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)

826

The whip of Zeus

forgotten by poets who told of his fight with Typhoeus. Homer1
himself works it into the simile with which he concludes the list of
the Greek combatants before Troy:

They marched as though the land were all devoured

With fire. Earth groaned beneath them as when Zeus

In anger twists his bolt and plies his lash

About Typhoeus—him who lies abed

(Men say) i' the land of Arima. Even so

Beneath their feet, as on they came, earth groaned,

And speedily they passed across the plain.

Hesiod2, relating the same myth, is even more explicit:

Zeus armed his might and all his weapons took,
Thunder and lightning and fierce levin-bolt,
Sprang from Olympos, struck, and blasted all
The wondrous heads of the monster. He at length
Laid low by strokes of the lash fainted and fell
Maimed of his power, and monstrous earth made moan.

This old belief in the whip of the lightning-god accounts for a
curious dedication in the precinct of Zeus Ndios. According to
Aristotle3,'there was at Dodona a couple of columns, which sup-
ported respectively a caldron (lebes) and a boy {pais) grasping a
whip. The bronze lashes of the whip, when swayed by the wind,
struck the caldron and produced a reverberant sound. Strabon4,
probably following Apollodoros5, adds that the whip was dedicated
by the Corcyraeans, that it consisted of three chains tipped with
buttons, and that you could count four hundred before the echo died
away. Now Sir James Frazer has conjectured that the Dodonaean
gong was ' meant to mimick the thunder that might so often be
heard rolling and rumbling in the coombs of the stern and barren
mountains which shut in the gloomy valley6.' If so, the Corcyraean
whip, which lashed its silence into sound, was an equally vivid and
appropriate emblem of the lightning.

1 //. 2. 780 ff.

2 Hes. theog. 853 ff. Nonnos on the same theme repeats the metaphor ad nauseam
{Dion. 2. 533, 535, 541, 548).

3 Aristot. ap. Souid. s.v. Acodiovaiov xaX/celoj', Apostol. 6. 43, cod. Coislin. 177,
Eustath. in Od. p. 1760, 58 ff. I have quoted and discussed these passages in the Journ.
Hell. Stud. 1902 xxii. 8 f., adding (id. p. 12) a conjectural restoration of the famous gong.

* Strab. lid. 7 frag. 3.

5 See Journ. Hell. Sited. 1902 xxii. 12.

6 Frazer Golden Bough?: The Magic Art ii. 358 f. Sir James Frazer's further con-
jecture (id. p. 358 n. 4) that 'the bronze statuette...would represent Zeus himself making
his thunder' would have to meet the objection that the said statuette is described as irals,
iraibapiov, or at most veavlas (see the passages adduced in the Journ. Hell. Stud. 1902
xxii. 8f.). But cp. the Zeus Ileus of Aigion (supra p. 742 f.).