Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

Development in the meaning of Olympos 113

If the Zeus worshipped at Dion was thus Dionysiac in character,
akin to the Phrygian Zeus Sabdzz'os1, we can understand why he
has the snake as his attribute (fig. 84)2: the slain
Korybas became a snake3, and snakes were all-
important in the mysteries of Sabdzios4. Twelve
miles south of Dion was a town, which the Tabula
Peutingeriana calls Sabatium*, i.e. Sabdzion, a
cult-centre of Sabdzios6. It may even be sug-
gested that the monastery of Saint Dionysios,
from which starts the modern counterpart of the
ancient procession to the altar of Zeus7, has in the name of its
patron saint preserved a last echo of the Dionysiac cult.

Whether these Dionysiac traits in the worship of Zeus were
original and essential, or whether they are to be explained as
merely the result of contamination with an alien cult, is a large
problem that still awaits solution. It will be convenient to deal
with it, not at the present stage of our argument, d propos of
Olympos, but in a later chapter, when we shall be taking a more
comprehensive survey of the relation of Zeus to Dionysos.

(c) Development in the meaning of Olympos.

Zeus Olympios.

In the Homeric, the Hesiodic, and the Orphic poems Olympos,
the seat of the gods, is to be identified with the Macedonian moun-
tain ; and the same identification holds good for the Alexandrine
epic of Apollonios Rhodios8. The poet of the Odyssey describes
Olympos in a passage of surpassing beauty:

1 Roscher Lex. Myth. iv. 232 ff.

2 Rasche Lex. Num. iii. 350 and Suppl. ii. 607 records a small copper of Gallienus
with Zeus standing between two snakes. The specimen figured is in the Leake collection
(W. M. Leake Numismata Hellenica London 1856 European Greece p. 46 Gallienus).

3 Orph. h. Koryb. 7 f. A-qovs 8s yvdofxriaLV iprjWatjas dep:as a-yvbv, \ drjpoTVWov defievos
fj,op<f>i]i> dvo<pepoio dpaKovros.

4 Roscher Lex. Myth. iv. 2526°.

5 F. C. de Scheyb Tabula Ltineraria Peutingeriana Lipsiae 1824 segm. 7 b,
K. Miller Weltkarte des Castorius genannt die Peutinger'sche Tafel Ravensburg 1888
segm. 8, 1.

6 L. Heuzey Le Mont Olympe et I Acarnanie Paris i860 p. 100. 7 Supra p. 103.
8 The evidence is collected and considered by Mackrodt in Roscher Lex. Myth. iii.

849 ff. He holds that only in two Homeric passages (//. 8. 18—27 and Od. 6. 41—46)
does the later conception of "Q\v/u,wos as ' heaven ' or ' sky ' occur. But, to my thinking,
even in these passages the mountain is meant. In //. 8. 18 ff. Zeus boasts that if he let
down a golden rope from heaven and all the other gods and goddesses hung on to it, they
could not pull him down from heaven to the plain, but he could pull them up, land and
sea and all, bind the rope about a peak of Olympos and let them dangle there. Whatever

c. 8