Bronze sculpture, thought to be either Poseidon or Zeus, National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Zeus needed an elite army and at first thought that Aegina, which at the time did not have any villagers, was the perfect place.

By the era of Greek philosophy in the fifth century BCE, Metis had become the Titaness of wisdom and deep thought, but her name originally connoted " magical cunning " and was as easily equated with the trickster powers of Prometheus as with the " royal metis " of Zeus.

Two Athenians, Theseus and Pirithous, thought that since they were both sons of gods, both should have divine wives ; they thus pledged to help each other abduct two daughters of Zeus.

Greeks thought they were battles waged by Zeus, who hurled lightning bolts forged by Hephaestus.

When confronted about this by Hercules, Zeus revealed that he specifically chose Alcmene to be Hercules ' mother because he, unfortunately, knew that he could not be there for his son and knew that she would provide him with the love, strength, and support he deserved, thus revealing he had put more thought into Hercules ' birth than any other child he ever had ).

Other stories say that Asclepius was killed because after bringing people back from the dead, Hades thought that no more dead spirits would come to the underworld, so he asked his brother Zeus to remove him.

Diomedes thought three times of turning back and fighting Hector, but Zeus thundered from heaven each time.

Scamander is also thought of as the river god, son of Zeus.

He also put the thought into Hera's mind to trick Semele into convincing Zeus into showing Semele his full glory, which killed her.

In the tablets of Linear B, a goddess named di-u-ja is thought to be the female Zeus.

It is also possible that the temple was originally dedicated to both Hera and Zeus ; some offertory statues found around the larger altar are thought to demonstrate this identification.

Precision hit-to-kill systems more reliable than the early Nike Zeus were thought possible.

Some pairs of Greek and Roman gods, such as Zeus and Jupiter, are thought to derive from a common Indo-European archetype ( Dyeus as the supreme sky god ), and thus exhibit shared functions by nature.

It is this assumed trilogy, including Prometheus ' reconciliation with Zeus, thought to occur in the final part of the cycle, which Shelley considers in the introduction.

It is notable though that in the Acts of the Apostles Barnabas was called Zeus, and Paul was thought to be Hermes by Lycaonians, and this makes some other researchers to believe that Lycaonian language was actually a Greek dialect, the remnant of which can still be found in the Cappadocian Greek language which is classified as a distinct Greek dialect.

She was transformed into a snow cloud by Hermes at the order of Zeus ; the Greek word for snow ( χιών chiōn ) was thought to have come from her name.

Sometimes, she was thought of as the mother of Aphrodite with Uranus or with Zeus.

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.

He is Arkas the son of Kallisto and Zeus, and he lived in the country about Lykaion.

She therefore ( as mentioned at the Kypria according to Proclus as part of a plan hatched by Zeus and Themis ) tossed into the party the Apple of Discord, a golden apple inscribed Kallisti – " For the most beautiful one ", or " To the Fairest One " – provoking the goddesses to begin quarreling about the appropriate recipient.

In the contest of wills between Hera and Zeus over whose candidate would be hero, fated to defeat the remaining creatures representing an old order and bring about the reign of the Twelve Olympians, Eurystheus was Hera's candidate and Heracles — though his name implies that at one archaic stage of myth-making he had carried " Hera's fame " — was the candidate of Zeus.

Zeus regards the donning of a hero's armor as an act of insolence by a fool about to die, but it makes him strong for now.

But then, says Cleanthes, Zeus uses the fire to " straighten out the common logos " that travels about ( phoitan, " to frequent ") mixing with the greater and lesser lights ( heavenly bodies ).

Greco-Roman poets write about his ascent to heaven after his birth and his obeisance to Zeus, king of the gods, who instructed him to bring lightning and thunder from Olympus.

Hippolytus says the free love doctrine was held by them in its purest form, and speaks in language similar to that of Irenaeus about the variety of magic arts practiced by the Simonians, and also of their having images of Simon and Helen under the forms of Zeus and Athena.

* The Temple of Olympian Zeus, about 3 km outside the city, built around 6th century BC.

Pseudo-Apollodorus ' Bibliotheke asserts that Thetis was courted by both Zeus and Poseidon, but she was married off to the mortal Peleus because of their fears about the prophecy by Themis ( or Prometheus, or Calchas, according to others ) that her son would become greater than his father.

She was the daughter of Agenor, and on her disappearance from Earth the Phœnicians honoured her with a temple and told a sacred legend about her ; how that Zeus was enamoured of her for her beauty, and changing his form into that of a bull carried her off into Crete.

When Zeus was about to be born, however, Rhea sought Uranus and Gaia to devise a plan to save him, so that Cronus would get his retribution for his acts against Uranus and his own children.

