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Documentary, History Channel - Clash of the Gods - S01E01 Zeus
#Zeus
#Zeus
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00:00A son battles his father for control of the universe and seizes more power than any god ever had.
00:15This is the story of Zeus, Greek mythology's supreme commander.
00:21To us it's a myth, but to the ancients it was reality, a way to make sense of a terrifying world.
00:30Some Greeks believed Zeus was the one true god, centuries before Christ, and that nature's worst catastrophes were a sign of his wrath.
00:44This is the myth of Zeus, as it was originally told, and the surprising truth behind it.
01:00If you control the sky, you control the world.
01:07In Greek mythology, that power belongs to one god.
01:13Zeus.
01:14He reigns as the enforcer of justice, the master of men and gods.
01:23Zeus was the king of the gods, but he was also responsible for dispensing justice, both to the gods and to mortals on the earth.
01:32This is something really cool about Greek mythology, because one of the things that you were supposed to do as a Greek, when you worship the gods, was simply to do what was required to keep the gods from squashing you.
01:46As commander of the skies, Zeus has the power of nature at his disposal.
01:59That gives him the most devastating weapon of all.
02:02The most powerful symbol of Zeus is the lightning bolt.
02:06This is what Zeus carries, it's his main accoutrement.
02:09And it's the thing that makes him the most powerful of all the divinities.
02:14Attributing lightning to Zeus was a way for the Greeks to explain the unexplainable.
02:19In a time before science, mythology put faces on the forces that shaped the world.
02:28The Greeks used mythology to try and figure out why the world operates the way that it does.
02:33They didn't have scientific explanations yet for how the world came into existence, or why lightning strikes here but not there, or why it strikes then and not some other time.
02:42The natural world was very frightening to them, so they associated it with the divine.
02:50You know, these were symptoms of the gods' power that they could use to punish people who hadn't worshipped them properly.
03:01Zeus' command over nature would make him Greece's most feared god.
03:08But how did he get there?
03:12What we know of Zeus begins with the writings of the ancient Greek author Hesiod, around 700 BC.
03:26His book, called Theogony, was the ancient Greek story of creation.
03:32What the book of Genesis is to our own world.
03:36Theogony is Hesiod's attempt to make sense of the world, to bring order to it,
03:40by telling the story of a dynastic family rivalry that winds up in a well-ordered cosmos that is the world that you and I know today.
03:48In the myth, Zeus doesn't start out as the king of the gods.
03:59He rises from obscurity to challenge his father for control of the universe.
04:03And that won't be easy.
04:09His father is Kronos.
04:11He is king of the Titans, the most powerful gods in the universe.
04:16The Titans are an older order of Greek god.
04:21They're pretty rough around the edges, they're not too bright.
04:23They're also not very well civilized.
04:29As leader of the Titans, Kronos is expected to produce offspring.
04:34So he mates with his own flesh and blood.
04:37His sister and fellow Titan, Rhea.
04:40Incest shows up quite a bit in mythology.
04:45Among the gods, there's really nobody else at the beginning for them to have sex with.
04:49So they end up marrying one another.
04:51There's an old-time aristocratic idea that says that no one else is good enough for our family except only our family.
04:58And the Greek gods definitely seem to ascribe to this kind of a principle.
05:01These two Titan siblings, Kronos and Rhea, produce the next generation of Greek gods.
05:10Mythology's household names, the Olympians.
05:14Among them are Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.
05:24But they will not simply inherit the Earth.
05:26They must fight for it.
05:34Kronos was very worried about having children because he was concerned that his son would be greater than him and would supplant him.
05:42The father fears being replaced by the son.
05:44That's human psychology.
05:46You go to Freud and actually Freud found it in classical mythology.
05:49So this fear of losing your power to the next generation was real.
05:57If you had a kid and you had something worth taking, at some point you needed to keep an eye on the kid.
06:04So his solution to this problem was to swallow alive all of his offspring.
06:13As soon as his wife gave birth, he would actually ingest them.
06:19Now, of course, since they're immortal, the children that Kronos swallows are not dead.
06:25They are just locked away inside of his belly.
06:28He's trying to control them and keep them from developing a power base so they might be able to overthrow him.
06:32To the Greeks who told the myth, this was an appalling act.
06:39Cannibalism was as deplorable then as now.
