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

ii4 Development in the meaning of Olympos

So spake bright-eyed Athena and withdrew

To Olympos, where men say the gods' sure seat

Stands firm for ever: neither wind can shake,

Nor rain can wet, nor snow come nigh the same.

Cloudless the brilliance that is there outspread

And white the glitter that is over all.

Therein blest gods have joyance all their days1.

This is the literary echo of the folk-belief that attributed a windless,
cloudless aither to the mountain-top2. Homeric and Hesiodic poetry
spoke of ' the palace of Zeus,' sometimes ' the palace of Zeus with
its floor of bronze,' as built by Hephaistos upon Olympos3. And
here too we may detect the creed of the country-side. For
L. Heuzey, writing in i860 of the villagers from the neighbour-
hood of Olympos, says4: ' If you tell them that you have ascended
the highest peaks, they always ask—" Well, what did you find
there ?" Some of them described me a mysterious palace adorned
with columns of white marble, adding that these had been seen long
ago by a shepherd, but that they would not be seen now-a-days.
Others spoke to me of a huge circus in which the ancients held
their games. The Klephts too have always attributed marvellous
virtues to the fresh air of Olympos, its snows, and its icy mountain-
springs. It figures in their songs as a paradise, whither they go
to recover from the contests of the plain below : here the body
gets stronger, wounds heal themselves, and limbs grow lithe for
fresh fighting. Throughout the rest of Greece a magic potency
attaches to the following words:

From Olympos, the summit,
From the three peaks of Heaven,
Where are the Fates of Fates,
May my own Fate
Hearken and come!5'

may be the precise picture here intended, the phrases wedioude and irepl p'tov OvXv/inroio
surely prove that the poet is contrasting the gods on the plain with Zeus on the mountain.
As to Od. 6. 41 fF., cited on p. 114, the absence of wind, rain, snow, and cloud, there
described as characteristic of Olympos, agrees well with Greek beliefs about the mountain-
top (supra p. 102 f.), while the presence of' bright sky' and ' white glitter' is no less suitable ;
indeed aty\r] recalls alyXrjeis, which Mackrodt takes to be an epithet of the earthly
mountain in //. 1. 532, 13. 243, Od. 20. 103.

1 Od. 6. 4r ff. 2 Supra p. 101 ff.

3 //. 1. 425 f., 531 ff., 566ff., ri. 75 ff., 20. 4 ff., 21. 438, 505, Hes. sc. Her. 471.

4 L. Heuzey Le Mont Olympe et VAcamanie Paris i860 p. 138 f., N. G. Polites
Uapadocrets Athens 1904 i. 97 no. 173, ii. 777. My friend Mr A. J. B. Wace, when at
Salonika, was told by a man from the neighbourhood of Olympos that somewhere on the
mountain there are said to be the remains of a temple with columns.

5 'A7r6 tov "OXvptirov tov Kopv/Jtf3ov, j t<x, t p'ta. axpa tov Qvpavov, \ oirov at Motpat tQiv
MotpQv, I /cat ij ediKi] fjtov Mot/>a | as aKovarj /cat as g\dr]! B. Schmidt Das Volksleben
der Neugriecheii Leipzig 1871 i. 219 n. 1 would read Htoi> for 'Kirb tov, r' ovpavov for tov