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

The Mountain as the Throne of Zeus 133

But guess-work is fatally facile. It will be more profitable to
notice a point which, so far as I am aware, has escaped the observa-
tion of Watzinger and his predecessors—the extraordinary similarity
of the Archelaos relief to the Marsyas vase from Ruvo. In both
the artist has portrayed success in a contest of poetry or music.
In both we see a mountain-side with Apollon half way up it
playing the kithdra or lyre. In both there are the Muses arranged
at different levels on the slope—one holding two flutes, another
seated to play the kithdra or harp, a third standing with a roil in
her hand. Lastly, in both the mountain is topped by a strikingly
similar figure of Zeus. I would infer that Archelaos was indebted
for his design, or at least for essential elements of his design,—not
indeed to vase-painters of the fourth century B.C.—but to contem-
porary fresco-painters, who like their humbler brethren of the
potter's trade were still at work under the far-reaching influence
of Polygnotos1.

Fig. 99.

There are extant two other representations of Zeus on the
mountain to which allusion must here be made. A bronze
medallion of Lucius Verus shows Zeus seated on a mountain,
holding a thunderbolt peacefully on his knee with his left hand,
while his right arm leaning on the mountain-top supports his
head. The emperor in military costume and himself crowned by

Parnassus, and in this case the cave within which Apollo is standing would be the
Corycian cave on that mountain.' Not necessarily: it might be the actual ^avTelop at
Delphoi, which is described as avTpov (Strab. 419, Eur. Phoin. 232 cp. I.T. 124511.:
, A. P. Oppe in the Journ. Hell. SUid. 1904 xxiv. 214 ff. has not said the last word on the
subject).

1 Thus in the case of the art-type of Zeus reclining on a mountain-top the vase-
paintings appear to form a link between some lost fresco of Polygnotos in the fifth
century b.c. and the relief of Archelaos in the third. Later (eh. hi § 1 (a) hi) we
shall see, in the case of the art-type of Zeus seated on a rock with Hera standing before
him, how the vase-paintings bridge the interval between a Selinuntine metope of the fifth
century b.c. and a Pompeian fresco of the first century a.d.