06:44We see the Greek authors giving voice to their fears through mythology.
06:48Cannibalism, sacrifice were horrible taboos.
06:52But when you project these things onto the gods, it gives you a safe place to explore the consequences of what might happen.
06:57Rhea is horrified.
07:08All five of her children have been swallowed alive.
07:13Now, she is pregnant again.
07:16But this time, she has a plan.
07:19She sneaks away and gives birth in secret to a son.
07:24The future king of the gods.
07:31Zeus.
07:34But Kronos is expecting another child to swallow.
07:38So Rhea wraps a rock in a baby blanket and presents it to him.
07:45Without thinking twice, he grabs the bundle and gulps it down.
07:49So the plan of Rhea is put into place.
07:53Kronos has swallowed down the stone instead of Zeus.
07:56Zeus then as an infant is spirited away.
07:58And he's put in what the ancient myth tellers tell us is the folds of the earth.
08:02Zeus has been saved by his mother's cleverness.
08:06It's a memorable story.
08:08But could that secret cave at the heart of the myth really exist?
08:13It seems the ancients thought so.
08:15They believed Zeus had been born on the island of Crete.
08:33In this mountain cave.
08:35The cave on the island of Crete is perhaps the most important sanctuary for the veneration of Zeus.
08:49It was considered as one of the possible places where the baby Zeus was kept hidden from its own father.
08:56Excavations at the cave have revealed that it was a major pilgrimage site for visitors from across the ancient world.
09:06It was a place that people would go to worship Zeus.
09:11How do we know?
09:12We've excavated thousands of dedications to Zeus and ritual objects to Zeus from all over the Mediterranean.
09:22One find in particular ties directly into the myth of Zeus.
09:28Amongst the material remains were these cool shields that probably were along the walls.
09:33And were put up there to indicate the clanging of shields that the people defending Zeus used to muffle his crying when he was a baby.
09:45So that Kronos could not hear.
09:47A chosen son hidden to save his life.
09:55For Christians and Jews, the story of Zeus's birth is very familiar.
10:01Many religious and mythological traditions have stories of sacred or divine children who are hidden away in order to protect them so that they can grow to adulthood and fulfill their destinies.
10:13We think perhaps of Jesus who is hidden away in the manger so that Herod will not be able to get to him.
10:20Or of Moses who is hidden away in Egypt.
10:28In the myth, Zeus quietly comes of age inside the cave.
10:32He has a kind of training period there out of the eyes of Kronos and is able to acquire his strength and develop into a man.
10:46Zeus spends his childhood preparing to fulfill his self-appointed destiny.
10:51To challenge his father and the Titans for control of the universe.
11:03Zeus has escaped the fate of his siblings who were all swallowed alive by their father.
11:09The Titan Kronos.
11:10Inside a remote cave hideaway, he has matured into a fully formed God.
11:17Now, he is ready to begin the epic power struggle he was born to wage.
11:22To avenge his father's savagery.
11:25To liberate his five Olympian siblings from his father's belly.
11:30And to seize control of the world from the Titans who now rule it.
11:44The stakes for him are tremendously high.
11:46If he succeeds, he'll be master of the universe.
11:49But if he fails, he may well be the one that winds up down in Tartarus.
11:52Tartarus.
11:55Tartarus.
11:57The lowest level of Hades.
11:59And the ancient Greek equivalent of Hell.
12:02Tartarus was the part of Hades where the damned went.
12:06The people who were bad or committed offenses against the gods on Earth would be sent to Tartarus.
12:12If Zeus fails in his attempt to seize power from Kronos and the Titans,
12:17he'll be damned to this place for all eternity.
12:22But if he wins, he'll command gods and men from his throne atop Mount Olympus.
12:38In Greek myth, Mount Olympus is the towering home of the gods.
12:43But it's also a real location.
12:46It's the highest peak in Greece, rising nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.
12:52And it's a natural setting for supernatural powers.
12:58The Greeks really believed that their gods actually lived physically on Mount Olympus.
13:06It was important for them to actually have a sense of where heaven was, where the gods actually resided.
13:16It is from his home base on Mount Olympus that Zeus engineers his rebellion against Kronos and the Titans.
13:27Zeus is going to have to get others to come in and help him out so that he can achieve supreme power.
13:38This is the ultimate family feud.
13:40And so it is to his own flesh and blood that Zeus turns first.
