Zeus

• Dyaus-Zeus was head of Greek pantheon of gods

98:1.3The Hel­lenic Greeks found the Med­i­ter­ra­nean world largely dom­i­nated by the mother cult, and they im­posed upon these peo­ples their man-god, Dyaus-Zeus, who had al­ready be­come, like Yah­weh among the henothe­is­tic Semites, head of the whole Greek pan­theon of sub­or­di­nate gods. And the Greeks would have even­tu­ally achieved a true mono­the­ism in the con­cept of Zeus ex­cept for their re­ten­tion of the over­con­trol of Fate. A God of fi­nal value must, him­self, be the ar­biter of fate and the cre­ator of des­tiny.

98:1.4As a con­se­quence of these fac­tors in re­li­gious evo­lu­tion, there pres­ently de­vel­oped the pop­u­lar be­lief in the happy-go-lucky gods of Mount Olym­pus, gods more hu­man than di­vine, and gods which the in­tel­li­gent Greeks never did re­gard very se­ri­ously. They nei­ther greatly loved nor greatly feared these di­vini­ties of their own cre­ation. They had a pa­tri­otic and racial feel­ing for Zeus and his fam­ily of half men and half gods, but they hardly rev­er­enced or wor­shiped them.

• transplanted to Rome, Z. became Jupiter

98:3.3Ro­man re­li­gion was greatly in­flu­enced by ex­ten­sive cul­tural im­por­ta­tions from Greece. Even­tu­ally most of the Olympian gods were trans­planted and in­cor­po­rated into the Latin pan­theon. The Greeks long wor­shiped the fire of the fam­ily hearth—Hes­tia was the vir­gin god­dess of the hearth; Vesta was the Ro­man god­dess of the home. Zeus be­came Jupiter; Aphrodite, Venus; and so on down through the many Olympian de­i­ties.