Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 2,1): Zeus god of the dark sky (thunder and lightning): Text and notes (Cambridge, 1925)

of the thunderbolt 783

larly Pliny states that at the Olympic festival a bull was immolated
to a god named Myiodes, after which clouds of flies departed from
the locality1. Elsewhere he says that, when swarms of flies bring
disease, the Eleans invoke a god called Myiacores and that, if he
accepts their offering, the flies forthwith perish2. At Rome neither
fly nor dog would enter the temple of Hercules in the Forum
Boarium3; for the hero, on distributing the flesh of the sacrifice,
had summoned the god Myiagrus, who kept the flies away, and had
left his club in the porch, which frightened the dogs4. We are
further told that the Romans sacrificed to Herakles Apomyios,

Fig- 744- Fig. 745.

'Averter of Flies,'" the Eleans to Zeus Apomyios1'. Both Herakles

and Zeus figure in the version preserved by Pausanias6:

'They say that Herakles the son of Alkmene, when sacrificing" at Olympia,
was worried by the flies. Thereupon it occurred to him, or perhaps somebody
suggested to him, that he should sacrifice to Zeus Apomyios. And so the flies
were sent packing across the Alpheios. The Eleans too are said to sacrifice in
the same way to Zeus Apomyios, when they drive the flies out of Olympia.'

Thus by a strange, yet wholly understandable, peripeteia the
sacrifice originally paid to the flies came ultimately to be paid to
Zeus who drove them out7.

Theriomorphism in the long run gives place to anthropo-
morphism, and the winged thunderbolts of Greek art lead up to a
quasi-\\\xm2M form. Square bronze coins struck by Maues, a Scythic

1 Plin. nat.hist. 29. 106.

2 Id. ib. 10. 75.

3 Plin. nat. hist. 10. 79, Solin. r. 11. The source may be Yarro, cp. Plout. quaestt.
Rom. 90. Did kvwv suggest Kwo/xvia? Similarly flies kept away from the temple of
Aphrodite at Paphos (Andron of Halikarnassos frag. 16 {Frag. hist. Gr. ii. 352 Miiller)
ap. Apollon. hist. mir. 8), and from Mt Carina {v.I. Carina) in Crete (Plin. nat. hist.
21. 79).

4 Solin. 1. 11.

5 Clem. Al. protr. 2. 38. 4 p. 28, 25 f. Stahlin evravda (sc. eV "H\t5i) 'Awo/xvicp Ad
dvovffiv 'H\e?oi' 'Pw/iaToi 5e 'Awo/j-viq) Hpa/vXei.

6 Pans. 5. 14. 1. Cp. et. ?nag. p. 131, 23 f. 'Awo/j.vws • ovtios 6 Zei>s 7rapa tois'HXei'ois
TLfidraL, Hpcu<\eovs idpv<rau.evov ettl airoTpow-fi tGiv /livlwv, Scholl-Studemund anecd. i. 266
'E7rt#era Atos 10 airoixviov.

7 H. K. E. Kohler's attempt to identify 'Jupiter Apomyos' on an engraved gem of
the Orleans collection (Reinach Pierres Gravees p. 138 no. 59 pi. 126, E. Thraemer in
Roscher Lex. Myth. i. 1153) was wholly misleading.