13:46He knows his strongest allies will be his five siblings, the Olympians.
13:52Now fully formed adults, but still trapped deep inside Kronos' stomach.
13:57If they can be liberated, the Olympians could tip the scales in Zeus' favor and help him destroy the Titans forever.
14:07He wanted to free his brothers and sisters, so he concocted a potion.
14:11Quietly, Zeus enters Kronos' lair and slips the drug into his nightly cup of mead.
14:23Kronos drinks it and becomes violently ill.
14:27First he vomits up the stone his wife had given him in place of baby Zeus.
14:40According to tradition, that rock is the cornerstone of ancient Greece's most sacred site.
14:47The Temple of Delphi, home of the Oracle.
14:51Delphi is a sanctuary in Greece where people would come from all around to consult with God.
14:58It was a direct phone line up to heaven to ask the answer to anything you wanted.
15:03To this day, thousands of years after the story was first told,
15:08the stone that Kronos supposedly vomited is still there.
15:12At the very center of the temple complex at Delphi is an egg-shaped stone
15:16that was understood to be the exact stone that played the role of being the substitute for Zeus
15:20that Kronos swallowed.
15:22And if you go there today to the Temple of Delphi, the locals will still tell you
15:25that the stone that's there is the actual one that was in Kronos' belly.
15:35In the myth, after throwing up the sacred stone, Kronos regurgitates Zeus' five siblings.
15:41And they are ready to join Zeus' revolution.
15:52What marks Zeus as a different kind of leader from those that have come before is his intelligence.
15:58He's able to persuade and convince those around him that he should be leader,
16:03and he's able to build coalitions.
16:04Zeus now has his siblings by his side, but he still needs more muscle to take on the Titans.
16:14And there are some other estranged members of the family who are out for revenge.
16:21Forgotten brothers of Kronos,
16:22the Cyclops,
16:27and the Hundred-Handers.
16:31But to find them, Zeus has to go to hell.
16:35Kronos had feared the powers of these Hundred-Handers and the Cyclopses,
16:39and he locked them down into Tartarus.
16:41Zeus knew that if he could get their power on his side,
16:44he could marshal it to his own ends.
16:46He goes down and talks to the Hundred-Handers and says,
16:49I will pay you great respect,
16:51and I know that my father Kronos has mistreated you.
16:54Now I've freed you, and now you owe me.
16:56And even they are moved, and they say,
16:58yes, great Zeus, we realize not only are you very powerful,
17:01but you also know how to treat people well.
17:03So we appreciate that, and we will now fight on your side.
17:08In gratitude for being liberated,
17:11the Cyclops present Zeus with a gift.
17:13The power of lightning.
17:23Lightning is one of the most devastatingly powerful forces in nature.
17:27When lightning arcs through the air,
17:30the air is briefly raised to a temperature that can be more than 50,000 degrees.
17:35That's five times the surface temperature of the sun.
17:38The lightning bolt gives Zeus the power to rule the universe.
17:40With this lightning bolt, no one's going to be able to overthrow him.
17:44The battle lines are drawn.
17:46The Titans will fight for Mount Arthrus.
17:48The Olympians from Mount Olympus.
17:50Between them lies the plain of Thessaly.
17:52But this isn't just a mythical battlefield.
17:53Thessaly is actually, if we take into consideration the modern map of Greece, is the central part of Greece.
17:54It's the biggest plain and the most fertile plain in Greece from ancient times to today.
17:55Thessaly has a long, bloody history.
17:56The Titans will fight for Mount Arthrus.
17:58The Olympians will fight for Mount Arthrus.
18:00The Olympians from Mount Olympus.
18:02Between them lies the plain of Thessaly.
18:04But this isn't just a mythical battlefield.
18:07Thessaly is actually, if we take into consideration the modern map of Greece,
18:12is the central part of Greece.
18:15It's the biggest plain and the most fertile plain in Greece from ancient times to today.
18:21Thessaly has a long, bloody history, stretching from the Greco-Persian Wars of the 5th century B.C.
18:29to the world wars of the 20th century A.D.
18:32And it is here that the ultimate battle of the gods will play out.
18:41Armed with a weapon of mass destruction and an elite fighting force,
18:46Zeus braces for an earth-shattering battle.
18:51And to this day, a real place may still bear the scars.
