically identified the demiurge ( or nous ) within the pantheon of the Greek Gods as Zeus ( Dyeus ).

The phrase " Cretans, always liars " was quoted by the poet Callimachus in his Hymn to Zeus, with the same theological intent as Epimenides:

" The tension between reason and passion is symbolized by his character's relationship with the gods, as in Hecuba's prayer, answered not by Zeus, nor by the Law of Reason, but by brutal Menelaus as if speaking on behalf of the old gods, and most famously in Bacchae, where the god Dionysus savages his own converts.

The other Strife is presumably she who appears in Homer's Iliad Book IV ; equated with Enyo as sister of Ares and so presumably daughter of Zeus and Hera:

In Homer's Iliad, when Alcmene was about to give birth to Heracles, Zeus announced to all the gods that on that day a child, descended from Zeus himself, would be born who would rule all those around him.

Aeacus himself showed his gratitude by erecting a temple to Zeus Panhellenius on mount Panhellenion, and the Aeginetans afterwards built a sanctuary in their island called Aeaceum, which was a square place enclosed by walls of white marble.

But to have her, Zeus disguised himself, Ovid says, as Artemis ( Diana ) herself, in order to lure her into his embrace.

According to Ovid, it was Jupiter ( Zeus ) who took the form of Diana ( Artemis ) so that he might evade his wife Juno ’ s detection, forcing himself upon Callisto while she was separated from Diana and the other nymphs.

If we wish for nothing but what God wills, we shall be truly free, and all will come to pass with us according to our desire ; and we shall be as little subject to restraint as Zeus himself.

When Hera learned that Semele, daughter of Cadmus King of Thebes, was pregnant by Zeus, she disguised herself as Semele's nurse and persuaded the princess to insist that Zeus show himself to her in his true form.

Another variation is when Hera persuades Semele to force Zeus to show himself in his real form.

Zeus made love to her after disguising himself as her husband, Amphitryon, home early from war ( Amphitryon did return later the same night, and Alcmene became pregnant with his son at the same time, a case of heteropaternal superfecundation, where a woman carries twins sired by different fathers ).

They asked Zeus to judge which of them was fairest, and eventually he, reluctant to favour any claim himself, declared that Paris, a Trojan mortal, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest in which Ares in bull form had bested Paris's own prize bull, and the shepherd-prince had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the god.

She was often portrayed as the shrewish, jealous wife of Zeus, who himself often escaped from her controlling ways by cheating on her with other women, mortal and immortal.

Amphion, at the sight of his dead sons, either killed himself or was killed by Zeus after swearing revenge.

Consider the ruler of lightning: the supreme god Zeus, Perun, Jupiter controlled lightning himself ; while in Norse mythology Odin delegated the power of lighting to his son Thor.

He got his laws straight from Zeus himself.

It was not until 174 BC that the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who presented himself as the earthly embodiment of Zeus, revived the project and placed the Roman architect Decimus Cossutius in charge.

In Human, All Too Human, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that " Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew.

Rather, the Theogony affirms the kingship of the god Zeus himself over all the other gods and over the whole cosmos.

In a vain attempt to hide his crimes, Zeus turned himself into a white cloud and transformed Io into a beautiful white heifer.

But regardless of the impropriety of Zeus ' frequent conquests, Sisyphus overstepped his bounds by considering himself a peer of the gods who could rightfully report their indiscretions.

* King Salmoneus was also mentioned to have been imprisoned in Tartarus after passing himself off as Zeus, causing the real Zeus to smite him with a thunderbolt.

" Upon the Mother depend the winds, the ocean, the whole earth beneath the snowy seat of Olympus ; whenever she leaves the mountains and climbs to the great vault of heaven, Zeus himself, the son of Cronus, makes way, and all the other immortal gods likewise make way for the dread goddess ," the seer Mopsus tells Jason in Argonautica ; Jason climbed to the sanctuary high on Mount Dindymon to offer sacrifice and libations to placate the goddess, so that the Argonauts might continue on their way.

The best-known story of the twins ' birth is that Zeus disguised himself as a swan and raped Leda.

Zeus also transformed himself into a goose and mated with Nemesis, who produced an egg from which Helen was born.