Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

502 Lightning as a flash from an Eye
often regarded as the piercing glance of a fiery eye, and that the
wide-spread belief in the evil eye is directly traceable to this conception\
Of the conclusions here stated I should accept the first and
reject the second. There are, I think, grounds for supposing that the
Greeks sometimes at least viewed lightning as a glance from the eye
of Zeus, and indeed as the glance of his evil eye. But to explain
the evil eye of men as derived from the evil eye of a god is—apart
from other objections—to invert the order of religious causation.
Hesychios the lexicographer quotes from an unnamed Greek
tragedian the phrase
as the eye of Zeus,
and informs us that it means 'as a flash of lightning^' This is
^ W. Schwartz Indogermanischer Volksglaube Berhn 1885 pp. 169— 219. Cp. some
sentences in an earlier work by the same author (F. L. W. Schwartz Der Ursprutig der
Mythologie Berlin i860 p. 212 f. ), and the helpful chapter of W. H. Roscher Die Gorgonen
und Verwandtes Leipzig 1879 p. 63 ff. ('Der Blitz als Wuthblick eines himmlischen
Ungeheuers,' etc.).
- Frag. trag. adesp. 278 Nauck- ap. Hesych. s.v. wavep oinpdaK/nos Aios • ujs daTparrri.
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