18:55Mythology's defining moment is now at hand.
19:06The battle between father and son is about to begin.
19:11It's the old guard of Cronus and his Titans,
19:14versus the new blood of Zeus and the Olympians.
19:18The outcome will determine who controls everything.
19:21From the top of Mount Olympus,
19:26Zeus sends a fury of lightning down upon his father's army.
19:30The fighting shakes the earth to its core.
19:33The only way we can conceive of this battle is simply worlds colliding,
19:38all the forces in the universe smashing together at once.
19:43You've got the hundred handers over on one side
19:46that are ripping off huge hunks of mountain and throwing mountains at the other side.
19:49From the Titans, you've got a lot of just brute force and brute strength.
19:54They're able to take a punch and keep coming back, coming back, coming back.
19:58It's an apocalyptic scene.
20:01And not entirely a myth.
20:03Experts have recently determined that a real event, just as frightening, actually happened in the ancient world.
20:20About 3600 years ago, the Greek island of Santorini experienced one of the most devastating volcanic explosions ever.
20:29Its effects were felt as far away as California.
20:36The volcanic blast was the single largest seismic event on earth in the last 27,000 years.
20:44To give you an idea of how massive it was, imagine a mountain about three and a half miles tall being blown into the sky all at once.
20:52In 2006, scientists discovered that the Santorini eruption was even larger than originally believed.
21:01Excavations uncovered deposits of volcanic ash piled 20 stories deep, blanketing a 30-mile radius around the island.
21:09Based on this evidence, it's now believed the eruption unleashed the equivalent power of 50,000 Hiroshima bombs.
21:19An explosion that powerful would have annihilated much of the Greek world.
21:25For the survivors, who knew little about how volcanoes work, it could only have been the wrath of the gods.
21:32When the ancient myth-tellers told the story of great cataclysmic battles that shook the earth, they weren't doing so in a vacuum.
21:41There hadn't been massive seismic events that had happened in the memory of some of the earlier generations of Greeks before these myth-tellers had written down their stories.
21:49As the clash of the gods plays out in the myth, it appears that Zeus is finally about to seize control of the universe.
21:59His powerful allies have tipped the balance, and the Olympians are closing in on victory.
22:10But the titans have one last weapon at their disposal.
22:20From the depths of Tartarus, they call forth a colossal beast.
22:25Typhon.
22:32Typhon is a tremendously strong, powerful monster that's challenging Zeus himself.
22:37It's a last gasp effort, and the final monster, the final challenge he has to put down in order to secure his reign over the universe.
22:46It is a supernatural death match.
22:49A decisive struggle between good and evil.
22:54And it will all come down to the ultimate weapon.
22:58As Zeus and Typhon are engaged in this final epic battle,
23:03Zeus eventually gets the upper hand and wins via his lightning bolt.
23:10With one final assault, Zeus drives Typhon and his titan allies down into Tartarus,
23:16where they are damned to spend eternity in a fiery abyss.
23:19According to the ancients, it was across the Mediterranean, on the island of Sicily,
23:35that Zeus' enemies descended into hell.
23:38Through the volcanic crater of Mount Etna.
23:40Local legend says Typhon is still inside, and has been behind all of the volcano's eruptions over the centuries.
23:50Greeks used this myth as a way of explaining why lava was constantly pouring out of the volcano.
23:56They explained that as either the remnants of Zeus' lightning constantly shooting out,
24:00or of the flames of Typhon, who is still breathing just a little bit, exploding flame out of the center of the volcano.
24:07It is also said that Typhon causes destructive wind storms.
24:13In fact, his name is the basis for the word Typhoon.
24:16But in the myth, the storm clouds are broken, for the time being.
24:23Zeus' victory over his father makes him the king of the gods, the absolute ruler of the universe.
24:30So goes the myth.
24:32But what is the link to reality?
24:37In 2003, at the base of Mount Olympus, a lost temple was discovered.
24:42It was the centerpiece of an ancient city known as Dion.
24:48And it was dedicated to Zeus.
24:52Dion was a city that was built at the base of Mount Olympus.
24:55And so it's very close to the home of the Olympian gods and goddesses,
25:00and where Zeus lived in Greek mythology.
25:03In fact, the name of the town, Dion, means Zeus.
25:06The Dion temple dates back to the 5th century BC, the golden age of Greek mythology.
