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Paul Saad  · CC BY-SA 4.0

Guided journey Free

From Zeus to Jupiter

A Greek god, a Roman god, and the old habit of calling one by the other’s name — followed from the records to the symbols to the places where each was worshipped.

  • 7 steps
  • Deities, Places
  • A note at each step
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Not yet reviewed · written . The notes follow the records; no editor has signed them.

  1. Jamain · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Step 1 of 7: Deity

    Zeus

    Greek god of the sky and king of the gods

    Start with Zeus as the Greek records hold him: king of the gods in the poems, with a pantheon, a family and a long row of “identified with” statements — Jupiter among them, but also Amun, Baal, Indra and Thor. Each of those is a separate claim that someone equated two gods. None of them says the two were ever one god.

    Open the profile Continue to Jupiter
  2. Jean-Pol GRANDMONT · CC BY 3.0

    Step 2 of 7: Deity

    Jupiter

    Chief deity of Roman state religion

    Jupiter, Rome’s own sky god, with priests, festivals and a temple of his own. Linguists usually trace his name and Zeus’s to one inherited word for the sky god, which is a claim about words. Historians describe Romans reading Greek myth onto their own gods; the relationship on this page records only that the two are identified — not who made the identification, or when. The statement is recorded from both sides, and neither copy cites a source outside Wikimedia.

    Open the profile Continue to Zeus

  3. Again First seen at step 1

    Step 3 of 7: Deity · Compare

    Zeus

    Greek god of the sky and king of the gods

    Now set them side by side. The records give Zeus thunder and lightning as his domains and give Jupiter none at all, so the eagle and the thunderbolt that Greek and Roman art gave both gods are in the pictures, not in the data. A shared symbol is evidence of a shared visual language — artists borrowing a look. On its own it is not evidence of a shared god.

    Compare it Continue to Zeus Ammon
  4. Unknown artist · Public domain

    Step 4 of 7: Deity

    Zeus Ammon

    Ancient Egyptian deity

    The habit ran in more than one direction. Greeks who consulted the oracle of Amun in the Libyan desert called its god Zeus Ammon, and the records hold that name as a god of its own, in both the Greek and the Egyptian collections. Identification made new figures as well as new names, which is why this site draws it as a relationship of its own kind and never as a line of descent.

    Open the profile Continue to Altis
  5. Joanbanjo · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Step 5 of 7: Place · On the atlas

    Altis

    Sacred enclosure of Zeus in Olympia, Greece

    The Altis, the sacred enclosure at Olympia where Zeus’s great temple and altar stood. The atlas marks it as a site: a place recorded for a god. The record holds a location and no date, so the atlas cannot say when worship there began — and it does not guess.

    See it on the atlas Continue to Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus
  6. Hiro-o at Japanese Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Step 6 of 7: Place · On the atlas

    Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus

    The poliadic temple of the ancient city of Rome

    The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill, Rome’s chief temple. The date on its record is the traditional dedication in the first year of the Republic — Rome’s own later reckoning, kept on the clock the record puts it on. It dates a building. It is not the beginning of Jupiter’s worship, which the temple was built to house.

    See it on the atlas Continue to Temple of Jupiter
  7. Paul Saad · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Step 7 of 7: Place · On the atlas

    Temple of Jupiter

    Ruined Roman temple in Baalbek

    A Temple of Jupiter far from Rome, at Baalbek in the Beqaa valley. The god worshipped there was called Jupiter Heliopolitanus, and historians generally read him as a local god given a Roman name. The record holds the building and its place. Who prayed there, and to which god in their own words, is not something a pin on a map can say.

    See it on the atlas Finish, and see where next

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