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

662 The Significance of the Bull

Then, to add crime to crime, since they were much afraid of the tyrant's cruelty,
they boiled the boy's limbs with various ingredients and devoured them. Thus
they actually fed upon a human corpse—a repast never heard of till that day.
His sister, Minerva by name, who had herself been party to the deed, kept his
heart as her share, that she might have clear proof of her story and something
to mollify her father's wrath. So, when Iupiter came back, his daughter told
him the tale of crime from beginning to end. Thereupon her father, exasperated
by the disastrous murder of the boy and by his own bitter grief, slew the Titans
after torturing them in various ways. Indeed, to avenge his son, he had
recourse to every form of torment or punishment. He ran riot in exacting all
kinds of penalty by way of vengeance for the death of a son, who was none too
good. The father's affection and the tyrant's power were here combined.
Then, because he could no longer bear the tortures of grief and because the
pain of his bereavement could not be assuaged or comforted, he made an image
of his son moulded in gypsum, and placed the boy's heart, by means of which
on the sister's information the crime had been detected, in that part of the
figure where the contour of the chest was to be seen. After this he built a
temple in front of the tomb and appointed as priest the boy's tutor : Silenus
was his name. The Cretans, to soothe the fierce mood of the angry tyrant,
instituted certain days as a funeral feast and coupled a yearly rite with a
celebration on alternate years, performing in order due all that the boy had
done or suffered at his death. They tore a live bull with their teeth, recalling
the savage banquet by a yearly commemoration of it. They penetrated the
solitudes of the forest uttering discordant cries and so feigning madness, that
the crime might be set down to lunacy, not to guile. Before them was carried
the basket in which the sister had concealed and hidden the heart. With the
music of pipes and the clash of cymbals they got up a make-belief of the rattles
by which the boy had been deluded. And so a servile people paying court to
a tyrant made his son a god, though a god could never have had a tomb.'

The Euhemerism of this passage will be readily discounted.
We are indeed likely to underestimate rather than to overestimate
its importance. After all Euhemeros, to judge from the extant
fragments of his famous work, seems to have based his theory of
apotheosised kings in no small measure upon Cretan tradition1.
The priests of his island utopia claim descent from Crete and
appeal for proof to their Cretan dialect2. His Zeus Triphylios has
a couch, on which is set no effigy of the god, but a great golden
pillar covered with records in a script resembling Egyptian hiero-
glyphs3. One may well suppose that Euhemeros had at least an
inkling of the old-time glories of 'Minoan' Crete—its pillar-thrones,
its aniconic cults, its linear pictographs. And, if he said that Zeus
was a Cretan king when he ought to have said that Cretan kings
played the part of Zeus, we can easily make allowance for the
error.

1 In the Class. Rev. 1903 xvii. 406 and in Folk-Lore 1904 xv. 304 I suggested that
the Euhemeristic belief in Zeus as a former king of Crete was based on the divine
kingship of Minos.

2 Diod. 5. 46. 3 Diod. 5. 46, 6. 1.