25:15Scattered around the site are marble blocks with unmistakable engravings.
25:21Eagles.
25:23In ancient Greece, eagles were the divine symbol of Zeus.
25:29But there's more.
25:31This headless statue was found in a nearby riverbed.
25:37Carved into its 2400-year-old base are three words.
25:42Zeus, the highest.
25:47There's a debate among experts about what this reference to the highest means.
25:53Some believe this statue could be a missing link between Greece's worship of many gods
25:59and the single god philosophy of Christians and Jews.
26:03And that this find is proof that the Greeks were embracing the idea of one god on their own
26:09before the arrival of Christianity.
26:12The Greeks sometimes identified that highest god with Zeus.
26:17After all, the word Zeus in its data form, Deus, is where we get our word Deus.
26:23So there's an etymological reason to understand Zeus as the highest deity.
26:28Starting in about the 3rd and 2nd and 1st centuries BC,
26:32we have different philosophical and theological schools that arise,
26:35and that start to propose a very strong view that there is only one god,
26:40and that all the ancient stories and all the ancient tales
26:43are actually just metaphors that reflect different aspects of what this divinity is all about.
26:48For the people who worshipped at Dion,
26:51it's clear that Zeus was different from all the other Greek gods.
26:55In fact, he may well have been the only one that mattered.
26:59In the myth, Zeus has achieved the absolute power he has long sought.
27:07But that power will soon be threatened by an unexpected foe.
27:13The king of the gods is about to be betrayed by the person closest to him.
27:17Zeus has won his epic clash with the titans.
27:29He now sits atop Mount Olympus as king of the gods and master of mankind.
27:40The ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus above all others,
27:44even though he was fatally flawed.
27:48The ancient Greek gods are very relatable.
27:52They have faults, they have strengths, they have weaknesses,
27:55they have all the things that normal human beings would.
27:58In fact, when the Greeks in these early times think about their gods,
28:01one way of trying to understand it is that they see their gods as being a lot like you and I,
28:05just really, really big.
28:07According to the myth,
28:09Zeus has one very human weakness that threatens to be his undoing.
28:16An uncontrollable sex drive.
28:19Zeus likes the ladies.
28:21That's one of the most endearing and enraging things about him,
28:25is that he has this very, very human character,
28:29that he just, he never saw a girl that he didn't like.
28:32Zeus will stop at nothing to seduce his conquests.
28:38He even uses disguise.
28:42Zeus visits mortal women in various guises,
28:47whatever it takes to consummate the relationship.
28:51So in different tales we hear of Zeus turning into an eagle,
28:54turning into a swan, turning into a bull,
28:57turning into all these different shapes,
28:59turning into human beings to mimic a woman's husband's face,
29:03to trick the women as best he can into having union with them.
29:12A beautiful young goddess named Metis is the first to capture Zeus' attention.
29:17He takes her as his wife.
29:20Metis is a very attractive and appealing young woman,
29:26and the quality that really sets her apart is she has practical wisdom.
29:30In fact, her name in Greek means practical wisdom.
29:33When Zeus spies her, he finds her very appealing.
29:36But Zeus' affection for Metis is overshadowed by a dark prophecy
29:41that threatens his grip on power.
29:43He is told that she will bear him a child who will one day seize his throne.
29:48Suddenly, Zeus, like his father, must fear his offspring.
29:55Zeus is representative of this awful tradition
30:00that starts literally from the dawn of time
30:03of sons destroying their fathers in order to take prominence.
30:09But Zeus vows that this time will be different,
30:13and he takes a drastic step to make sure of it.
30:15He swallows his wife, alive.
30:26Once again, family love falls prey to power.
30:31Its history repeated.
30:32But this horrifying act will make Zeus stronger and wiser.
30:40By swallowing her, Zeus internalizes Metis, or cunning and prudence, all at once.
30:47She becomes a part of Zeus.
30:50In a sense, she's probably imprisoned in his stomach,
30:53but he also takes on these greater qualities of intellectual ability.
30:56This to us seems a little strange, but it's important to remember that for the Greeks,
31:02one of the places that some Greeks thought that they carried their wisdom and their ideas was actually in their stomach.
31:09So when Zeus swallows Metis, he actually takes her into the part of himself where really a lot of his best thinking was done.
