ABSTRACT
The name of Zeus, from the Sanskrit dyaus, evokes the bright sky. In a fragment of a column-krater of Lydos datable to about 560 bc in the Acropolis museum at Athens the peoples can see a Victory or Nike accompanying a figure wielding a thunderbolt. The other main type shows the god seated upon a throne. One such, from Mt Lykaion, datable to the second half of the sixth century, shows him thus (though the throne is lost) with thunderbolt at rest in his left hand, and a sceptre resembling a shepherd’s crook in his right. Zeus’s eagle appears on one stone, and it looks as if this is a true Greek cult with special reference to Macedonia. It was an obvious enough cult-title for a sky-god; as an epithet it was applied to Zeus by Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and it is only surprising that it did not appear earlier as a cult-title.