The Olympian Zeus is about seven times life size ( or 13 metres ) and occupies the full height of the temple.

His mortal mother, Semele, was a mistress of Zeus, and while pregnant, she was killed because her sisters accused her of lying about her son's paternity and their father Cadmus using Zeus as a cover up.

Zeus relieved her grief by changing her into a nightingale, whose melancholy tunes are represented by the poet as Aëdon's lamentations about her child.

The Cretans say ( the myths about her are native to Crete ) that Euboulos was the son of Kharmanor, who purified Apollo of the killing of the Python, and they say that Britomartis was the daughter of Zeus and Kharme ( the daughter of this Euboulos ).

Zeus relieved her grief by changing her into a nightingale, whose melancholy tunes are represented by the poet as Aëdon's lamentations about her child.

Once the deluge was over and the couple had given thanks to Zeus, Deucalion ( said in several of the sources to have been aged 82 at the time ) consulted an oracle of Themis about how to repopulate the earth.

Another classic etymology derives the name ' Haemos ' from the myth about the fight of Zeus and the dragon Typhon:

Zeus saw that both Hector and Archeptolemus were about to be slain by Diomedes and decided to intervene.

Also, when Achilles and Hector were about to engage in a fight to the death, the god Zeus weighed both warrior's keres to determine who shall die.

Zeus had turned all the people of Thebes to stone and so no one buried the Niobids until the ninth day after their death, when the gods themselves entombed them.

Zeus made her choose between them, and she chose Idas on the grounds that Apollo, being immortal, would tire of her when she grew old.

Because of her beauty, other gods feared that jealousy would interrupt the peace among them and lead to war, and so Zeus married her to Hephaestus, who was not viewed as a threat.

Ajax's prayer to Zeus to remove the fog that has descended on the battle to allow them to fight or die in the light of day has become proverbial.

In the Iliad when Zeus sends Apollo to revive the wounded Hector of Troy, Apollo, holding the aegis, charges the Achaeans, pushing them back to their ships drawn up on the shore.

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.

In every case, Zeus placed them both in the sky as the constellations Ursa Major, called Arktos ( αρκτος ), the " Bear ", by Greeks, and Ursa Minor.

The names that eventually prevailed were chosen by Simon Marius, who discovered the moons independently at the same time as Galileo: he named them at the suggestion of Johannes Kepler after lovers of the god Zeus ( the Greek equivalent of Jupiter ): Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, in his Mundus Jovialis, published in 1614.

Zeus gave her the gift to be able to take her eyes out to rest, and then put them back in.

Tiresias was a priest of Zeus, and as a young man he encountered two snakes mating and hit them with a stick.

Julian writes, " when Zeus was setting all things in order there fell from him drops of sacred blood, and from them, as they say, arose the race of men.

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.

After his death, his lyre was thrown into the river ; Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve the lyre, and ordered both of them to be placed in the sky.

Zeus had turned all the people of Thebes to stone so no one buried the Niobids until the ninth day after their death, when the gods themselves entombed them.

Subsequently his remains were sent back to the Cretans, who placed them in a sarcophagus, on which was inscribed: " The tomb of Minos, the son of Zeus.

Zeus caused a storm which prevented them leaving.

Angelo Casanova, Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Florence, finds in Prometheus a reflection of an ancient, pre-Hesiodic trickster-figure, who served to account for the mixture of good and bad in human life, and whose fashioning of men from clay was an Eastern motif familiar in Enuma Elish ; as an opponent of Zeus he was an analogue of the Titans, and like them was punished.

Eventually Zeus released the Hundred-Handed ones to shake the earth, allowing him to gain the upper hand, and cast the fury of his thunderbolts at the Titans, throwing them into Tartarus.

Arcas almost shoots the bear, but to avert the tragedy, Zeus turns them into bears and puts them in the sky, forming Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.

Immediately after their birth, Cronus swallowed all but the last and youngest, Zeus, who forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings and led them in a war against their father and the other Titans.

Later in some cults Zeus is united with the Aegean Great Goddess, who is represented by Hera, in a " holy wedding " ( hieros gamos ). At some point in their cultural history, the Myceneans adopted some Minoan goddesses like Aphaea, Britomartis, Diktynna and associated them with their sky-god.

When Hephaestus was thrown from Olympus, whether cast out by Hera for his lameness or evicted by Zeus for taking Hera's side, the Oceanid Eurynome and the Nereid Thetis caught him and cared for him on the volcanic isle of Lemnos, while he labored for them as a smith, " working there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream of Okeanos around us went on forever with its foam and its murmur " ( Iliad 18. 369 ).