Zeus

Also known as: Papaios · Family: Greek · Role: god · First appears: Book 1 · §34–43

At Sardis, after Atys died, Croesus grieved and called on Zeus as Cleanser, Protector of Suppliants, and Guardian of Friendship. In Book 2, Zeus appeared to Heracles by flaying a ram and covering himself with its fleece; a yearly Theban rite also covered Zeus’s image with a ram’s skin and brought Heracles’s image to it. Hecataios later traced his descent to a god in the sixteenth generation, and the priests of Zeus responded to him much as they had to the narrator.

At Nysa, Zeus was said to have sewn the newborn Dionysos into his thigh and carried him there. In Book 4, Targitaos was said to be the son of Zeus and the daughter of the river Borysthenes, while at lake Tritonis Zeus made Athene his daughter after she left Poseidon. Elsewhere, Earth was supposed to be Zeus’s wife, and Idanthyrsos acknowledged no one above him but Zeus, his ancestor, and Hestia.