31:19With Metis gone, Zeus is in need of a new wife.
31:27And like his father before him, he finds one in his own family.
31:32His sister and fellow Olympian, Hera.
31:37Hera.
31:39She's not like Zeus's earlier conquests.
31:42She's mythology's most powerful goddess.
31:45The king of the gods has met his match.
31:50Between Zeus and Hera, we actually see a relationship which is between two people who are on some level equals.
31:59So some of the conflicts between Zeus and Hera, I think we can see as the Greeks culturally working out,
32:07wow, what would it look like if you actually had two people with equal power within a relationship?
32:13She's the queen of the goddesses, and she has wonderful beauty, she's supremely intelligent, she's mighty,
32:20but she's also exceedingly jealous because Zeus is always running after other women.
32:24The king of the gods continues to step out with an endless string of sexual partners.
32:33He conceives well over 100 offspring with a host of lovers, both divine and mortal.
32:43If I'm not mistaken, Zeus never has an encounter with a woman that does not produce a child.
32:50So in that sense, it's extreme virility, it's extreme power.
32:52Zeus's ability to sleep with anybody matches a kind of fantasy of what ancient Greek males would hope or desire their lives to be.
33:01Men fantasized about such things, and they thought if there was an all-powerful god out there,
33:06well, he would surely act on those fantasies.
33:11Zeus's promiscuity provided a perfect way for Greeks to connect themselves to him.
33:16Every corner of the Greek world boasted of having its own hometown love child.
33:23As Zeus's fame and power grow across ancient Greece, more and more cities and towns want to be associated with him.
33:29And they therefore claim that there was some kind of actual liaison between Zeus and some mortal woman within their family tree
33:36that then produces the offspring, that produces the local ruling families.
33:39Evidence of this connection can still be found in cities throughout the Greek world.
33:46Athens, Thebes, Magnesia, Macedonia, all are named after children of Zeus.
33:54But there is one individual who isn't happy about Zeus's abundant fertility.
34:01In the myth, his wife Hera has had enough.
34:05She vows to make the king of the gods pay dearly for his chronic philandering.
34:09She doesn't like to be humiliated in front of the other gods, so she will take it out on her husband.
34:18Hera gathers the other Olympians together and lays the groundwork for a revolution.
34:27Hera actually goes to her fellow Olympian gods and says,
34:32Why is Zeus in charge?
34:35He's no more important or powerful than the rest of us.
34:38If we all get together, we can kick him out.
34:41So, in fact, they rise up and they bind Zeus with chains.
34:46Zeus awakes from a nap to find himself tied down.
34:52A prisoner in his own bed.
34:54It is the ultimate betrayal.
34:57A conspiracy carried out by the siblings he once saved.
35:04The God Revolt was the greatest threat that Zeus ever faced.
35:10There was never any sense that mortals could challenge his power.
35:16But the combined power of all of the Olympian gods really could have defeated him.
35:21This was indeed one of the most horrifying moments in Zeus's career.
35:31He was actually about to lose everything.
35:39But just when all seems lost, help comes in the form of an old ally.
35:47The Hundred Handers.
35:48When they hear Zeus is in trouble, they come to his rescue.
35:54Breaking his chains as the Olympians run for cover.
36:01Zeus survives the coup attempt.
36:07Now it's time to exact his revenge.
36:09His wife Hera is sentenced to hang from the sky by golden chains.
36:22His son Apollo and brother Poseidon are condemned to hard labor.
36:28They are ordered to build one of the ancient world's most iconic monuments.
36:31The massive walls of Troy.
36:32It's another example of myth explaining the unexplainable.
36:45To the ancient Greeks, the walls of Troy seem too strong to have been built by man.
36:50So Zeus's punishment of Apollo and Poseidon helped explain their existence.
36:59Their ruins survive to this day.
37:02In antiquity, people thought it actually had been built by the gods or some kind of divine intervention on behalf of the Trojans.
37:13In the myth, Zeus has dealt justice to those who crossed him.
37:19But it will be human beings who bear the brunt of his wrath.
37:24That wrath will arrive in the form of a massive flood.
37:29One that may even be linked to the biblical story of Noah.
37:33Greece's most powerful god has survived a coup attempt.
37:46He dealt swift justice to the conspirators.
37:50But he's not through yet.
37:52Now mankind will experience the full measure of his rage.
