Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 3,1): Zeus god of the dark sky (earthquake, clouds, wind, dew, rain, meteorits): Text and notes (Cambridge, 1940)

Xll

Preface

Richter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (pi. xxxv,
figs. 776, 883, 897), by Professor Homer A. Thompson (figs. 923,
924), by Professor A. J. B. Wace (fig. 193), by Dr C. Weickert of
the Museum at Munich (pi. 1), and by the Direktor of the Badisches
Landesmuseum at Karlsruhe (pi. li).

In the matter of text-figures I have been lucky enough to retain
the services of Miss E. T. Talbot, the artist to whom I owe the
bulk of the drawings in Volumes I and II. Her work has through-
out maintained a high level of exactitude. Her coins, for instance,
are not merely faithful transcripts of originals or casts, but actually
'stilgetreu'—a rare achievement in draughtsmanship.

The cameo in malachite portraying the bust of a Ptolemaic
Zeus (pi. xliv) was drawn from the original by Miss F. E. Severs
and produced as an experiment in lithography by the Cambridge
Press. But most of the colour-plates have been specially painted
for me by another artist of quite exceptional powers, Mrs D. K.
Kennett. She sketched the Corfu pediment from a full-size cast in
the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology (pi. lxiv) and the
Sulis Minerva pediment from the original at Bath (pi. lxvi). But
her feeling for colour is better shown by the little head of Hera
in blue glass from Girgenti (pi. Ixxiii), the bust of Sarapis in
lapis lazuli (pi. lxxiv), or the bronze mace from VVillingham
Fen (pi. lxxviii). These are veritable triumphs of sympathetic
rendering.

And here I must add a word on another of Mrs Kennett's
plates, the neolithic pounder from Ephesos (pi. lxvii). That
remarkable object—given me as a souvenir of Sir William Ridgeway
by the President of Queens' College and Mrs Venn—has, if I am
right in my interpretation of it, presented us for the first time with
a prehistoric Greek baitylos, a stone believed to have fallen from
heaven and worshipped accordingly. Not the least of its claims
upon our attention is the incidental light that it throws on a
passage in the New Testament (Acts 19. 35).

The passage in question sets in sharp contrast the old 'Zeus-
fallen image' with the new Gospel proclaimed by St Paul. These
were in effect the two extremes. Between them lay the whole
history of Greek religion with its gradual development, now slower,
now faster, from primitive paganism towards complete Christianity

_a long story, for the telling of which three volumes would scarce

suffice. My contention is that in that development the cult of the