Zeus shares his name with an Indo-European sky father worshipped from India to Rome
Of all the Olympians, only Zeus has a name whose ancestry is crystal clear. It descends from Dyēus, the Proto-Indo-European god of the bright daytime sky, whose relatives include the Vedic Dyaus Pita and Rome's Jupiter. The king of the gods is a very old inheritance dressed in Greek clothes.
The reconstructed root dyeu- means to shine, and its offshoots came to mean sky, heaven and god. The Sky Father title survives almost intact in Latin Iuppiter. Albanian and Messapic forms are also close cousins. Mycenaean scribes already wrote the name, as di-we and di-wo, in Linear B. Plato later proposed that it meant cause of life for all things, playing on alternate forms like Zen and Dia, but modern scholars reject that explanation along with his whole etymological method.
Hesiod's Theogony, composed around 730 to 700 BC, tells how Cronus, warned that a child would overthrow him, swallowed each baby Rhea bore. Zeus was the youngest of six, after Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Rhea sought help from Gaia and Uranus to save him. Where he was born is a mess of rival claims: Hesiod alone names Lyctus, Callimachus said Arcadia, and Apollodorus described a cave on Dicte. Pausanias remarked that the claimants were too many to count.
In Apollodorus's account, nymphs fed the infant on milk from the goat Amalthea while the Kouretes clashed spears on shields so Cronus could not hear him cry. Grown up, Zeus ruled from Olympus as a sky and thunder god, symbolised by the thunderbolt and eagle. Even gods who were not his children called him Father and stood when he entered. His iconography borrowed items such as the sceptre from the ancient Near East.
His family was sprawling. Most traditions pair him with Hera, mother of Ares and Hephaestus, but at Dodona his consort was Dione, and the Theogony names Metis, mother of Athena, as his first wife. Countless affairs produced figures such as Heracles and Persephone. Many of his epithets preserve the names of local gods absorbed into his myth, and because he was matched with so many foreign weather gods, Pausanias could call his heavenly kingship a saying common to all people.
Source: Zeus