37:56In ancient times, fear of Zeus's punishment kept a lot of Greeks out of trouble.
38:06When people did something wrong, they would have to be very, very careful that Zeus did not smite them with a thunderbolt.
38:15There are many, many examples in Greek history of Zeus destroying entire cities and civilizations
38:23because he felt that they had overreached themselves, that they had blasphemed the gods,
38:30that they had become too proud to be allowed to live any longer.
38:38The Greek author Hesiod wrote that without the fear of Zeus's wrath,
38:43humans would live like beasts and the weak would be in the hands of the strong.
38:47Zeus is the order bringer.
38:51Zeus is the bringer of justice and the bringer of civilization.
39:01When natural catastrophes occurred in the real world,
39:05the Greeks believed that they were sent by Zeus to punish evil men.
39:10Often stories were invented to explain what had made the supreme god so angry.
39:15According to the myth, Zeus's most frightening moment of wrath comes after he sees humans engaging in cannibalism.
39:31Cannibalism was as important as it was in ancient Greek religion because they considered it to be so heinous.
39:37In fact, identification of eating human flesh is something that you would attribute to wolves or to dogs, but hardly to human beings.
39:49Zeus is no stranger to cannibalism.
39:54His own father Cronus once swallowed all of Zeus's siblings.
39:58When he is confronted with the sight of mortals doing the same thing,
40:02he becomes enraged and vows to destroy the human race with a catastrophic flood.
40:10Nine days and nights pass.
40:22The rain is relentless and the earth slowly drowns.
40:26The waters reach the peak of Mount Parnassus, which stands over 8,000 feet high.
40:33In all corners of the earth, the human race perishes.
40:41When the rain stops, only two mortals are still alive.
40:47Incredibly, they have survived the storm by building an ark.
40:51A raging flood, an ark, and only two surviving humans.
40:59The parallels with the Old Testament are striking.
41:03It could be the biblical flood of Noah.
41:06It could be Zeus's deluge.
41:09It could be similar sorts of giant, watery disasters that we see figuring in a wide number of different cultures around the world.
41:16All these stories go back to a natural catastrophe that affected the collective memory of peoples living in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean Sea.
41:33A deluge like the one described in these myths would have devastated humanity.
41:37But could such a flood have really happened?
41:49In the past decade, scientists have uncovered some stunning clues that prove it did.
41:55Research has shown that as the last ice age ended about 7,000 years ago,
41:59runoff from melting glaciers surged into the Black Sea Basin, violently submerging nearly 170,000 square miles of dry land.
42:12For these people, their entire world was flooding.
42:16And it surely must have seemed like they had angered the gods to have brought down this kind of disaster upon themselves.
42:23Could this be the real-life disaster that spawned the story of Zeus's flood?
42:36In the myth, Zeus has held onto power in the face of strong opposition.
42:42But there is one more challenger he didn't count on.
42:45Jesus Christ.
42:46In the first century AD, his message would take the world by storm and dethrone Greece's dominant God.
42:58When Christianity came and promised salvation in the afterlife,
43:04so it gave people something to believe in, something that could happen to them after their death,
43:11Christianity found so many followers.
43:18Zeus's stranglehold on humankind faltered as this new religion spread across the Mediterranean world.
43:25Ultimately, the same civilization that worshipped him would reject him.
43:31In antiquity, there was no more powerful force than Zeus except for one, fate.
43:38Not even Zeus himself could overturn it.
43:41Much as he wants to, on occasion, try to change fate or redirect it,
43:45he himself is even subject to its dictates.
43:51Before the rise of Christianity, Zeus's myth captivated the Greek world for thousands of years
43:57and made him the most feared and respected of all the gods.
44:00But he was only one of many, from Greece and beyond, who would leave their mark on mankind.
44:09Some are still familiar names.
44:12Hercules.
44:14Hades.
44:16Medusa.
44:19And each of their stories is a window into a long lost world.
44:23A code waiting to be deciphered.
44:26These myths reveal to us in a uniquely powerful way the hidden strata that lay underneath our conscious, awake lives,
44:36our understanding of the world.
44:38And like an archaeology of the human mind, we can dig into them and see the deep recesses of human psyches.
44:43And I think that's what makes these myths so powerful.
44:45And I think that's what makes these myths so powerful.
44:47You
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