Zeus Triophthalmos, the Three-Eyed Jupiter

Pausanias & François Lenormant · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 7 pages

From Pausanias, Description of Greece 2, Corinth, in W.H.S. Jones's translation, together with a passage from François Lenormant in Daremberg and Saglio's Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines of 1877, quoted in the original French. The frontispiece is the Roman copy of Zeus Triophthalmos of about 257 CE, after a Greek original of the fourth century BCE, excavated at Otricoli in 1175 and now in the Sala Rotonda of the Museo Pio-Clementino. A head-note sets out the correspondence the file exists to draw: that the prosonyms Triophthalmos, Triopas and Triops answer to Shiva Triaksha, Trinayana, Trinetra and Tryambakam.

Pausanias describes what he saw on the top of Larisa — a roofless temple of Zeus surnamed Larisæan, whose wooden image was no longer on its pedestal, and beside it a temple of Athena worth seeing, among whose votive offerings stood a wooden image of Zeus with two eyes in the natural place and a third on the forehead. The history attached to it is that this Zeus was a paternal god of Priam, son of Laomedon, set up in the uncovered part of his court, and that when Troy was taken Priam took sanctuary at its altar; when the spoils were divided the image fell to Sthenelus, son of Capaneus, and was dedicated where Pausanias found it. He then offers his own inference about the three eyes, and it is the passage the compilation turns on. That Zeus is king in heaven is a saying common to all men; the ruler under the earth is also called Zeus in a verse of Homer, which names Zeus of the Underworld beside the august Persephone; and the god in the sea is called Zeus by Æschylus. Whoever made the image, Pausanias concludes, made it with three eyes to signify that the same god rules in all three allotments of the universe. Lenormant's note follows on the links between Demeter and the other gods, and on the traces the Hesiodic pairing of Demeter with Zeus Chthonios preserves of a very ancient Pelasgic cult.

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