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)

966 General Conclusions with regard to

while Lucian1 goes much further and in a passage of bitter sarcasm
upbraids Zeus for failing to use the thunderbolt in his hand :

' O Zeus, where is now your resplendent lightning, where your deep-toned
thunder, where the glowing, white-hot, direful bolt ? we know now 'tis all fudge
and poetic moonshine—barring what value may attach to the rattle of the
names. That renowned projectile of yours, which ranged so far and was so ready
to your hand, has gone dead and cold, it seems ; never a spark left in it to
scorch iniquity.

If men are meditating perjury, a smouldering lamp-wick is as likely to
frighten them off as the omnipotent's levin-bolt; the brand you hold over them
is one from which they see neither flame nor smoke can come ; a little soot-
grime is the worst that need be apprehended from a touch of it. No wonder if
Salmoneus challenged you to a thundering-match ; he was reasonable enough
when he backed his artificial heat against so cool-tempered a Zeus. Of course
he was; there are you in your opiate-trance, never hearing the perjurers nor
casting a glance at criminals, your glazed eyes dull to all that happens, and
your ears as deaf as a dotard's.

When you were young and keen, and your temper had some life in it, you
used to bestir yourself against crime and violence; there were no armistices in
those days; the thunderbolt was always hard at it, the aegis quivering, the
thunder rattling, the lightning engaged in a perpetual skirmish. Earth was
shaken like a sieve, buried in snow, bombarded with hail. It rained cats and
dogs (if you will pardon my familiarity), and every shower was a waterspout.
Why, in Deucalion's time, hey presto, everything was swamped, mankind went
under, and just one little ark was saved, stranding on the top of Lycoreus and
preserving a remnant of human seed for the generation of greater wickedness.

Mankind pays you the natural wages of your laziness ; if any one offers you
a victim or a garland nowadays, it is only at Olympia as a perfunctory accom-
paniment of the games; he does it not because he thinks it is any good, but
because he may as well keep up an old custom. It will not be long, most
glorious of deities, before they serve you as you served Cronus, and depose you.
I will not rehearse all the robberies of your temple—those are trifles; but they
have laid hands on your person at Olympia, my lord High-Thunderer, and you
had not the energy to wake the dogs or call in the neighbours; surely they
might have come to the rescue and caught the fellows before they had finished
packing up the swag. But there sat the bold Giant-slayer and Titan-conqueror
letting them cut his hair, with a fifteen-foot thunderbolt in his hand all the time !'

So Lucian, like Seneca, was labouring under the delusion that
Zeus PJleidiak^s'^^, as he came to be called, was fulminant. Roman
rhetoric and Greek satire had equally failed to grasp the sculptors
new conception.

In truth that new conception was too exalted for a public
which preferred truculence to tranquillity and could appreciate

1 Loukian. Tim. 1—4 trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler.

2 Schol. Greg. Naz. in Catalogns sive notilia manuscriptorum qui a E. D. Cln^e
comparati in Bibliotheca Bodleiana adservantur Oxonii 1812 i. 36 (Overbeck Schrifl-
quellen p. 134 no. 739) <$ei8las...aya\fia.TOTroibs dpians- 8s tcjj /.liy Ad i^&avov tfyeipev 0,5